21 October 2009

I was going through some photos from when Nut Brown was a newborn yesterday- he sure looked funny, and not at all like the cute cherub he's grown into- and I was remembering how we got a visit from a social worker a couple days after we came home from the hospital. I was all groggy from hormones and lack of sleep and a nicely dressed young lady came into our living room and asked us why our new baby's stool had tested positive for marijuana!

We were highly alarmed, mostly because it seemed to us that she didn't believe our assertions that we don't use marijuana, we never have, and we're never around people who do. She kept saying things like, you can tell me if you have in the past, and when we kept saying that we had nothing to confess, she intimated that it would have been better if we had.

So I'm all freaking out about the state taking my baby away based on his poop testing positive for a chemical we don't keep in the house, and fortunately Mr. Brown leaned over and looked at her papers, and then asked, "Doesn't that say that you're looking for an African-American female baby?" She says, Yes. Not to be racist, but Mr. Brown & I & Nut Brown don't really look African-American. And I know the fact that we'd dressed the baby in blue is not a final determination of gender, but it might have merited further investigation. She, however, did not seem to think that this was worth looking into at all, and after pressuring us further for another few minutes, she took her leave, promising or threatening to talk to her supervisor about our case.

Mr. Brown immediately got on the phone to the hospital to ask for more information about the stool tests, how they're done, what sort of accuracy rate they have, and so on, and he told the hospital that we'd been visited by a social worker. The hospital did some checking and it turns out that there were two babies born that afternoon- both to mothers named Brown. And the other baby was an African-American female.

The hospital apologized profusely. The social worker's supervisor apologized profusely. I'm glad that Mr. Brown was clear-headed enough to get things sorted out. I was dithering in a hormonal nightmare of having my baby taken away, but he got everyone straightened out and nothing actually happened. Hooray for him! Hooray for the tender mercies that let everything work out so well.