So recently I read a social media story about a confession from a midwife on her death bed. She was confessing that in the course of her midwifery career she had swapped (for the fun of it) babies at birth. To the tune of at least 5000 babies 😳…
Imagine growing up and not having any atom of resemblance to your parents or siblings…. So technically there are 5000 people who are living with people who are not biologically related to them. Some stories just make you wonder about life …
After my initial shock, wonder and anxiety for all the families involved, I started thinking of the possibility of that act of swapping babies, at birth, actually happening in any UK hospital. Then suddenly… I remembered…. yep, it was indeed a flash … my famous light bulb moment … I remembered the fact that it did happen to me 😂🤣🤣🤣😂🤣🤣🤣… I mean can you beat that… I was swapped at birth-ish…. if only for a moment…
I remember clearly, the story my mother had pleasure in narrating to me as a young child. The swap happened during feeding time. At the time of my birth, in 1970, the maternity policy then in the UK … was very different. At that time, babies were kept separately (in the nursery) from their mothers…. how things have changed… I was a baby then so my story is based on what happened to my young mother .. and Ofcourse what I can remember of her story….
Anyway, in those days during feeding time, the story goes, that the nurses would bring the babies from the nursery and hand them over to the nursing mothers. My mother being one of the new mums… and me being one of the bouncing baby girls.
This particular incident happened on one of those scheduled feeding time. My mother being a black woman, was dark in complexion, was handed over a baby similarly to her complexion…. and I apparently, being lighter in complexion to my mother, was handed over to another mother…. a woman that I was closer in complexion to… the lady I was handed over to for breast feeding, was Greek or Turkish or so… yep … my mum told me.
Anyway my mother took one look at the baby they gave to her and immediately raised her concern that the baby she had in front of her, was not hers…. needless to say that the situation was rectified. So it is possible to unknowingly make a mistake….
But thinking of it though, how many babies would have knowingly or unknowingly been swap at feeding times? That thought is scary.
Is love all a child needs? ….
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