Breathe
By Pamela Cerdeira
It has been seven years since I had such tiny clothes in my hands, a few days before I ran to the supermarket to buy everything: bottles, pacifiers, bibs, what I had already given away a year after my first daughter was born, and I bought and gave away again when my son was born, and I donated for the third time after Sofia's arrival. There I was, at 43 years old, staring at a drawer in my house full of clothes from size zero to three months, listening to my daughter say that we needed diapers, a small tupper to store powdered milk for when she went on a trip, a bathtub and a changing table. The surprise will not be because I could be a grandmother at 43, but because my daughter, the one who made the eternal list, is only seven years old.
Alexa was a Christmas present, she is a reborn doll, unlike the dolls I used to play with, these have a brutal resemblance to real babies, the soft sparse hair, the shine in the eyes, the varnish on the lips that looks like saliva, the nails, the size and weight, plus the fact that she fits perfectly in the baby clothes we bought at the supermarket, it all screams "I'm a real baby", especially to the surprised passersby who jumped after a few minutes to realize that what they were seeing in a little girl's arms was actually a doll. Alexa was followed by Briseida, and others whose names (I know, I am the worst grandmother in the world) I have already forgotten. My older children find their nieces "creepy" and the 19 year old woke me up in the wee hours of the morning to ask me to take the doll out of her room, because every time she opened her eyes she felt that her sister's silicone baby was looking at her. Needless to narrate the eternal arguments and fights between my children every time they told Sofia that her baby was ugly or scared them, any mother would understand their outbursts of rage in response.
