The baby under the bridge...

So when I was a little kid, I had this weird obsession that I'm scared to even share, for fear people will label me as this or that...when I was little, for a period of about two years, I had to go check everyday under this bridge by my house, because I believed I would find an abandoned baby under the bridge.

I felt guilty if for some reason, I did not check; I was sure when I went the next day, there would be a dead or frozen baby under the bridge, and because I didn't check, it had died. This was a guilt that plagued and obsessed me.

I told my mom about this fear; she humored me and would often walk with me to the bridge to look for this baby, although she was always telling me how silly this obsession was.

Now I'm starting to see what it was I was really looking for.

Our culture is such that all of us, at some point or another, end up being or feeling abandoned. We break up with people and move across the country; we experience divorce, we have parents who are unable to care for us, so they leave us at K-mart until guilt overwhelms them and they come back to get us (my mom once did this to me and my sisters; she purchased sleeping bags for us and then left to do laundry and left us most of the day at K-mart; when she came back she claimed she had "forgotten" to pick us back up...), we have friends who move away and break our hearts by forgetting us, when they promised they wouldn't. Part of this is the mobility of our culture; because we have easy and convenient ways to travel long distances in a short period of time, we can easily pack up and leave if things aren't quite what we want them to be. Part of this is the amount of people we now have in the world, and the homogenization of our "global culture," it isn't hard now, to move to a new city and just assume a new identity, or find a whole new tribe; whereas in the past, if your tribe or people rejected you, you where as good as dead, now, if your life isn't pleasing you, you can pick up and move to Paris and have a whole new tribe (if you have people skills to any degree,) in a matter of weeks.

So the baby under the bridge was more of a symbolic baby; it was representative of the baby we've all abandoned; the tribe that no longer exists, those life-long relationships we no longer cultivate. I had felt abandoned already many times in my young life; I was the baby, as where those people who had done the abandoning; they felt as sad as I did, yet for reasons overwhelming to them, they abandoned.

And perhaps the baby was a reflection of the future life I was to have; becoming a caretaker, a nurturer, a midwife, a childbirth ed teacher and a doula; these roles all involve babies, both real and cultural. Perhaps I am taking these roles on because of the abandonment I am still struggling to deal with, and perhaps the abandonment I felt is a symptom of a larger culture and the cure is finding those abandoned babies, searching for them daily, and never giving up until those babies are warm, fed, and loved...

Love ya,
Carrot