In “Sugar Babies,” Sierra’s sugar baby symbolizes her struggle to form her own identity in the wake of her mother’s abandonment and social forces which seek to route her into a specific lane of being. The sugar baby school assignment lays bare the institutional production and maintenance of the compulsory American ideological apparatus of heterosexual marriage and the nuclear family. Within that apparatus, the woman is supposed to be the primary caretaker of children. Sierra’s own mother rejected this role and scarred Sierra in the process.

Therefore, when Sierra is placed in a pantomime of this role, designed to prepare her for the day in which she will be expected to fill that role for real, she also rejects it. Instead of playing the role of the nurturing and motherly female, she treats her sugar baby with gleeful glibness, flippancy, and sarcasm. Ironically, she rejects her own play-baby, even though (or, perhaps, because) she was rejected by her mother at a young age. The sugar baby, then, becomes a symbolic avenue for Sierra to work out multiple forms of trauma: the trauma of abandonment, and the trauma of simply being a girl within a system that relentlessly imposes a set of strictures and requirements upon that identity.