(The mother's) provision of total care, her entire absorption into her baby's needs and gestures, is crucial to both his physical and psychic well being. The baby does not only require feeding but also the bonding and attachment that feeding allows. The mother must emotionally bond with her child during the feeding; otherwise the whole process is deadened, apathetic, and cold.
The blue and green floral wallpaper in the kitchen was beginning to peel in its corner. The humming icebox door made its usual clunkety-clunk as its contents were retrieved. In 1968, and that white icebox with the rounded doors had been in use constantly since the 1940s. One day, it would probably give up the ghost.
Mr. Blue shook the bottle of Pet Milk and Karo syrup. He took care of three, his wife took care of three. This baby girl had finally gotten the hang of her schedule after seven long weeks. For hours on end, she would scream, then eat, then scream some more until she collapsed, exhausted, into the blackened comfort that sleep offered her. He didn't have the inclination nor the energy to hold her, rock her, or offer her any of the niceties that most people offered babies.
This one, like the other five that might be in his house at any given time, were wards of the state of Virginia, usually infants of teenage girls who would soon find their futures with mothers and fathers who would adopt them. Mr. Blue attributed this one's, and most of their, really, endless caterwaul to "bad blood," bastards that they were, offspring of wayward girls.
Setting the baby in the baby seat, he glanced sidewards at the patina it had developed from years of use. Propping it slightly supine, he rolled a kitchen towel and propped the glass bottle, the first of five the baby would get that day. Each day for Mr. and Mrs. Blue was the same, feed the babies, put them down, feed them, give the bigger ones playpen time, feed them, take them out in the yard in the buggy if he felt like it. Feed them. Put them down. Get them on a schedule. It was a check from the state.
...an addict in pursuit of a drug is in a state of desperate need. He looks like a craving, dependent child in pursuit of the rejecting mother. Simultaneously, he is the "I don't need anyone" individual who ignores his wife's pleas, spends his children's inheritance, and completely avoids all intimate contact. In sum, the addict may operate on both sides of the attachment continuum, all in pursuit of the security he never had.
She was a frail, tiny thing, prone to illness. Hong Kong flu. Croup. Diarrhea. Neither the decrepit doctor nor Nancy, the young caseworker, freshly graduated from the local college, knew why the baby, whom Nancy named Nancy Carol, after herself, stubbornly defied all their efforts to force her to gain weight. At her two month checkup, the doctor told the Blues added cereal to her bottle. Over the next few weeks, the baby moved to full meals of strained peas, squashed pears, and the plethora of sustenance proffered by Gerber.
At six months old, she weighed ten pounds. Refusing to return the gaze of the doctor, and of Nancy, the baby had been declined by several families looking to adopt baby girls. She was sickly. She wouldn't smile. She wouldn't interact. They had to do something.
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