From Jen: There is no reason whatsoever for MJ to refer to Trig as her NEW baby brother unless he is related to her blood-wise….
I think this is critical enough that I want to comment on it specifically. I spent a great deal of time in doing that post looking at cabinetry, and chairs, and trying to figure out family trees. I spent so much time trying to put together what some comments might "mean," that I neglected to try to figure out how a seventeen year old girl thinks. (And I should know since I recently had three of them. Not all at once, thank God.) I was looking at reality. I should have been looking at emotion. And emotion comes through in these pictures, loud and clear.
Jen's comment got me thinking. Really thinking. How do seventeen year old girls feel about babies? Specifically, I thought about how I would have felt if a good close friend of mine had had a new sibling come on the scene when I was seventeen. You know what I came up with? I would have felt mostly grossed out that her parents had had sex. (I mean, come on! They're in their forties! Forty year old people don't have SEX. Do they?)
And then, secondly, probably a little pissed off because I would be worried that baby-sitting tasks might interfere with our future good times. And thirdly, in this case, given the fact by the time Mercedes visited it would have been known that Trig had Down's, I think I would have been very put off by that as well. "Oh my God. First they had a baby, and now he's retarded." It sounds cruel and selfish, but I am being honest. I think this is exactly how I would have felt at age seventeen about the "special-needs" newborn sibling of a friend; I wonder why we think Mercedes Johnston is any different.
"Jen," who made the above comment, has hit a bull's eye with this one. If Sarah Palin were Trig's mom and Bristol her really really good friend, Mercedes certainly might have come over to see the baby and brought a small gift. It would be good manners. But it doesn't matter how she regards Bristol, in late April or in the future. It doesn't matter how she thinks of Gov. Palin. And you know, it really doesn't even matter that inexplicably she refers to Trig as her "brother." It doesn't matter what she's saying. What matters is how she appears to be ACTING.
Jen is correct. Mercedes Johnston's enthusiasm for Trig is best explained and in fact only makes sense if Trig is something TO her. Something WAY beyond the younger sibling of a good friend. ( And yes I know that there have been bizarre suggestions all along that somehow Trig is TRACK'S child by Levi and Mercedes Johnston's MOTHER, but there is absolutely no evidence that this is the true and no earthly reason I can think of that Sarah Palin would fake a pregnancy in that case.) If Trig IS Mercedes Johnston's blood relative, given everything we know, by far the most plausible explanation is that he is her brother's child.
Then the baby becomes part of your group. Part of your "set." Part of your paradigm. She's possessive about him: she uses the possessive pronoun MY as in "my new baby brother" specifically. Then, posting his picture on your MySpace page and gushingly referring to him as "most adorable little man ever" makes sense in a way that it could not if he were the child of the parents of a friend.
