I Was a Baby Jane Doe like the one on The Pitt

This season, the popular HBO series The Pitt gives us a Baby Jane Doe. No name, no explanation why her mother abandoned her. She arrives the way Jane Does always arrive—out of nowhere and unaware that her mother has left her. 

Noah Wyle’s Dr. Robby picks her up. The show allows itself a stillness here it doesn’t usually permit—fifteen hours of controlled ER chaos and then this: a man and an infant who don’t belong to each other, both of them quieter for it. The baby settles. He settles.

Many on social media predicted he would foster and even adopt her. I understand the impulse completely, and I want to gently push on it, because I think what we’re actually watching is more complicated and more true than the ending we want.

Dr. Robby is not okay. This is not a secret the show keeps. He is brilliant and great at what he does, but he is also coming apart in ways he hasn’t fully reckoned with. He has what the show carefully refuses to label but what looks, from the outside, a great deal like PTSD—the accumulated weight of losing his mentor during the pandemic and watching so many people die in the ER.

The people who care for others are complicated. They’re not always perfect. But at least they cared.

And many of us have heard about Punch, the monkey who captured the internet’s heart after being rejected by his mother at a Japanese zoo, who I wrote about in an MS Now essay. You may or may not have heard about the elephant calf at a German zoo whose mother walked away, and an older female stepped in without ceremony or explanation. These stories keep coming, and we keep stopping everything for them.

I’ve been sitting with why.

Not the easy answer, which is that baby animals are cute and people are sentimental. That’s true but it’s not the whole thing. There’s something else happening when strangers fly across the world to stand in front of a zoo enclosure and bear witness. That’s not sentimentality. That’s recognition.

We keep watching because we’ve all felt it. Not the literal version—most of us weren’t abandoned at birth  by a parent, though there are different kinds of abandonment, rejection or distancing because of divorce, illness, or other reasons. But the feeling underneath it, the question that stories about abandoned babies and animals speak to is the questions that many have asked themselves at one time or another?  Am I worthy of being loved?

That question doesn’t require an abandonment to take root.

We want Robby to adopt Baby Jane because we want the story to close cleanly. Broken man finds abandoned child. Child, through the mysterious alchemy of innocence, heals the broken man. Everyone is saved. It’s not a bad story. It’s the story we need to believe, because the alternative—that your biological parents are not equipped or willing to keep you — is something we don’t know what to do with.

We recognize the abandoned baby because we have all, at some point, been the one holding the stuffed animal. The one waiting to see if someone cares. 

I was a Baby Jane Doe. Not the hospital kind — I wasn’t left in an ER the way Baby Jane is in The Pitt. I was left in a stairwell in Hong Kong. 

I like to think that someone in the orphanage held me like Dr. Robby did.