imaginative infant.

A few Sunday’s a week, I work in the nursery at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Comforter. For someone who is usually more annoyed by children than amused, this has been a great exercise of my patience – and has really softened my life-long aggravation with children. I’ve enjoyed watching the kids grow and develop from week to week, like the baby who just a month ago would spend the entire morning in my arms but who is now sitting on his own and starting to interact with the older children. It truly makes me marvel at the rapid complexities of the human brain.

My time in the nursery has brought about several thought provoking encounters. This past Sunday I was sitting on the floor, playing with Anna, when an elderly woman walked into the room cradling a baby doll. The doll was an infant snuggled in a pink blanket. The woman held the doll close to her chest. A man accompanying her announced, winking and using an unusual voice, that they had an addition for the nursery – this child.

Kissing the doll, the woman handed the infant doll to the other caregiver saying, “Now, she doesn’t eat much.” We assured her that we would take good care of her child. She hesitated as she walked out of the door, like a real mother with reluctance to leave her newborn child.

We soon learned that this woman was going through doll therapy – a treatment often used with patients suffering from dementia or a form of Alzheimer's. Without a doll, the woman might worry about where her “children” are, and go outside to look for them. The anxiety some women experience is so great that doctors have found giving them a doll to take care of greatly improves their quality of life and calms them.

This got me to wondering what I might cling to if I were to suffer from dementia or Alzheimer’s. Clearly this woman cherished her days as a mother, when other lives depended on her – not the other way around. Would I cling to my days on the soccer field? Nights spend playing spades with friends? Or my travels through Europe?

I’m quite certain that above all I would cling to reporting. It is the one thing that at this point in my life I would hate to lose the ability to do. I can see myself now, carrying around a notebook and pen (with pencil backup, of course) interviewing people for stories that will never run anywhere, making up deadlines that I would never need to meet, fuming when a phantom rival paper beats mine to a story or takes ideas from stories I’ve written. I only hope that people will humor me enough to give way to my imagination and play along.

When the woman returned we brought her the infant, saying that she’d slept the entire time.

“Well she never does that at home,” she said.

“Perhaps you should bring her here more often,” I replied.