Mother of shoebox baby sets the record straight

Three years after being accused of dumping her newborn in a shoebox Karen Grech speaks out for the first time. Celebrating her son’s birthday last Thursday, she tells Ariadne Massa she wants to set the record straight.

Chuckling with glee as the toy sports car speeds off, the three-year-old boy cast his vigilant mother a cheeky grin as it crashes into the wall.

Crawling to pick it up, Hayden runs into his mother’s hands for a quick hug as she lifts him in the air and plants a kiss on his cheek before he wriggles free to continue playing.

“My son is the best present I could have ever received,” Karen Grech, 22, says.

Born on April 1, 2007, Hayden’s entry into this world made headlines when he was found abandoned in a plain cardboard shoebox in an alley in Cospicua.

The unusual incident, which had shocked the nation, unfolded after two girls and a boy, playing in Guliermu Street heard a noise coming from a box at around 3.30 p.m.

Inquisitively they edged towards the box that was inside a plastic bag and were shocked to find the baby inside.

One of the teenagers, a 13-year-old boy, had nervously recounted how they decided to explore the box because they thought there were kittens inside.

“When we lifted the lid of the shoebox, there was a white-skinned baby wrapped in a towel, moving about. He had patches of blood and an umbilical cord, about 30 centimetres long,” he had said.

The boy's story was corroborated by the father of one of the girls, who instinctively ran to the Cospicua police station, situated about 200 metres away, for help.

An ambulance had taken the baby to the hospital's Special Care Baby Unit. His 19-year-old mother was turned up at the police station within three hours and she too was hospitalised.

The surreal element of the story was further compounded when the baby’s grandmother, Mary Grace, had told The Times she had been the one to discard the shoebox on the street because she mistook the package for refuse.

It turned out Karen had never confided in anyone that she was pregnant and she had been waiting till nightfall to give her newborn to the nuns in Żabbar.

The boy, who was put under a care order and became the responsibility of the Family Minister, was temporarily placed with a foster family. However, sensitive to the fact that the mother played a pivotal role in the baby's development, the social workers established a rapport with her relatives to determine whether or not they could be trusted with the child's care and custody.

Mother and child were reunited in June 2007, 10 weeks after the baby was discovered in the draughty pedestrian alley among dog excrement and scattered orange peel.

Shuddering at the recollection, Karen hugs Hayden tightly and insists she never wanted to harm the baby. She speaks out for the first time in the hope of dispelling people’s misconceptions on a story that has a happy ending.

Her gruff voice presents a street-wise woman who has had to grow up quickly, but when she starts to peel away the layers of her story a timid persona is revealed.

“People always accused me of throwing the baby away, but it was never the case. I had just wanted to hide him from my mother – it never crossed my mind to throw him away,” she says.

The story started in 2006 when she fell for her neighbour who “was nice, and looked sincere” and they started hanging out. Three months later she became pregnant.

Her mother, who had her as a single mother, was always warning her not to get caught out, so Karen was scared of confiding in anyone. Her weight had always yo-yoed, and she started piling on the pounds to hide the growing bulge.

“I was very scared to speak out. I never summoned the courage. I used to wear bulky jackets with nothing underneath. At one point I had hit 100kg,” she says, stressing abortion was something she never contemplated.

Karen was raised by her grandmother – “she was like a mother to me” – and in December 2006, just before Christmas when she was planning sharing the burden of her secret, her grandmother suffered a stroke and was hospitalised.

“I was waiting for the right moment to tell my grandmother, but when she fell ill all my plans fell apart. I felt all alone. I had no help or support from anyone,” she recalls.

What about telling her mother?

“I wasn’t so close with my mother and maybe it was wrong not to tell her. Things have changed now. I didn’t want to burden her with my problems. On the contrary, my grandmother was very strong. She too was a single mother. She faced an abusive life, but she stood tall,” she says.

And her friends?

“My friends had screwed me one way or another so I never felt there was anyone I could trust,” she says, averting her gaze shyly.

She never even said a word to her boyfriend and her relationship soon fizzled out.

“When I had the baby I went to tell him it was his. I thought he loved me, but instead he told me, ‘see who you went with’. That was it. The man was heartless.”

She plodded through her days in silence, going to the factory where she worked and generally keeping to herself. Two weeks before Karen gave birth, her grandmother, who ran the household, died burying her last chance to speak up.

In the two months leading to her grandma’s death, Karen had lost track of her due date and she continued working until, Friday, March 30, 2007. That evening she started experiencing severe cramps and her waters broke.

“I had not done any ultrasounds or been to prenatal classes – I knew nothing about childbirth except from what I used to watch on the Discovery Channel. All I knew was that there was prima (the baby) and the seconda (the placenta),” she says, blushing at her lack of knowledge.

On Saturday morning, she went to the swings with her younger brother, but she ended up doubling over with the crippling cramps – the contractions had begun.

“I rushed home and went to bed. I cuddled beneath the blankets and said now come what may.”

She spent a sleepless night writhing in agony as the contractions became more frequent. On Sunday, April 1, soon after her mother left home, she went into labour.

“Labour lasted 90 minutes and I was trying hard not to shout in pain so people won’t hear me. At 9 a.m., the baby shot out.”

She lay on the bed worn out from her ordeal, with her newborn by her side. But 15 minutes later Karen decided to spring into action for fear her mother would turn up any second.

“When I started to get up I suddenly felt like a string down there. I got the shock of my life, thinking it could possibly be twins. I started pulling slowly and everything came down – it was the seconda. My tummy just went flat.”

Did she have to cut the umbilical cord herself?

“I don’t know. Something must have happened because I never cut anything. The baby was born and I put him on the bed. I dabbed him a bit to clean him. I didn’t have any nappies or clothes, so I wrapped him up in a beach towel to keep him warm,” she says, nervously keeping the palms of her hand tucked between her legs.

“I thought to myself that since nobody knew I was pregnant I could sneak him out and take him to the nuns in Żabbar. But when I peeped out of the window it was a sunny day and there were quite a lot of people outside.”

The plan was to take her son to the nuns’ orphanage, where a former boyfriend had been raised. He had always spoken highly about how well he was treated and she believed they would be able to give her son a good upbringing.

But she had to bide her time. With no cot at hand, she put the baby in the first thing that could provide a safe haven – a shoebox.

When the news first emerged that the girl had delivered the baby on her own everyone had been incredulous, Donald Felice, president of the Malta College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, says a woman’s body is perfectly designed for a mother to give birth on her own.

“If the mother tore the cord it will contract to protect the baby from bleeding to death,” he explains, adding that initial investigations on the baby’s cord would have established exactly what happened.

“If everything is perfectly normal, from the baby's position to the mother's health, then giving birth is a natural process.

“During the doctors’ strike (1977 - 1987) we delivered several babies at mothers’ homes. Many would deliver and then get up and prepare some coffee. What we have nowadays is mostly pampering and prevention.”

Dr Felice points out babies are very resilient and all they need to survive in the first 24 hours is oxygen and warmth.

It seems Karen instinctively knew this. She put him inside the box and took it upstairs to the roof, where she placed it inside a big plastic bag, making sure the lid was slightly ajar to allow the baby to breathe.

She placed the box horizontally on a shelf near the plants, in a sheltered spot, assuming it would never draw her mother’s attention. She put the placenta in a bag and also hid it on the roof.

To ensure her mother would have no reason to go upstairs, she removed the clean clothes from the washing line and took them downstairs.

Was she not scared the baby would start wailing?

“It didn’t even cross my mind at the time. He must have listened to my prayers and slept; it must have been his first deep sleep,” Karen says.

Exhausted and drained of energy she went to rest, “but once things start going wrong, nothing can stop it”, she admits.

“At 3 p.m. my mother came to shake me saying there were the police in our street and they had found a baby out on the street. I thought she was playing an April Fool’s joke,” she says.

When her mother shook her head, Karen froze. She panicked and her mind was racing trying to grasp how her baby could have possibly ended up on the street.

It turned out her mother, who had taken her own mother’s loss very badly and was not thinking straight, had gone upstairs to sweep and was clearing up. Karen says it was not normal for the family to leave boxes upstairs so she assumed it was rubbish and took it out.

“I don’t know what went through her mind. I wasn’t with her. I guess she never imagined there would be a baby inside.”

What happened after that?

“I owned up and they took me to hospital – I was just 19 at the time. I spent two days in a ‘normal’ ward and one day in a psychiatric ward, but I cried so much I was discharged – I wanted to go home and I wanted my baby back. He’s mine,” she says.

Karen thanks the Lord every day that the teenagers discovered her son in the shoebox before it was too late.

“I still bump into the girl who was the first to run to the police station for help. Every time I see her she tells me, ‘kiss Hayden for me’,” Karen says, her eyes welling up with tears as she dwells on what could have happened.

Looking back, Karen reflects: “The biggest lesson in all this is that if something bad happens it’s useless trying to hide it. Just face it and deal with it. I’m sad about what happened and that my son ended up being the talk of the town.”

Karen is fiercely protective of Hayden – who was named after the priest who christened him – and she refuses to be disheartened by any obstacles that threaten to trip her. In Cospicua, where she lives, tongues kept wagging for a while and the gossip hurt.

“I would see people whispering behind my back. If you can withstand their cruel words you’ll endure anything. I keep to myself mostly.”

Hayden is still under a care order, but she lives in the hope that she has proved to be a good mother and it will be lifted before he turns 18.

Her life has changed drastically since the tormenting few months from Hayden’s birth. She has received a lot of help and hand-me-down clothes from her family and established a close bond with her mother who she still lives with – “she’s all I have”.

Instead of sitting around and living off welfare benefits, Karen has taken her life in her own hands and gets up at the crack of dawn every weekday and goes out to work as a housemaid between 6 a.m. and noon.

She prays she will be kept on because everybody was cost-cutting in the present economic crisis and she has already had two hours chopped off her roster.

Her mother shuttles Hayden to playschool, and Karen picks him up after work.

“I spend a lot of time with him and miss him in the mornings when I have to go to work. Now that I’m finishing work at noon instead of 2 p.m., I pick him up immediately, there’s no way I’m going to leave him there any longer than necessary. I want him to myself,” she says, her brown eyes softening as she catches Hayden careening though the hallway.

“My son is like a bird, always flying around. I act like a little girl with him, rolling on the floor playing and pretending to box, which he loves,” she says, adding she will support him in reaching his goals, even if he wants to become a boxer.

“His life is in his hands. I’ll help him in whatever he chooses.”

The boy’s father is not interested in seeing him or recognising him as his own and Karen believes he is the one missing out. In the meantime, she has been going steady with her boyfriend, Rueben Ellul, for a year and he dotes on Hayden.

“My life has changed. Rueben comes from a good family. They too have suffered and he understands me. Most importantly he loves Hayden,” she says.

Rueben is a DJ and her wish is that he gets a good push from someone with experience who could guide him in the right direction in the hope that he will get a break.

And what about her dream?

“I never went abroad. I would love to visit Cape Town; seeing it on television it looks so beautiful. I also never got much from school so I wish to change that. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll write a book,” she says.

She would also love to have another child, a girl, but not for now, she says, “in the future, maybe”.

At the moment, her life is focused on trying to cope with everyday commitments and struggling with paying the bills. However, she does not dwell on her state of affairs for long, instead trusting in fate that everything comes for a reason.

“The Lord took the person closest to my heart, my grandmother, and gave me the most beautiful person in return.”