Families, Too, Must Be Prepared to Fight for Their Lives

As metaphors go, this one is pretty grim.

If Baby Boy X wasn’t exactly the first baby born in 1992, he only missed out by minutes, maybe hours at most. Then his 23-year-old mother threw him away, in a trash can on the side of her house in Garden Grove.

I will give this mother the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she just couldn’t cope. Maybe she was overwhelmed and confused.

Her child was a fighter, however, somebody not so easily tossed aside. He was found 10 hours later, cold and hungry and shocked. But he lived on into the new year.

And it looks as if this baby will be OK, in the short term at least. Perhaps a nice family will adopt him, give him their love and lots of their time.

Perhaps . That is, we hope, we pray, and we cross our fingers too. And then we must go on to something else. Other urgent matters call.

Millions of American families do this every day. We wish for the best but console ourselves with less than the worse. We hope that nothing goes really wrong, that we don’t get overwhelmed.

Risky child-care arrangements, maternity leave that doesn’t pay the bills, a sick child unable to have the comfort of Mom or Dad, an aging parent who will just have to go it alone. These are just a few of the entries on the list of what’s wrong for American families in 1992.

I will give our society the benefit of the doubt. Maybe we, too, are confused. We are talking out of both sides of our mouth.

Listen to the politicians, the people we have chosen to represent our interests, the ones who are supposed to do what is best by us. They say that families are great. Why, they have one themselves!

Candidate Bush ran for his job as a family man, stressing the need to give workers time off to care for newly arrived children and to succor the seriously ill. President Bush vetoed the family leave bill, stressing the need not to shove anything down businesses’ throats.

Still, everybody is “pro-family.” Our leaders think that families are definitely the way to go, something that you want to promote. As long as, uh, everybody agrees on how that should be done. We cannot.

In the meantime, families are left with almost no help at all.

Last week, Rojelio Vargas and his wife, Maria Eusebio, were at work while a baby-sitter was home with their three children in Santa Ana. They didn’t know this girl very well, but the cost of her services was what they could afford.

The Vargas children are 4 and 2 years old, and the baby, Oscar, was 9 months. Oscar, police say, was beaten and shaken to death. The baby-sitter, 15, stands accused.

“I didn’t expect anything like this,” said Rojelio Vargas, too grief-stricken to say much else.

No one can say with certainty what would have saved little Oscar’s life, or spared Baby Boy X the cruelty of the first hours of his own. Horror stories such as these are hardly confined to fiction anymore.

It’s tougher than ever to be a child in America, and parenthood is no piece of cake. Blah, blah, blah. In other words, we have heard this all before. And, still, what gets done?

The United States is the only developed nation without a national policy on medical care, child care or maternity leave.

The comparisons with Western Europe, for example, are enough to make a parent weep. Tax relief, paid maternity leave, cash payments with the birth of a child, free day care and subsidies to parents who hire baby-sitters in their homes.

In America, the government offers no such “deals.”

I use this word for a reason. A deal implies a bargain, a stroke of luck, something unexpected maybe, something you want to grab on to before the other guy changes his mind.

Parents have gone so long with so little that we tend to forget that it shouldn’t be up to politicians to offer us some sort of “deal.”

A couple my husband and I have known for many years, very good friends, brought home their adopted baby from the hospital the other day. We spoke on the phone that first day.

Both mother and dad were excited almost beyond words, awe-struck by a wish come true, reverential for having been so blessed. This baby girl is their first child.

The adoptive mother called the woman who chose her and her husband to raise this child a “really special person.” I sensed that my friend was saying those words softly, slowly, because they were inadequate to express what she felt.

Then she expressed something else. It was anger almost, blended with frustration and fear. She spoke of having to choose between advancing in her television career or advancing in the new one, being a mother to her child.

I told her the truth: The conflict would only get worse. It made me want to cry. I shared some regrets of my own.

But, to complete my metaphor that started this off, let me say something else. Baby Boy X survived. He has a future, because he fought for his life.

In 1992, families must do so as well.