Then a doctor says the word she has been circling for two decades: infant. Not a diagnosis. A recognition. And under the law, the decision of what happens next belongs entirely to her.
What follows is Marianne's passage through the Baby Institute — three residential months in which she and Kevin, soon to become Amelia, are guided through a full and formal transformation: nappies, feeding, a name, a gender, a certified legal identity. Alongside her are three other mothers, each carrying her own long-kept version of the same private weather, each learning what Marianne is learning — that the exhausting work of managing a child's true nature is not the same as caring for it, and that putting the management down is its own kind of homecoming.
Told in spare, close, unflinching prose, Babies In Training is a story about the distance between living alongside who you are and living inside it — and about what a mother discovers about her own long-buried history when she finally stops looking away from her child's.