“Two things happened at once: the doorbell rang, and Christina started to cry. “Oh, honey,” Ms. Mina crooned, not scary anymore but still sweaty and red-faced. She held out her hand, but Christina was too terrified by what she had seen, and instead she burrowed closer to me. Rachel, ever practical, went to answer the front door. She returned with two paramedics, who swooped in and took over, so that what Mama had done for Ms. Mina became like everything else she did for the Hallowells: seamless and invisible.”
Although Ruth’s mother delivers the premature baby efficaciously, her exertions are not unconditionally valued based on the words ‘seamless and invisible.’ Ruth discerns that the Hallowells take her mother for granted owing to the nature of her low-status vocation. Evidently, Ruth’s mother’s invisibility is ascribed to her humbleness as the household’s servant; a rank which they contemplate to be inconsequential.
“In soft words, the doctor said their child had profound birth defects that were incompatible with life. The mother was still crying when I settled the baby in the crook of her elbow. His tiny hands windmilled. She smiled down at him, her heart in her eyes. “Ian,” she whispered. “Ian Michael Barnes.” She wore an expression I’ve only seen in paintings in museums, of a love and a grief so fierce that they forged together to create some new, raw emotion. I turned to the father. “Would you like to hold your son?” He looked like he was about to be sick. “I can’t,” he muttered and bolted from the room. I followed him, but was intercepted by the nurse in training, who was apologetic and upset. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just . . . it was a monster.” “It is a baby,” I corrected, and I pushed past her. I cornered the father in the parents’ lounge. “Your wife and your son need you.” “That’s not my son,” he said. “That . . . thing . . .”
Here, Ruth beholds the nativity of a incapacitated child. The doctor’s assumption infers that the child’s endurance is not warranted and it is based on the magnitude of the deformity on the child’s face. The mother’s crying specifies that she is compassionate with her child. Her emotions are devastating considering that she had foreseen delivering a healthy kid. The amalgamation of ‘love and grief’ generates an imagery of multifarious emotions that cannot be distinguished. The father’s reaction is illustrative of the prevalent rebuff of individuals with disability. Babies born with disability encounter dismissal, occasionally, even from their parentages because abnormalities are considered to be atypical. The father’s preliminary denunciation infers that it would be demanding for him to adore the son unreservedly even if he were to endure.
“At one point, I took that stupid nursing student into the room with me, ostensibly to check the mother’s vitals, but really to make her see with her own eyes how love has nothing to do with what you’re looking at, and everything to do with who’s looking. When the infant died, it was peaceful. We made casts of the newborn’s hand and foot for the parents to keep. I heard that this same couple came back two years later and delivered a healthy daughter, though I wasn’t on duty when it happened. It just goes to show you: every baby is born beautiful. It’s what we project on them that makes them ugly.”
Ruth’s assertions concerning the intrinsic magnificence of all babies are philosophical. Although the infant with the facial deformity passes on, Ruth still looks at the baby as stunning. The society’s conformist criteria of discerning the beauty of babies is shallow. Ruth is an extraordinary nurse and human being who transcends the hollowness of peripheral attractiveness for she focuses on the spotlessness that a child espouses notwithstanding his or her deformities. Perhaps, if all people were to appreciate the intrinsic beauty, then deformity would have been standardized and cases of disability-related prejudice would have been curtailed.
