They know she is terribly young,
So much smaller they.
Yet, she remains imprisoned,
To this barred bed -
And for her protection.
That is her name over there.
What has she done?
Why is she alone?
Does nobody care?
Someone is walking.
The keys are
Jingling in the hall,
As attendant comes near.
Is it food this time?
Will there be a bath?
Or, will she just pass.
She usually does.
Now, she enters
The sparse room –
Barred and covered bed,
A chair, table and lamp.
Assignment made, carried forth,
Soiled diaper weighed
And charted, as quickly as
Done, attendant is gone.
Through the corridor,
Down the hall again, she moves
Off to check another name
In this warehouse for
The cared for and not about.
-ann klein
-05.96
Comment:
When I was a kid, I lived at a children’s home. We all who were at least twelve years had jobs consisting of some work around the place. Being the opposite of the stereotypical ‘Orphan Annie’, I quite easily got what I considered to be the best job there, hospital worker. The hospital is where the infants and toddlers were kept. And, most of the time, my duty consisted of being sent down to the basement to fold diapers, about two and one-half of those industrial laundry bins a day. By age three, if the babies hadn’t been adopted, they went out into the general population. The hospital housed about twenty-five of these young ones.
Generally, the hospital kept only children at one and one-half years and older. Sometimes, the state would bring in a newborn. It was the most solemn occasion of any there at the children’s home. If for some reason a mother had to give her baby up and if other housing facilities were full, the newborn would come and stay for three days at most. There was actually a law governing this process, I was told. If a newborn hadn’t been sent out by the third day, tempers flared, softly so, but flare they did. Round the clock calls would be made. It was believed and the nurses had evidence, that survival rate at our hospital was not a good one, when babies stayed for too long.
Because of regulations, newborns were kept in isolation under dim lights while being tended to and in darkness during any other time. The newborn room was small, the size of a walk-in closet, just inside the main entrance of the hospital. Therefore, anyone coming in that entrance, walked close by it. A one-way window, a window where a person can see out but no one can see in, was a part of the door. Last, the door was locked at all times, unless a doctor was in attendance. During the doctor visit, he and one nurse would be in the nursery, while another nurse stood at the open door.
It was also mandated that no one form attachment to a newborn. God forbid a nurse would do such a thing, and the newborn, days later, could not form attachment with the adoptive parents. This was the psychology of the day. Many times, I would see a nurse checking her wristwatch, anxious for the scheduled time to visit the newborn and provide vitals, then, feed and change it. If a newborn cried and did not stop crying, the duty nurse was allowed only to go into the nursery and check vitals. Naturally, they all picked the baby up for less than a minute, but there was no mandate against doing so.
As you can see by detail, it wasn’t the hardened hearts of the nurses, which kept the babies in their charge from being loved and cuddled, rocked and whispered to. There were laws and mandates surrounding their service. Each age group had governing rules, but newborn rules seemed to be the harshest. I’m so happy, that there are no such places here in the US anymore, warehouses to store babies. But, wait…do we isolate AIDS babies? What about infants with life threatening illnesses? Overall, there are NGO’s, whose concern for young ones prevents this kind of treatment of our nation’s babies. May it be so everywhere in the not too distant future.