A Day in the Life of Jem Aliya Denisovich

We think they’re weakening; that their stern silence will crack any day now and justice will come to us and all the other peasant families here. We have heard from our friends Boris Gishkin and Vladamir Putnik that there will be an uprising soon, and all the loving parents will be free to take the babies home. And that gives us a reason to smile—and to not care, for once, that they’re not smiling back.

This is the 1,000-word piece of prose that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn never got to write. Then again, he was never inspired by Dr. Alma’s charge and her stolid workers. If he had been, a great work of literature certainly would have been born. Instead, there is just this blog...

…and our heroine, Jem, who, each morning is carried on a woman’s hip, like a small piece of handle-less luggage, from bedroom to feeding chair. Her expression is placid as she tracks the familiar path between rooms, strangely parallel to the floor.

Our hearts flood with joy at seeing our little baby-ushka zipping by. It makes us laugh. Sometimes we peek into the feeding room, just after she’s been dropped into her breakfast chair. We spy her sitting there, still content with the world, a little red bib around her neck. Just waiting. Sometimes we wave at her and blow her kisses, and she turns our way, big head bobbing slightly on the pivot of her neck. We can’t believe that we’re going to get to watch her having breakfast for the next 18 years!

Because we’ve got a lot of feeding ahead of us, and because our one practice run didn’t meet with a seal of approval, we wanted a little more practice. So we asked Dina to coax the baby houses’ caretakers into allowing us to try our parenting skills under their tutelage. Much to our surprise, they agreed.

We returned to the art of grouting and troweling hot cereal. Again, only Mama was allowed into the feeding room. (Such domestic activities are verboten for men at the baby house—much to Steve’s dismay.) Jane took on the task with razor focus. She didn’t smile; she was scared that that would open the door for a food fight—a regular occurrence at the Buchbinder household. Instead, she fully inhabited the role of porridge pusher. Steve stood in the doorway, shouting words of encouragement.

Jem took charge, when she wanted to, by capturing the spoon between her teeth. No entrance, no exit. Jane opened her mouth to model compliance for Jem. This tactic actually worked some of the time. When it didn’t, peach juice was added to the mix, something that delighted Jem. She reached out to grab the mug, as if to say: “Give me that damn cup of juice!” Jane held the cup up to Jem’s mouth and the tiny dictator chugged with a big sloppy, smile on her face.

Ten minutes later most of her breakfast was consumed. Jane turned to the caretaker to ask, with her eyes and a shrug of the shoulders, is this good enough? She was met with a reassuring nod. Steve stood in the doorway, shouting words of encouragement.

Next, Jem’s caretaker ushered us both in to watch her change Jem’s diaper and clean her off. Such efficiency probably doesn’t exist in many households. Nor such vigor. Our naked little Jem was carried, this time, like a happy, dead doe—ankles and wrists bound in the caretaker’s hands, torso swinging below. Jem smiled up at us as they approached the bidet, as if to say “Isn’t this fun? And just wait, I’m about to get a vicious scrubbing.” After the washing, she was wrapped in hooded towel and carried to the changing table against which her head dropped to a dull thud. Jem kept beaming up at us as she was creamed, powdered and diapered, as if our voyeurism bonded us in a new way. The whole event took about two minutes.

This piece of parenting looked easier than we thought it might, even if their carrying methods seem a little unorthodox.

We also asked Dina to translate a description of Jem’s daily schedule. Feel free to skip to this paragraph, unless you’re related to Jem in some way. It ain’t scintillating material. Her day is measured out in two hour parcels. Two hours of feeding and lolling about, followed by 2 hours of sleeping and/or ceiling gazing. It begins at 6 am and ends at 8 or 10 pm. During that time, Jem drinks two to three bottles of formula, a cup of stewed fruit drink, as well as what they call “fruit tea” and water. Her solid fare consists of an adult-sized bowl of hot cereal with half an egg yolk mashed inside, a bowl of vegetable puree with boiled ground beef, fruit puree and a cookie, followed by a bedtime snack of yogurt. If she’s up at 10 or 11, she gets another bottle of formula.

Seems like a lot of food for such a little lady. Jane’s worried that Steve is going to steal Jem’s cookies. (Actually, we’re going to give that part of her diet the kibosh until she gets older.)

We’ve been told to hold onto her schedule, for continuity, while she goes through the challenging transition of moving in with us. But we’re ready, too, to let her body’s own natural rhythms take the lead.

Now that we’ve been shown the behind-the-scenes workings of the caretakers, we felt comfortable enough to ask if we could photograph them. It turns out that the very people who haven’t looked at us or acknowledged our hellos (Why do we keep saying hello?) do respond if we wave Jem’s tiny hand at them, as if she wants to ask a favor. And so, on Jem’s behalf, they’ve said cheesesky and tried to show us their teeth.