Seeing Past the Storks

By Erika Smith

The mural seemed to represent everything I hated about the Pregnancy Help Clinic. The curly yellow hair and pink-and-white complexions of all the painted babies seemed to be an unforgiveable assault on political correctness. The skinny, lopsided storks seemed to symbolize the naïveté and ignorance of the clinic as a whole. If they won’t even be honest about where babies come from, how can they expect these girls to stop getting pregnant? I thought derisively. I couldn’t deny that the clinic meant well – it was a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing emotional, financial, and medical support to those dealing with an unplanned pregnancy – but everything about it, from the mural to the incoming donations to my fellow volunteers, seemed to counteract its intentions. I was a volunteer against my will, and although I had resigned myself to the long hours of mindless work, I fumed against my fate in a constant internal litany of complaints and judgments. I hated the Pregnancy Help Clinic and I was determined that nothing could change my mind about it.

I was volunteering at the clinic because I was unemployed and, it seemed, unemployable. The summer I was eighteen, I applied for 31 different jobs – everything from making sandwiches at Subway to stocking shelves at Target to watching rich strangers’ children – but was only called back for a single interview, at the bookstore where my mother worked. When even the bookstore wouldn’t hire me, my parents finally began to listen to my complaints about the failing economy and the lack of a job market for college students. However, they stressed the importance of gaining experience, getting good references, and, most of all, getting out of the house. “If you can’t find a paying job,” my mom said, “then you’ll have to settle for an unpaid one.” “Baby Boutique Maintainer” - an organizational job that would require a minimal amount of effort and allow me to stay mostly in the background - at the local Pregnancy Help Clinic sounded, if not perfect, at least far preferable to cleaning chicken cages at the Howell Nature Center or wasting gas by participating in Meals on Wheels.

My first day went wrong from the second I stepped out of my car. The dentist and chiropractor whose businesses surrounded the clinic must both have been very successful; there seemed to be a constant stream of people going in and out of their doors. As I got out of my car, I felt for the first time a soon-to-be-familiar rush of mixed shame and hypocrisy: I knew the people looking at me sidelong assumed that I was a teenage mother and I wanted to correct them. At the same time I became aware that by not wanting to be associated with them, I was looking down on the people I had volunteered to help. Red-faced, head down, I rushed into the clinic as fast as I could and proclaimed my status as a “good teenager” to the receptionist: “I’m here to volunteer!” She sent me back to meet the manager, Jane, who showed me where I would be working.

I would spend most of my time in a back room where donations were stored, cleaned, and sorted. The floors were covered with garbage bags of new donations and various large items that didn’t fit anywhere else, such as cribs, changing tables, and rocking horses. My fellow “Baby Boutique Maintainers” were gathered around a high wooden table going through a black garbage bag of baby clothes. One of them, a tall, 60-ish woman with peroxide blonde hair, introduced herself as Pattie. “Erika,” she repeated as I introduced myself. “That’s a nice Scandinavian name. Erika, this is Ashley.”

Ashley was the only other volunteer under thirty. She was about my age, possibly a year or two younger. She was wearing jeans and a tank top, and her long brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Jane left me with Pattie and Ashley, and Pattie showed me what to do: put the dirtiest clothes in the trash, the slightly stained ones in a garbage bag labeled “Salvation Army,” and the nicest clothes – “like new,” meaning without any visible stains or holes, though some wear was permitted – were to be folded and stacked according to size and gender in the Baby Boutique in the next room.

Pattie interrogated me as I slowly began to sort through clothes. “Where do you go to school?” she asked.

“Boston University,” I said.

“Where’s that?” asked Ashley.

“In Boston.”

“Is that in New York?”

I stared at her. I had been hoping that Ashley, the volunteer closest to my age by about fifteen years, would be a friend, someone I could talk to. But although she was a high school senior, she had never heard of Boston. Clearly, we had nothing in common. “It’s in Massachusetts,” I said coldly.

“Oh,” Ashley giggled. “I’ve never heard of it. I’m terrible at geometry.”

Geography, I considered saying, but instead I forced a smile and went back to folding clothes.

After about an hour, Ashley went home and was replaced by Barb, an elderly woman who spent her entire time at the clinic complaining with Pattie about Obama’s health care plan and liberals in general. The phrase “death panel” was used frequently. “They’ll kill old ladies like us,” Barb said, and Pattie agreed. I had chosen to go to college in Boston partly because of a desire to escape the extremely conservative mindset of my hometown – when I was thirteen, a classmate threatened to shoot me for saying I preferred Kerry to Bush, and ever since then I had kept my opinions on politics to myself. Listening to Barb and Pattie’s conversation made me dislike them, both because of how ill-informed they were about health care, and because their conversation made me realize that I still was not brave enough to voice my own political beliefs.

During the first few days, I was astonished by the number of incoming donations, but I soon became disillusioned. In the best donation bags, about a quarter of the clothes went in the trash, with about half going to the Salvation Army and the rest going to the Baby Boutique, but frequently we would get a bag full of holey onesies stained with spit-up and urine, and the whole thing would have to be thrown out. “Seems like people just throw all their baby clothes in a bag and pass them along to us,” Barb said, and for once I agreed with her.

When conversation with Ashley, Barb, and Pattie grew unbearable, I would escape to the Baby Boutique, a room full of shelves stacked with approved donations. But although the silence of the Baby Boutique was a relief, I still couldn’t hide from what I hated about the clinic. The one visible wall was covered in a mural of lopsided storks carrying chubby blonde babies with huge, creepy eyes. I tried to keep my back to it, but I still felt like the painted cherubic babies were staring at me with their Precious Moments-inspired eyes, judging me, condemning.

I stayed at the clinic because I had signed a contract agreeing to volunteer for at least three months. Still, I might have quit and resigned myself to cleaning chicken cages at the Howell Nature Center if something hadn’t happened in my third week: I talked to one of the mothers. I had seen them before, girls around my age with swollen bellies hidden under oversize sweatshirts or with babies in their arms, sometimes alone and sometimes clutching the hand of a boyfriend or best friend. But I’d never talked to them: our only interactions were glances in hallway as they walked to the doctor’s room or an uncomfortable smile in the foyer. Once in a while “one of the girls” would come into the Baby Boutique while I was organizing the shelves, but we never exchanged more than an awkward “Hello.”

Until the day we did. I was in the Baby Boutique when one of “the girls” came in. She looked older than most of the young mothers, although she couldn’t have been more than twenty-one or twenty-two. She had long, raggedy blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail; it looked as if it hadn’t been washed or brushed in several days. She wore no makeup but thick black eyeliner and she was badly in need of braces.

“You’re not one of us, are you?” she said without even a “Hello.”

“No,” I said, glad that she had been able to tell. Maybe I didn’t need to worry about what the neighboring businesses’ clients thought of me. Maybe it was obvious that I wasn’t one of “the girls.”

“This is Emma,” the girl said as a baby I hadn’t noticed before crawled out from under the table. The baby was beautiful: she had curly blonde hair, big blue eyes, and a smile with only a few teeth in it. She was wearing nothing but a clean white onesie and a diaper, but it was obvious that her mother had spent much more time on Emma’s hygiene and appearance than on her own.

“Would you watch her for a minute?” the girl asked. “I’m trying to fit a crib in my trunk.”

“Okay,” I said, still staring at Emma, who was cooing happily on the floor. I knelt so I could see her better and I gave her one of the free McDonald’s toys that sat in a basket on the table. As I watched her playing against the backdrop of the hated mural, I realized with a jolt that Emma looked just like the cartoon babies on the wall. Maybe the mural wasn’t an expression of my hometown’s inherent racism but a representation of the artist’s love for a specific child.

Emma chewed contentedly on the plastic Ice Age figurine, oblivious to my revelation and, it seemed, my presence. When her mother returned about five minutes later, I stood and continued organizing the shelves, but I kept turning back to look at Emma. A few minutes later Emma left with her mother, and I went back to the donations table.

“She’s a cutie, isn’t she?” said Pattie, who was watching Emma and her mother make their way down the hall. “That’s what we do this for.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah.”

From that moment on, not much changed in my everyday life at the clinic: Ashley still displayed a disturbing lack of general knowledge, Pattie and Barb began to assert their belief that Obama was really born in Kenya, and the level of useable donations remained disappointingly low. But from that moment on, my motivation changed: I was no longer at the clinic because my parents had forced me to find work. I was there because of a genuine desire to help mothers give babies like Emma the chance at a life like the one I was living. I began to, if not like, at least tolerate and respect my fellow volunteers. Thanks to my change in motivation, we now had something in common: a profound interest in the workings of the clinic and in the wellbeing of the people who depended on it. Even when talk strayed from the clinic to politics or current events, my respect for the volunteers gave me a newfound confidence; finally, I found the courage to voice my opinions.

On my last day at the clinic, my fellow volunteers gave me a card. Good luck in Boston, Massachusetts! Ashley had written. But my favorite message was Pattie’s: I know you can’t see it, but you’ve made a difference in some baby’s life. I pictured Emma, the real-life version of the babies on the mural, and hoped that it was true.