A Weekend with Alora

I nearly passed out from the sight as I walked into my house after a long day of work.  My then 13-year-old daughter, looking like a cross between Aunt Jemima and a Crip gang member, wore on her head a bandana rag tied in the front. She had her shirt hiked above her belly button, and the shirt was being held up by a knot tied in the back. As if that was not a ghastly sight in of itself, what almost knocked me to the ground was the thing attached to her hip.

“Do you want to see Ari’s baby? That’s Ari’s baby, Alora,” my 2-year-old daughter, Amya, informed me with excitement and glee, jumping up and down as I walked into the house. There she was my oldest daughter feeding a bottle to baby Alora. When I left to go to work in the morning, I was a father of two girls. When I returned home that evening, I had become a grandfather.  But my family is fortunate than most. Ari’s new baby was a doll, and her introduction into motherhood was just homework. My new grandbaby, Ari’s baby, would return to school at the end of the weekend.  Lesson over.  But for many young people, particularly those in the African American community, teenage parenthood is a reality. Children are raising children, grandparents are raising grandchildren, and children are being raised without fathers.  As part of our ongoing efforts to ensure our oldest daughter doesn’t become a statistic, a teenage, unwed mother, we saw the value in this class and exercise.

Alora, a black baby doll that took a bottle, messed her diapers, and cried, cried, cried, and cried some more, had to be back at my daughter’s school Monday morning.  But before Alora’s departure, she provided my family, and particularly my daughter, some insight on what it means to be a teenage parent. Last spring, my oldest daughter begged her mother into allowing her to take this child development class in school.  The class calls for students to learn about child rearing issues, and during the course of the semester, they are responsible for taking care of one of the dolls, which has a memory bank that allows the teacher to see how well the student did parenting.  At first, my wife balked at the idea of my oldest participating in this class. “You don’t need this elective.  You should be worried about an elective, like Spanish,” she said, adding, “Besides, you have a little sister.  You already know what a baby is like.”

I stepped away from my traditional role as the “naysayer/dream crusher” and backed my daughter on this issue. I suggested to my wife that Ari spending some time with a baby of her own might be a good thing, and a baby she was responsible for would be much different than dealing with a baby sister.  My wife agreed, Ari signed up for the class, and for a weekend, Alora became a part of our family.

Alora, who was dark skinned, had short hair to the scalp, scrunched up eyebrows, and a perpetual frown on her face, was a peculiar sight.  That, however, didn’t matter to my Ari, who quickly stepped into her role as mother to this helpless doll.  In fact, my daughter quickly became defensive and protective when someone mentioned that Alora was, um, ugly. When I would mention Alora’s homely appearance, my teenager would give me the eye and then bounce her baby while reassuring the little one that everything was OK and not to pay attention to me, since she plans to promptly place me into a nursing home in my golden years. With that knowledge in hand, I stopped talking about Alora.  Nevertheless, I remained amused by Alora and my daughter’s interaction with this doll.  And the interaction with Alora was plenty because she cried, and she cried often.  She cried when she was hungry, she cried when she needed burped, she cried when she was sleepy, she cried when she needed held, and she cried just to cry. I don’t remember my 2-year-old daughter crying as much as Alora.  But to that, my wife would say, “You wouldn’t because you slept through it.”  All the same, I heard Alora often.

Ari was a faithful mother.  Alora cried, she picked her up. Ari would take Alora out of her car seat (yes, the baby had a car seat that we had to put in the car every time we went out) and she would rock Alora. Ari developed an unorthodox way of rocking the baby, however.  She held the baby in both hands with her arms extended out, and she rocked the baby with long swooping motions as if she were preparing to propel the baby out of a window.

“What are you doing to my grandbaby?” I asked, partly confounded and partly entertained.

“I have to rock her like this, so the sensors can pick up the motions,” mother Ari insisted.

So every time the baby cried, and if she needed rocked (and I use that term loosely in this instance) my daughter dutifully swung Alora back and forth without once accidentally letting the poor girl fly off into orbit.  Ari also dutifully fed Alora when she cried as well; however, I noticed after a short period, my daughter quickly and literally detached herself from the bonding process that occurs between mother and child during feeding.  My teenager, who had started off closely holding Alora to her chest while feeding her, devised a new method of providing sustenance to my grandbaby.  She left Alora in her car seat, propped the baby bottle up with a pillow, and used a Gopher Grabber go-handle fully extended to hold the bottle in place. This allowed my daughter to kill a few birds with one stone.  Ari could watch TV, relax and feed the baby all at once (oh, poor Alora).

But don’t think my baby became neglectful of her baby.  That wasn’t the case.  When we went out, she would faithfully retrieve Alora’s baby bag and car seat to bring along.  And going out was fun. When we were out, every time I got the chance, I would show off my grandbaby:  To my neighbor, “Hey, you want to see Ari’s baby?”  To the clerk at the checkout at the grocery store, “Hey, did you meet my grandchild?” I repeated my grandfatherly enthusiasm to the chagrin of my daughter and to the amusement of myself and wife.

Through it all, though, Ari remained faithful to little Alora.  Ari dragged herself half-asleep out of bed several times in the middle of the night when Alora would cry.  Ari kept her baby safe from being tossed out of the window by my wife, who had threatened both my daughter and granddaughter with swift repercussions, “if that doll wakes me up in the middle of the night.” Ari was worn out by the end of the weekend, and you could tell.  Alora cried incessantly, and Ari responded every time, albeit, begrudgingly by the end of the weekend. She had to fend off the curiosity of her baby sister who was thrilled to be an aunt; she had to protect Alora from annihilation from grandmommy dearest; and Ari had to be on guard from the new grandfather who was enjoying the experience way too much.  (I put a fisherman hat on Alora, fitted her with a pair of sunglasses, slipped a fat cigar in her mouth, and placed an empty pint-sized Cognac bottle in her car seat. I was trying to take a picture of Alora, when my daughter caught me.  She promptly grabbed her baby, shot me a look that said, “I can’t wait to put you in a nursing home,” and she hurried her daughter off to safety.)

I was proud of Ari—of her dedication to her baby.  Aside from the occasional detached pillow feeding, she was nurturing, loving and attentive to Alora.  As mothers often do, she

sacrificed for her child’s well-being.  That weekend Ari gained a small understanding of what an important and demanding job being a mother is. The weekend also gave her parents plenty of opportunity to preach abstinence, consequences, and responsibility. I asked Ari at the end of the weekend what did she learn from the experience.  My teenager said she learned she didn’t want to be a mother now. I heard Alora crying.  Oh, what music to my ears.

This article was written in 2003. Ari, now 32, a college graduate, entrepreneur, a body image coach, social media influencer, and founder and director of The Queenpin Collective, still has her father waiting on his first grandbaby.

Picture: Ari and baby sister, Amya.