Bad Girl House

Relief from being pregnant in the summer heat finally came. I started feeling contractions the night of August eighth at around ten o’clock at night. We had learned all about waiting until my contractions were ten minutes apart before calling the midwife and heading to the hospital, so I tried to relax by lying down for a while. While they got closer together, we called our parents to let them know that baby Jessica was on her way. Even when it was time to go, I didn’t think that the pain was too terrible. The intensity of each contraction was nothing that I couldn’t breathe through. I suppose that four years of learning to control my breath to sing was coming in handy now. Also, I had grown up with those terrible cramps, that were almost as bad as what I was going through in labor.

It was nice to get settled into my room at the hospital. My sister, who is a nurse, and a genius, told me to take frozen grapes to have for a snack. With all of the quick breathing, they were the best grapes I’d ever had. As the night went on, my body’s need for sleep was overwhelming. So somehow, in between each contraction, I was able to fall asleep. I would then wake up to breathe through the next one. Even though I was only getting about ten minutes of sleep at a time, it was helping the night go by faster.

Morning was dawning, and my contractions were coming at a steady clip. I was also needing to do my breathing exercises constantly. While I was trying to do this, John was right in my face, attempting to be supportive. It was uncomfortably close, and made me feel claustrophobic. I simply told him to back up as I pushed his shoulder back. It wasn’t as if I was screaming at him, like the stories we often hear about women in labor. Out of breath, and with a whisper, I told him to get out of my face. John was insulted that I didn’t want him right there beside me, but I couldn’t worry about that when my daughter was about to enter the world.

After a short and relatively easy eight hour labor, I was handed Jessica Ann. She was so tiny, beautiful, and perfect. She was already crying, showing her strong lungs, and foreshadowing her personality. I smiled down at her, so happy to be bonding with her in my arms. In John’s opinion, because I wasn’t crying myself, I wasn’t emotional enough about just having had a new life handed to me. When I came home a few days later, he made me feel guilty for not reacting the way he thought I should have. He said I had been emotionless, uncaring, even heartless towards my own child. For years, he would bring this up each and every time he saw something that reminded him of this. When my sons were born, I had to think about John seeing my emotions as the nurse hand me each of them. I needed to try to look like I was going to cry so that I didn’t upset John again. I thought this might even make up for my lack of visible emotion the first time. After all of my children had been born, there was a tissue commercial on TV. It showed a mother crying ecstatic tears after being handed her new baby. Every time John saw it, and no matter where we were, I had to hear him say the same thing: “You didn’t cry about the birth of any of your children. What kind of mother doesn’t cry when her children are born?” I felt the guilt all over again. I even tried to distract him when I saw the beginning of the commercial, or anything else that was going to remind him to bring that up. He made me question how I felt about my own kids. Did I not feel happy enough when they were born? Should I have been dramatically crying over them?

For some time, I believed that having the new baby improved the relationships of everyone around her. I was seeing my mom more often than I had been, because she was coming over as much as possible to help me with Jessica. That also meant that she was around John more often too, because he was home on the days he wasn’t working with his father. My mom saw the good side of John: He was constantly taking pictures, wanting to capture every little moment. There are pictures of her sleeping, wearing every one of her outfits, playing on the floor, taking baths, drinking bottles. Every milestone was documented on film. We took her up to Nana and Papa’s house almost every weekend, especially when we had Johnathan, too. There are countless more pictures of Johnathan making faces at his little sister than of him by himself. Suddenly John’s whole family seemed to be getting along with each other more often than not. There wasn’t as much worry about arriving to a screaming match, or of one brewing while we were there. Things really seemed to be going in a better direction.