God knows moms are tired. They’re somehow always in charge of everything and it’s exhausting. People always think they know what it’s like to be tired until they find themselves up in the middle of the night, repeatedly, with a baby, sometimes for months on end. It’s then they realize that they never knew the true meaning of “tired” before having a kid.
To Olivia, a high school freshman, taking care of a baby seemed like it would be easier than the engineering class she dropped in order to take early childhood education instead.
She was assigned a robotic baby named William who’d she be in charge of keeping happy and safe from Friday after school until Monday morning.
Speaking to BuzzFeed, Olivia’s mother Lawren explained that the robot baby really was a lot like a real baby. “It sounds like an easy task, but then it repeats at ungodly hours. It would wake her crying when she was dead asleep and then cry again an hour later.”
Now, Lawren has four children, one of whom is a tiny baby named Violet, so obviously Lawren is pretty busy already. She told BuzzFeed that she’s up all the time with Violet, and over that weekend, Olivia was up all the time with William, rocking him, feeding him, changing him, and doing all the stuff that you need to do for babies. Olivia would ask Lawren for help, but she’d just say, “My hands are full. This is your grade, not mine.'”
Lawren said she heard Olivia crying in her room with the baby a few times, just full-on bawling, asking William to please just be quiet. And at one point, Olivia went into Lawren’s bedroom and actually begged her motherfor help, but mom was all, hard pass.
Lawren wrote a Facebook post about the situation and included a picture of a clearly miserable Olivia with William on her lap.
Her post got a ton of attention and one common comment was that this assignment should be a mandatory part of the curriculum at every school.
Despite the fact that it sounds like Olivia really did her best (her mom pointed out that her bathroom trips were faster, her hair was greasier and she wasn’t as put together as she usually was), she actually did not get a good grade on the taking care of William assignment.
She still definitely learned a lot from the assignment, though—Olivia told Lawren that she thinks she wants to adopt an older child (“like a 10-year-old”) rather than have a baby when she wants to become a mom. She may not feel that way when she’s older, but if this assignment is any indication, she’s not going to be rushing into motherhood anytime soon.
h/t: BuzzFeed