Crib Death: A Guest Post by Mary Molina

Mary’s story about the infant that died
By Mary Molina, as dictated to Conrad Seitz
Monday, July 6, 2015.

I was 21 years old in 1972, when my son Marshall was 2 years old and my daughter Kristi was 5. I was working, picking strawberries.

Kristina had gotten pregnant again, and she wound up living with us, but I don’t know why except that we took her in, at the urging of my husband. She was 18. She had two children, one of which she gave to her mother, and the other one she gave away to someone else, I don’t know who. Kristina moved in with us after the baby was born.

We all lived in a new house provided by the owner of the dairy where my husband Junior worked. There were three bedrooms and when the baby was born, six people including him; he lived to be 30 days old. He never had a name.

When we went to pick Kristina up at the hospital after the baby was born, I could already tell that she wasn’t going to bond with him. She never said anything to me about the baby. I was too busy with picking strawberries all day and then coming home to feed my husband and two children, cleaning house, then getting everything ready for the next day. I wasn’t prepared to even think about what we would have to do to take care of the baby.

Kristina never told us about taking the baby for a two-week checkup, and we were so busy that it didn’t occur to us. We wouldn’t have had transportation or time anyway; we couldn’t take off work in the busy season to take her to the doctor even if she had told us. She just didn’t seem to care about anything. She sat around the house all day, watching TV.

One day when the baby was about three weeks old, the mother told me that he had a cold and I said that she needed to take him to the doctor. She immediately gave me the little boy and said “You can have him.” Junior had already told her that, if she didn’t want the baby, we would take him. Kristina couldn’t provide milk or baby clothes; she had no friends, no car, and no relatives nearby– we lived in Laton, and the nearest were in Mendota, 50 or 60 miles away

I knew that we could barely feed our kids and I would never have taken someone in that way, but my husband had already decided for me and it was too late. In remembering, I think it was George, my brother, who brought her to our mother’s house, and it was there and then that Junior offered her a place to stay and adoption of the baby. George is another story altogether.

I had to take care of him from the day we picked him up from the hospital; he was fine at that time. When he cried, Kristina never picked him up; I would go and see what he needed, if he was wet or hungry. My children liked him and were very curious about him. I was working picking strawberries all day, and Kristina was at home watching Marshall, who was only two; Kristi was in kindergarten already. Kristina told me, “I’m not going to take care of the baby, but I’ll watch Marshall.”

Kristina was a fat girl, and she never intended to go to work at any time. She was used to being on welfare because she had lived with her mother, who was on welfare; she was the oldest of four children. When she was at home, she never did any housework and I didn’t ask her to; I just wanted to make sure she fed the baby. I had to be away at work for eight hours, and I was worried about the baby being fed.

The baby was always crying; I think he sensed that his mother didn’t love him. I would sometimes take him to bed with me because I was so tired, I wanted him to have somebody holding him, but I was too tired to stay up while I was holding him. He had been in the crib all day except for one feeding.

When I came home, I fed him, walked around with him for a while until he fell asleep, and then I went to bed. The sleeping arrangements were this: Kristina slept on the floor in one room with the baby in a crib, I slept in a second bedroom with Junior, and Marshall and Kristi shared the third bedroom. I put the baby in his crib and went to bed in the other room with Junior.

Junior and I were talking in bed, and I said, “I don’t know why you offered to take the baby– we barely enough to eat on own and we have to feed Kristina and the baby now.”
As we were talking in bed, he really didn’t have anything to say because he knew I was right, but there was nothing we could do about it. Kristina didn’t have any documents of the baby’s birth, although she had her own Medi-Cal card. I don’t know how we were going to adopt him without any papers.

Kristina had told me, just that day, that she wouldn’t take care of her own baby during the day when I was gone. I was shocked, and said, “You’ll take care of Marshall, but you won’t take care of your own baby? What do you stay home for?”

She said, “OK, I’ll take care of the baby.” But she still didn’t sweep the floor or wash dishes; I usually kept everything very clean anyway, as I felt that someone had to do it, and I was very conscientious about housekeeping.

After a week of having a clear runny nose, he developed a cough and green mucus discharge from his nose. I knew I had to take the baby to the doctor, but I needed to get a day off to do so. In the meantime, he continued to eat and wasn’t fussy. On the night he died, I put him to bed at eight o’clock as usual; I was exhausted, and I went to bed right afterwards.

During the night, I heard him crying, and since I knew Kristina wasn’t taking care of the baby, I got up. But then I heard footsteps on the bare wood floor, and after that, the baby stopped crying. I went back to sleep. I assumed that she got up and gave him a bottle or picked him up, because he had stopped crying.

Actually, she didn’t go to check on the baby until the morning; her blankets were  still on the floor where she had slept. She came into our room and said, “Mary, there’s something wrong with the baby.” She sounded scared. So I got up, hurried into her bedroom, and started looking for the baby in the blankets on the floor. She said, “The baby’s in the crib.” I said, “You mean you didn’t pick him up last night when you got up?” She said, “No, I just got up to get a drink of water.” I had a premonition that the baby was dead already.

I went over to the crib to look at the baby and he was already cold and hard. His eyes were closed. I picked him up in my arms and my husband drove us to the hospital; it was about twelve miles away, in Selma. We got there about seven thirty in the morning; there was no-one around and it was quiet in the hallways of the hospital. The baby didn’t move at all, and he felt stiff in my arms.

I sat down in the emergency room with the baby on my lap. I didn’t want to look at him because I felt guilty, as if it was my fault that he had died. The nurse took him and put him on the gurney and put an oxygen mask on him. The doctors were examining him and then they took him behind a curtain. They asked me about the history and I told them that the mother slept in the same room with him. He had had a cold for a few days, but never had a fever. I had heard him crying for a little while that night and I heard the mother’s footsteps; I had assumed that she had picked the baby up. The next morning, I had started looking for the baby among the blankets on the floor because I had assumed the mother had taken him to sleep with her.

The doctor told me that the baby had died of “crib death.”  He said it was partly due to the “upper respiratory infection” and perhaps that the baby had been lying on his stomach. I felt heartbroken and guilty at the same time: Kristina hadn’t taken care of the baby, and I hadn’t stepped in to take over, even though I knew something was wrong.

I felt like I was dead myself. All I could think about for weeks afterwards was the dead baby. I just walked around like a zombie. No-one came to investigate; at the hospital, they all assumed that the baby had died of pneumonia and “crib death”, whatever that was.

I was the only one who knew that Kristina didn’t want her baby and didn’t bother to try to take care of him. She had no interest in being a mother and no feelings for the child. I just couldn’t understand how a woman could have no affection for her own child and I wished she had just let the baby be adopted out immediately. She was so unconcerned that she didn’t bother to retain the birth certificate or any of the baby’s documents.

I felt horrible because I had bonded with the baby, even though his own mother hadn’t. I felt as if my own baby had died, and I felt responsible because I let Kristina take care of him that night, even though I knew she didn’t care. I was so tired that, when the baby stopped crying, I just assumed that Kristina had picked him up and checked on him.

Kristina continued to live with us for a month or so after the baby died; then she found somewhere else to live, I think with my brother George. I didn’t see her again for six years. Then I saw her at the clinic where I had begun working as a medical assistant. She had two more children, twins, from another guy. This time she kept the children because the guy stayed with her.

Partly because of this, I went back to school and eventually became a physician’s assistant. I have never forgotten this baby and I have never forgiven myself for not getting up in the middle of the night to go see what Kristina was doing with him.