The Miniature Museum of Greater St. Louis hosts a delightful collection of matchbox-sized model kitchens, general store vignettes, and fully furnished one-inch-scale houses. Dolls shorter than an outstretched hand occupy micro-studies and petite kitchens; toylike cars navigate streets as wide as a coaster; a family of small potatoes sits around a table cannibalizing a plate of still tinier potatoes.
One scene is particularly memorable: “Sisters of the Immaculate Deception,” a tableau designed by James and Barbara Bohik. I first noticed the cabbage patch: in the middle of a spacious yard (“spacious” being a relative term in a thirty-six-by-twenty-four-inch model), four rows of cabbages sprout from a rectangular plot of dirt. Several of the cabbages are growing babies. Cabbage patch kids.
“Sisters of the Immaculate Deception” brings to Lilliputian life many of the mythical answers to “Where do babies come from?”. Beside the cabbage patch is a short set of stairs with a stork nest at the top: a sister carries one baby, fresh-plucked from the garden, to the stork family while a bird preps another baby to be carried home. Posters at the rear of the yard remind the sisters of the baby-making recipes: “sugar and spice and everything nice” or “snips and snails and puppy dog tails.” In the main building, the sisters offer DIY instructions: swallow a watermelon seed—“(DO NOT CHEW)”—or two for twins, then go to the hospital in nine months to receive your baby.
These folk rhymes and tales grew from desperation, I assume, among awkward adults who didn’t want to explain sex and childbirth to curious preschoolers. Some parents don’t opt for outright fiction; instead, they obscure the details: “When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much …” My own mother used more blunt terms—egg, sperm, uterus—that I did not understand at age five. I still appreciate that she did not lie.
Lies about where babies come from aren’t limited to children. We tend to understand the science and anatomy and intimacy of conception, but some cultures obscure the realities of pregnancy and birth. The regularity of babies entering the world numbs us to the truth.
I’ve never carried a child, and for medical reasons I likely never will. Yet I’m fascinated by accounts of “the miracle of life”: people whose pregnancy made them unable to stand without aid, whose C-section epidural failed so they screamed through the entire procedure, whose babies tore them open from vagina to anal sphincter, whose post-partum anxiety isolated them from their support systems. I don’t recount these stories for horror, but for honesty: bringing a child into this world can require ingredients more dire and gruesome than puppy dog tails.
As a public school student in Ontario, my pregnant teachers took at least year-long maternity leaves to recover their bodies and care for their children. When I moved to Michigan, I worked for an organization that taught English and other American life skills to refugees. In one class, I overheard the teacher explain how she had given birth and returned to work just two days later—the American way.
The bodily trauma of pregnancy and birth alone should render such a rapid return impossible, nevermind the importance of bonding and around-the-clock care for brand-new humans. I understand why it happens: the United States is one of only a handful of countries that do not guarantee paid parental leave, meaning new parents face an impossible choice between recovering from birth and financially supporting their families. It seems to me that this approach to parental leave, as well as callous attitudes toward pregnant people and those who have recently given birth, only makes sense if babies really are grown painlessly in a cabbage patch and delivered without distress by dutiful storks.
Among adults, lies about pregnancy and childbirth can harm pregnant people, relationships, and communities that would otherwise be attentive to hurting neighbors. Babies can come from love and sex and bravery and patience; they can also come from distress and injuries and agony and danger. Forgetting the latter is as mythical as sprouting twins from watermelon seeds.
Amen to ALL THIS.