Miracle Baby
By Tom Deiker

(continued)

“They call it a support group,” Miriam told Charlayne. “They got them for families of people who are all dying of the same dreaded disease, or for wives of dope addicts or sex perverts and such.”

So Miriam calls Mr. Kudlaty back over to the house. At first he was kind of iffy about it. “It wouldn’t be easy to find all those people,” he says. “Plus some of them aren’t hankering for any more publicity.”

But the more Mr. Kudlaty thought about it, the more taken with my idea he gets. “We never did a story like that before. It might go over big.”

So Mr. Kudlaty sets it all up. He couldn’t find the werewolf baby’s family, which was a big disappointment to me, he said The Sun had lost track of them. He did get ahold of the mother of the Bigfoot baby, who was still living in that tiny village in the Rocky Mountains. She was there at The Sun office — it takes up the whole top floor of the biggest building in Boca Raton — when we went down for the therapy. I was hoping to see her boy, whose name is Sogvee by the way, but she didn’t bring him. She was all nervous and fidgety, Charlayne says, hardly said a thing the whole time, not even when the therapist tried to get her to talk about her feelings about having Bigfoot’s baby. She did say Sogvee was doing fine, and I remember the article in The Sun telling how the people in her village had grown to love him after they got over the shock of having Bigfoot’s baby living in their midst.

The mother of an alien baby was there, too, one I hadn’t heard of before. She was just the opposite of Sogvee’s mother, Charlayne said, talked a mile a minute about her experiences in the alien spaceship. She brought her boy — he’s about six now — and he looked perfectly normal to me, except kind of sickly. His mother told Charlayne he has severe asthma, because his lungs can’t adapt to the atmosphere on our planet.

They had just the one therapy, which Charlayne said went fine, except for her being fit to be tied when she saw the headline in The Sun: “Family Therapy for Freaks!” The story talked more about the psychologist they brought in than the therapy, how he works with hopeless cases and all. It did tell about how the mothers found comfort in sharing their misfortunes with other mothers who were given the same cross to bear — which Charlayne agreed was true for herself. It was a pretty good article, other than the headline, which Mr. Kudlaty said they changed after he wrote it up, and that he felt bad about that.

Charlayne tells us it did make her feel better that the alien mother plus the therapist himself told her she was more fortunate than the other mothers, who had to raise their miracle babies all alone.

“Plus don’t forget they both had to endure rapes and kidnappings, which can’t help but leave you scarred for life,” Miriam tells her. “You got to start in counting your blessings, Charlayne. How’d you like to endure kidnapping and rape, and then have to raise your child all alone, and without a husband that has a steady job with good fringe benefits. Who’s never even had a horrible industrial accident that left him crippled for life. Or even worse, how’d you like to lose your baby completely like Little Mikey’s mother? Now you ought to think about that before you go on wishing you could trade places with some other mom.”

Charlayne didn’t know who she was talking about, so I told her. “Don’t you remember that cute little boy who made that famous Life Cereal commercial, you know, ‘Mikey likes it!’ That one. Everybody thought here was this perfectly happy child, bound and destined for wealth and fame. But then he goes and swallows a whole package of those Pop Rocks, which are no longer approved by the FDA because of what happened to Little Mikey.”

“So what happened?” Charlayne wanted to know.

Miriam tells her. “Little Mikey took a drink of Coke after he swallowed those Pop Rocks. And his stomach exploded. Now, how’d you like to trade places with Little Mikey’s mom?”

Well, that got to Charlayne alright.

“You’re absolutely right,” she says. “I believe in my heart that God has given us this trial and tribulation for a good reason known only to Him. It’s a blessing in disguise, I see that now. So we got to take the bitter with the sweet and start in counting our blessings. We got each other, and we got our baby, and we got our family, and our home, and a steady job.”

“And your youth,” Mr. Kudlaty puts in. “Don’t forget you got your youth and your health.”

“And our country, the United States of America,” says Miriam, “where we got freedom of religion plus the right to bear arms.”

“One thing I know for certain, Charlayne,” I tell her, “is that if we both keep our faith and don’t abandon hope, then love will conquer all obstacles, no matter how big they turn out to be.”

Which it will.