Off the Cuff: When adults play baby games

When you don't get to win ‘Baby of the Week' in a hospital competition — it's the definition of a born loser. That's Eugene Hammond's ‘serious joke' — about himself. His aunt Sonia was in hospital at the same time as his mother, both expected to deliver that week.

"My cousin Neil was to arrive after me, but decided he'd defy calculations. Six other babies were born and Neil got to be Baby of the Week."

A framed picture of the infant asleep in his crib wearing the red sash declaring him winner was among the first adornments on the walls of Neil's baby room. "My cousin's parents, especially Aunt Sonia, never tired of pointing to that picture and telling everybody she'd produced a winner — often, in later years, to Neil's embarrassment, so that he'd be heard saying, ‘Mum, that's enough. The world knows the story.'"

Neil had barely been weaned off his mother's breast when he found himself, literally, in the water — the local swimming pool. Start him early, said Aunt Sonia, and he'll soon be setting Olympic records.

Eugene's own mum, Natalie, said she'd never seen this side of her sister.

"Aunt Sonia, according to mum, was a shy person, lacking in confidence. Mum said Neil's birth changed her totally. I have only seen this new Aunt Sonia — determined, striving, never quitting."

Routine family get-togethers fell away. Sonia always had something to do.

"Mum would ring on Saturdays and ask aren't you coming for tea and a chat? But aunt would have to drive Neil to swimming practice, or football coaching. Neil was into everything and Aunt Sonia was into everything with him."

Sonia has such a gifted child it keeps her on her toes, Eugene overheard his mum tell a friend once. Indeed, Neil was thereabouts in everything in school. Fourth in triple jump, third equal in art, third in the 100 metres, runner-up with the football and cricket teams (the second highest score of 78 run out); a second division on graduation.

Then the late teens and early twenties, the years of mild falling out over the opposite sex.

"There was this petite, pretty young girl Chantelle — her mother was French or something — she began to show an interest in me at a time when I had my head in my books, burrowing from one story to another but literally trapped among the pages. When I told her we'd be incompatible she turned her gaze elsewhere. Before I knew it she and Neil were a couple until she, in her honesty, told him she'd liked me before him! From then on there was a freeze between us."

Neil also came close, in his mid-twenties, to scaling a mountain peak, an attempt that had to be called off due to an alarming turn in the weather. "For years we've only had a superficially cordial relationship, until recently when he visited me at the clinic, put his cards on the table, bared his breast, so to speak, and simply said ‘Help me, Eugene'."

Everything that happened to Neil, and shouldn't happen to people so young, will soon be in Eugene's book, Let Children be Children …

"It took many sessions to realise it was not Aunt Sonia. What changed her was the hospital's awarding of one of those silly awards. It led her to set unreal standards for herself and her son. Neil really never won anything after that, he was always thereabouts. Such competitions the world can do without. All babies are winners at birth. They endure enough before emerging triumphantly into the world. No one should have the right to declare them — even implicitly — losers. And look what it might do to the winner," Eugene said.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.