Uncle John’s Presents Mom’s Bathtub Reader (17 page)

This former Harvard grad student is teaching us all a lesson.

T
here’s a lot less crying in the hallowed halls of Harvard lately. Not the crying that comes from students with tough exams or homesickness. No, what’s missing are the crying sounds of an infant wrapped in a swaddling blanket and attending class in the arms of Charity Bell.

Charity, 30, recently graduated with a master’s in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government (part of the university), where she was a dedicated student and a dedicated foster mom. Charity became well-known as the mom who took babies with her to Harvard.

Since 1997, Charity has been caring for foster children, most often the babies of drug-addicted mothers. Bell is one of the youngest moms in the Massachusetts foster-care system, taking on a demanding job. These babies often come into the world with symptoms of drug withdrawal. They can have trouble sleeping, eating, and even breathing. They’re often irritable, jittery, and hard to comfort. Charity’s methods of coping with foster babies’ problems are simple. She gives her disadvantaged charges good physical care, combined with lots of snuggling and calm, soothing attention. Her babies go everywhere with her—which is how they wound up at Harvard.

With little fuss but lots of fortitude, Charity managed to juggle the demands of getting an education with giving a good start in life to at-risk babies. Harvard’s professors and fellow students grew used to the sights—and sounds—of an infant cradled in one arm while Bell busily took notes in class or at the library. But rather than complaining about these (sometimes noisy) visitors to academia, hip grads and dignified professors were more likely to be found cooing over a cute baby or even combining a bit of babysitting with peek-a-boo.

Not everyone can charm Harvard grads and profs into child care, but Charity Bell was never the usual student. She told Harvard’s Kennedy School
Bulletin
, “I’m not supposed to be here . . . I was supposed to be a statistic.”

Charity’s father left her family and she grew up on welfare, along with her sister, Faith. (Her mom thought those names sounded nice.) Their mom, though loving and supportive, had an alcohol problem, and getting by was never certain. Charity beat the odds that she’d be a “statistic” with a scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music, where she planned to become an opera singer. Then Bell became a volunteer at the New England Medical Center. It changed her life.

At the hospital Charity found a little girl—alone with no attention or visitors—crying in her crib. The girl hugged and clung to Bell in desperate need of loving contact, sobbing when Charity had to leave. This sweet little girl, Bell learned, had been abused and was kept alone in a crib because there was no available foster family. Charity began her foster parent–training program, intending to temporarily care for the lonely little girl. Today she’s still caring for children in trouble.

Now that she’s graduated from Harvard, Charity works fulltime as the regional director for a Massachusetts foster-parenting program. She oversees two programs, one that helps foster parents find affordable day care and a second that gives support to grandparents raising their grandchildren.

And just like in her grad school days, Charity is nearly always comforting a baby snuggled in her lap or resting on her arm. She’s admitted that juggling care for troubled newborns with a job isn’t easy and that it’s put other things she wants on hold. She’s joked about the need for a husband, a new stove, and a washing machine—in that order.

But the hardest part of Charity’s mission isn’t the workload, the effect on her social life, or the low pay—less than $15 a day. Charity enjoys her kids too much for that. She gets “payback” from receiving their love and watching them grow and thrive. No, the toughest part is when it’s time for her kids to go on to the next step . . . a stable home or perhaps an adoption. Saying good-bye to a beloved child is always a wrenching loss. For devoted foster moms like Charity, it’s part of the job.

“I become deeply attached to every child I care for,” Bell says, “even if it is only for a few weeks.” But she also says, “I am proud to have been one of the people in each of my kids’ lives who have loved them. I hope that I have helped them learn how to accept love and give it to someone else.”

Because she’s so familiar with the difficulties—as well as the joys—of foster parenting, Charity has founded Foster the Future (
www.fosterthefuture.org
), a nonprofit organization to improve foster care. Foster the Future works to
recruit nurturing families and healing homes for kids in need of foster care and raises money for the extras that foster parents need—anything from a double stroller to linens for a child’s bed.

With interviews in magazines and newspapers and after being featured on NBC and MSNBC as an everyday hero, Charity is getting her message out. There are children in desperate need of parenting, and foster parenting is the toughest job you’ll ever love.

Laboratory mice are proving that what a pregnant mom puts through her lips may wind up on your hips.

W
hat makes a brown mouse brown and a yellow mouse yellow? Does it have to do with the color of the mama mouse’s fur? Or the color of the papa mouse’s fur? Well . . . not exactly. When biologists at Duke University Medical Center began adding vitamin supplements to the diets of pregnant yellow mice, the vitamins changed the fur color of the babies!

The scientists fed yellow mother mice vitamin B
₁₂
, folic acid, choline, and betaine before and during their pregnancies. These mothers gave birth to offspring with brown fur. Not so for yellow mother mice that ate a normal diet with no added vitamins—their babies were yellow. Yet both the pregnant mice and their litters were the same genetically. The only difference between the litters was that some mice had moms who ate vitamins and some did not.

What happened? How could baby mice with the same exact set of genes look so very different? Could diet alone produce such a colorful difference? Scientists have long known that even if a gene is present in the body, it may not have much effect. Everyone inherits two sets of genes—one from each parent. Usually one set of genes is
dominant (active) and one set is recessive (inactive). That’s why two brown-eyed parents can have a child with blue eyes. Both mom and dad had blue-eye genes that they passed on and that became active in their offspring.

In these experiments, scientists worked with a strain of mice that have an extra piece of DNA in their agouti gene. This deviation makes them obese and yellow. When this gene is active, it turns their fur yellow. When the agouti gene is turned off or silenced, i.e., when it isn’t having an effect on the mouse’s body, their fur should be brown. When those mama mice at Duke took their vitamins, chemicals in the vitamin supplements turned off the expression of the agouti gene.

Inside the vitamin-supplemented mama mice, molecules containing carbon and hydrogen became attached to the gene and switched it off—a process called DNA methylation. Basically what that process did was cause the fat, yellow mother mice to produce slim, brown babies.

The agouti gene doesn’t only change fur color in mice, it also impacts health. This gene plays a role in controlling brain signals for appetite. Mice with a highly active agouti gene tend to eat more and get . . . well . . . fat. Turning off the agouti gene produced brown mice that ate less, were not obese, and were also less susceptible to diabetes and cancer than their fair-furred brethren.

So what does this mean to human moms? More studies will have to be done on human DNA methylation (just pronouncing it is hard enough!). But many studies have
already shown that pregnant women who eat a poor diet have children who are more susceptible to diabetes and heart disease. Those brown baby mice at Duke suggest that human genes—like those in mice—are being influenced by prenatal nutrition and chemicals.

Looks like what a pregnant mom eats and the vitamins she takes can have a permanent influence on the physical characteristics and the health of her baby—and maybe even her grandchildren! So when a pregnant lady says she’s eating for two, she’s not kidding. The only other question is—what do all those cravings for ice cream and pickles mean?