Book Review: Some Babies
Volume 2, Issue 31
Some Babies by Amy Schwartz, released in September of the year 2000, is a funhouse mirror.
You gaze into Some Babies, and Some Babies looks back at you, reflecting an endless pattern of images, wherein you, the reader, stare at the mom in the book, and she looks back at you and winks subtly from the abyss.
The abyss, of course, being bedtime.
Bedtime, meaning that impenetrable sequence after dinner, but before the wholly unsatisfying 15 minutes of peace that you may or may not get before collapsing into utter exhaustion after.
That part. That’s what this book is about.
Two characters dominate the hellscape Schwartz constructs in this deceptively simple book:
“Baby,” a tiny totalitarian in a onesie, who demands increasingly “More!” narrative detail from
“Mommy,” an exhausted parent improvising a story at bedtime.
Mommy is a saintly woman whose spirit is pushed to it absolute limits by a toddler with chaotic, yet somehow age-appropriate, bedtime energy. Mommy’s arc is tragic and familiar: she is operatic when describing how different kids go “Up, up, up” the playground equipment; but succumbs to the sweet, temporary death of sleep on the penultimate page, while “Baby” remains awake, demanding still more detail before resorting, ultimately, to a haunting primal scream on the final page:
“Daddy, more!”
I love this book, I hate this book, I am this book, this book is me, but this book is also not me in some profound ways.
Some Babies is an abyss in the way Nietzsche meant, wherein looking into it causes it to look into you. I suspect Amy Schwartz, who passed earlier this year, knew that.1 Here’s how this abyss looks at me, specifically. Azad, my two-year-old with no chill, asks me to read this book to her every night. As a narrator, I am occupying a strange space as an ironic conduit between her and “Baby,” a character literally designed to mimic some of her most annoying characteristics. Azad is too young to realize that Baby’s insatiable demands are not even as weird as hers, nor does she know that I, narrator dad, occupy a role similar to that of the mom in the book, as I pilfer her oratory to mask my own exhaustion.
I say “similar,” because I’m not a mom. And when Mommy collapses on page 25, coffee cup tumbling from her already weakened grasp, I am reminded that no matter how much bedtime storytelling I conjure, or childcare activities I notch, my body and mind will never experience the profound and complicated transformations that happens around childbirth. Because I’m a dad, and I write about dads, and in this particular book “Daddy” lives in the background, first doing dishes, and later doing a crossword.2 I don’t know what he does after Baby shrieks “More!” on that final, blood-curdling page, but I do hope his soul can rest with whatever decision he makes.
Here’s what I do know, though: when Mommy implodes into her nightgown, festooning herself with what a Kirkus reviewer described as a “profusion of patterns and florals,” Moms everywhere felt that.
And no matter how tired I get, I can’t ever really know what that’s like.
In light of that, shout out to moms. One in particular. I love you, Sheila.
This incredibly funny and insightful interview Schwartz did in 2010 offers some hints into the wry psyche of the deceased storyteller.
As regular SP readers know, the physical and metaphorical locations of “Daddies” are a bit of an obsession for me.