How To Throw a Baby

November 20th, 2003 Posted in 2003

There is perhaps nothing as effective as a human baby sailing out of a carriage at incredible speeds for grabbing your attention. I learned this lesson today from history’s greatest teacher—experience—while heading down the escalator to buy a coffee.

At the foot of the escalator was a woman ministering to something in a baby carriage—presumably a baby and, if I was feeling bold enough to assume, perhaps even hers. Whoever the baby belonged to, they clearly weren’t doing their job as caretaker when one second later— and in full view of everyone on the escalator, myself included—the baby sailed headlong out of the carriage and collapsed in a heap on the floor.

As I mentioned before, the incident had commanded my full attention. And so it puzzled and alarmed me when the mother, without so much as batting an eyelash or even standing up from her baby-tending crouch, roughly grabbed the babe by the ankle and tossed the thing brusquely back into the carriage.

Noting the ease with which the woman was able to grab the baby by the ankle, I was left with one of the following deductions: a) the woman was vastly strong; b) the baby was extremely light, like a balsa wood baby; c) the baby was in fact a toy baby.

As it turned out, the baby was a toy baby, made entirely out of stuffing and felt with no easy-to-swallow plastic parts (hence the lightness). As I reached the base of the escalator I got a better view of the carriage, the baby the mother had been tending to, and several toys—including one life-sized felt baby, in the exact same outfit as the real baby, no less.

My first thought was: decoy baby? But this struck me as needlessly complex. Babies, as a rule, are unimportant to absolutely everyone but the people who, for whatever reason they felt was justified at the time, conceived the thing. Unless the baby’s parents were billionaires, I couldn’t see the need for the depth of subterfuge a decoy baby would suggest. Besides, I don’t care how unacquainted with children a would-be kidnapper is: they’re probably going to know that babies weigh more than five ounces, and deduce accordingly.

My second thought: a placeholder baby? Maybe there was actually a second baby, but it was at the shop or something. This option actually struck me as needlessly idiotic, and I didn’t pursue it further.

I was left with no other hypothesis: the toy baby was there, it seemed, only for the amusement and presumable joy of the real baby.

I put forward that there’s something incredibly creepy about that, even if we completely ignore the many hilarious sitcom scenarios that could result from it (”Why is the toy baby in the crib? But then what did I put in the washing machi–Jordan!”) It’s creepy because you’re asking a baby to play with an unmoving, dead-eyed simulacrum of itself. Put yourself in the same position and tell me you wouldn’t be thoroughly and intimately shaken.

Perhaps I’m projecting too much of an adult sensibility onto a life force with as much capacity for abstract thought as a sparrow, but I’d like to think babies can at the very least recognize when a toy is or is not terror-inducing. While they may lack the faculties to take something like that to its logical conclusion—i.e. that they have awful, even stupid parents —they should nonetheless spot a bad idea when they see one.

Imagine if someone gave you a life-size felt replica of an adult human and asked you to enjoy yourself with it. I submit it would unsettle you. Maybe if you made sure you got a replica with a different sex than your own, it might be a little entertaining, but even then for no longer than a few minutes.

A toy boat or even blocks or balls—I may have outgrown them, but if you handed me a bright plastic tugboat and asked me to entertain myself for a few minutes while you sorted some items, I’m sure I’d be able to come up with some scenario with the boat to occupy my time for a few minutes.

I’d like to think a baby’s no different; in fact, I’m going to go as far as to say that the baby chucked its dead-eyed, horrifically still twin out of the carriage on purpose, attempting to relay an obvious message about naked terror that the mother was too preoccupied to notice. I think I was backed up by this on the way back from buying my coffee, where the toy baby throwing incident repeated itself.

Or maybe the baby was just in a shitty mood. I don’t hang out with babies much, so I admit I’m talking out of my ass here.