Daydreams gave movement and stimulation to housewives standing in line at supermarkets and provided an escape for mothers of infants who sat alone as inert and purposeless as rocks until becoming instruments to be used by their babies. To find the source of his discomfort and ease it was in a child's mind a woman's only role; and this particular one also felt that his mother could also be manipulated by slight smiles and the temporary end of tantrums. And in a sense she was manipulated to toss him in the air, albeit only in the physical gesture itself for only fools read expressions of love in these smiles and the cessation of screams. Gabriele accommodated him beyond what was necessary for his welfare only because of the horrendous nature of his cries if she didn't do so. Throughout these months of care giving she did not have any other world beyond the child. She tried to keep herself from being flattened by the perfunctory role of bathing, feeding him, and changing his diapers by telling herself that motherhood would pull her into the swathes of human experience and its interconnectedness, that it would be a novel learning experience on coexistence, that it might be a means of duplicating the ideas of respected child development theorists so as to corroborate or discredit them, and that he could be the specimen of an experiment on how the instincts and proclivities of a male child might be altered into more ethical variations although she wasn't quite able to isolate the exact nature of the experiment and its parameters. But really these ideas did little to counter this pauper's version of ennui that fogged over her perceptions. What sustained her were her daydreams and art. Once she drew a surreal image of her baby in a business suit with an attachZ case in his hand. It was a partially adult caricature of a being standing proudly alone on an ice mountain. She drew its contumely as master of itself in all of its avarice, ability to facilitate its own pleasures. It was a fragmented child glued back together as an enraged whole and she accentuated this by drawing myriad cracks within its porcelain skin. . When she finished the sketch she knew that charcoal was an ineffective tool for the ideas and the color that rushed inside of her. Still, the sketchbook was compact as an album, and a bit of paper and charcoal were affordable.