Sad story about motherhood

Yesterday I took the kids to a big-box bookstore and was sitting with the baby in the children's section, near the table of little wooden trains they have set up there. A woman with a 2-year-old boy asked me how old the baby was and when I told her, she said that she had a daughter the same age. Without my prompting, she said that the baby went to China with her mother. What? This woman said that two children were too difficult, that she worried about the boy being too rough with the baby (this I understand), that her mother and father took the baby to Beijing and that she (the mother) might be able to send for her in a year.

So sad. I mean, I don't know all the details, just that her husband is in a grueling Ph.D. program and unavailable to help out with the boy or the baby girl. But this young woman was playing with my baby and crying because she reminded her so much of her own baby---gone now for 2 weeks. I can't imagine that she would send her baby away without pressure from somebody else, it's just not in the female makeup. She said that she and her husband just bought a new house and a new car and that they did not have enough money for daycare for the baby.

Is the woman being bullied? Is the baby better off with the grandparents? I don't know. I felt so sad hearing her story. Sad and judgmental. I had a hard time staving off feelings of self-righteousness. And anger. How dare she not fight to keep her baby! But how much of her dilemma is cultural? The woman is Chinese. If the baby were another boy, would they ship him off? How much choice did she have? How much coercion did she endure before she convinced herself that sending her baby away was the right thing to do?

My baby, has a beautifully shaped head. She slipped out of the womb covered by a caul and so never got the mis-shappen baby head from which some infants never recover. A friend calls her "Queen Neferititi." This woman asked how my baby slept and I told her that she sleeps on her side, as we're nursing often during the night. She said she always has her babies sleep on their backs and that you can buy props to keep them there. Indeed. Her boy did have quite a flat head from two years of lying on his back. "Yeah, lady." I thought, meanly, "I'm about to take parenting advice from you who sends your baby to live half a world away?"