Flour power

I know that some 12-year-old girls in her class are not those things, that they do far more than hold hands. But many other parents I talked to that week were dismissive of the project as a deterrent. "They thought it was hilarious and threw those bags of flour all over the place," one neighbor told me.

Another friend said, "The girls made such a fuss over the babies that it seemed like it was teaching them how much fun it could be without the real messy stuff."

And without any of the actual rewards, like the smile, the warmth, the fingers grasping yours, the seductive, indescribable baby smell. What if the teen was raised by a single father who knew nothing about babies? What if the teen was afraid?

Some of Gaila's friends did seem afraid of this flour bag baby, because it meant a grade, and they weren't sure what to do with it. Perhaps their parents were around to help, or perhaps they are the kind of students who will never be comfortable with babies.

Much of the baby week seemed as arbitrary and absurd as the tape restrictions. Gaila's friend Chris, who rides his bike to school, put his flour bag baby in his backpack when leaving for the day, whereupon a math teacher who witnessed this threatened to call the science teacher and fail him for the week, and told him to carry the baby. OK, I thought, when he passed by my house as he does daily: Is it better for him, or his parents, that he have an accident on his bike, whereupon the flour bag will fly into the four-lane avenue? And is this better, litigation-wise, for the school?

At the end of the week, I asked Gaila's best friend Jackie what she'd learned. She replied, "That flour makes a big mess when you throw the bag and it breaks." I repeated my question, and she repeated her answer verbatim, quite pointedly.

I asked a few other students, and they said, "That when you wrap it with duct tape, you can kick it really hard and nothing happens."

"That my baby clothes fit the bag."

"That babies are a pain."

"That I never want a baby, not now, not never."

OK. Except babies are not just a pain, they are wonderful and fragile and when you're ready, or not, they are alive. None of this seemed proven by the flour bag, which couldn't suck at your cheek or do the aforementioned great baby things. The bag also couldn't throw up or scare the heck out of you.

One Web site, Teen-Aid, Inc., based in Spokane, Wash., agreed, saying, "When returning computerized babies or dumping the bag of sugar, students express relief at being rid of the responsibility." Using this approach, abstinence educators are merely modifying Planned Parenthood's motto, "Every child a wanted child," to "Every child is a pain."

Another Web site, Catholic Exchange, featured an article by Amy Welborn, who had been in church holding her own real baby when she encountered a teen holding a science class baby. "Undoubtedly on a timer, the baby clicked and in a tinny, taped voice, began to cry. The girl poked around in the bag, took out a bottle, put it between the doll's lips and the crying stopped. She tried to take it out after a minute or so, but the doll just started crying again."

Welborn says succinctly about the "see how much of a pain baby is" experiments that kids don't have babies because they are unaware of how much work it is, but because they have a "specific, wrenching failure of will at a very crucial time."

She's right. They have sex. They are experimenting, scientifically, and randomly, and seeking warmth, smells and smiles. They might remember a flour bag or a mechanical baby, or their parents' warnings, or they might need that moment of intimacy too much to care. And inconvenience, fear, the real frightening stuff of babies and parenthood, might have come from somewhere far from school.

Our rabbit had babies today, a planned pregnancy. My 6-year-old wanted to put Mel Jr. and Emily together, and that was really how her older sisters figured out conception and parenthood, from previous bunny litters. We came home from school and were shocked by eight babies in various states on the bottom of the cage. Two had been pushed out, and lay in the dirt. We gently put them in the nesting box, and my girls watched, fascinated and frightened and repelled, as I detached the umbilical cord from one struggling baby and put it with the others. Emily's hindquarters were very bloody, and she passed a clot just then, to the disgust and consternation of the girls. "But human mothers do that, too," said Melissa, who'd come to see with her own daughters.

"Gross," all five of our combined girls chimed, and we nodded and grinned. Gross is what it takes, most of the time, to learn the truth.

When we turned to leave, my youngest asked in a worried voice, "What if Emily's not a good mother? What if she kills them, like that bad bunny we had once?"

I raised my hands helplessly. "Then she does. She's the only one who can take care of them. Remember, we tried to save that one with kitten milk? It didn't work."

In the kitchen, Gaila whispered, "I hope we don't go out there in the morning and find them dead."

"I hope not, either," I said. She frowned and went off to her room, the weight of assisted parenthood on her face for the first time.

I opened the cupboard door, and the flour bag was still wrapped in blue Saran. I had asked Gaila, when the project was finished, what she wanted me to do with her baby, and she'd grinned and said, "Let's make brownies." I unwrapped the bag and felt it very light in my hands.

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