Seems like my whole life I have been looking critically into my soul demanding “What the hell is wrong with me?” My dreams of what I wanted out of life have always been vague and uncertain, with no deep driving direction to fuel them.
When they were younger and dating, my mom introduced her sister to my father’s brother. They fell in love and were married. Uncle J and Auntie K had six kids together. Even better than a big family, in my young eyes, was the fact that they really loved each other. They held hands! My parents never held hands!
It made me want a big family of my own some day. My sisters were ten and thirteen years older than me and so by the time I was five, they had moved out. My middle sister, G had moved back home once when she was seventeen and going to college, but other than that I was raised almost as an only child because of the age gap.
Yet, at twenty-one, when I found myself pregnant I was terrified. Cain and I weren’t married, in fact he told me he didn’t WANT to be married. This conflicted with every moral that was drilled into my skull by my very traditional and old fashioned mother growing up.
The day I found out I was pregnant was such a paralyzing moment. I can walk in to that frozen heart-stop every time the door of memory opens on it. It was one of those moments that, once it has touched your life, no matter what you choose in the outcome, you will never be the same. For the rest of your life you will carry with you the knowledge that the house of your spirit carried within it another life, not your own, but one which you are completely responsible for weather you choose to let that life into the world or not. As well, you will live with the responsibility both physical and spiritual of what you choose to do with that new life.
I could tell by the look on the Family Planning nurse’s face what the test results were before she spoke. Cain was sitting in the chair behind me. After she told me I turned around to look at him and burst into tears at the look on his face. He looked condemned. Like, walking-up-to-the-gallows-to-be-hanged condemned.
I am pregnant and he doesn’t want a kid and now he will leave me. I thought as I began to sob.
We left the office. On our way out I had gained a bit of composure, not wanting to bawl in public. Outside I asked him, “What should we do?” hoping, as my mother’s voice railed in my mind about marriage before sex, that he would ask me to marry him. Even though, I didn’t really believe in getting married just because you got pregnant, I was hoping maybe that his mind about marriage would change now that this had happened.
“What about abortion?” was what came out of his mouth.
I felt like a second crushing kick to the stomach had come right then that day. I couldn’t believe that was the first thing out of his mouth. I felt hurt and angry beyond belief. I have always been of a pro-choice standpoint. But I don’t believe you just have an abortion and it’s like nothing ever happened. There are some serious spiritual consequences for ending a life, no matter how small. While I didn’t believe in stopping others from making that choice, I didn’t feel I could live with that idea. Besides, I loved this man. I was carrying a part of him too now.
On the car ride home I sat with an angry lump in my stomach. Cain didn’t speak to me. I was to angry to speak to him. I was terrified. In a way, I too, felt condemned. My life as I knew it would end and what the future held and the hardships and uncertainty involved left me reeling.
I couldn’t get used to the idea of being a mom. I didn’t know the first thing about it! I was, as always, afraid of failing. I felt certain of it in fact.
Yet, I decided to keep the baby. Cain wasn’t too happy about it, but he wasn’t going to leave me over it. Cain’s father didn’t like me, and I never felt like his step-mom was entirely forth coming with me though she was always nice to me. Cain’s father never bothered to get to know me, but felt certain in his arrogant assumptions that he had me pegged as a gold digger. He had, in fact, told Cain at one point when we first got together that I was only going out with him for the money. Cain worked part time at a pizza joint. I worked full time at the title company. It was me Cain borrowed $190 from to buy his school books because his own father refused to help him pay for any schooling though the man was a lineman and worked on power lines for a utility company. Cain decided to move in with me in part because paying half rent at my house was less money for him than what his Dad was charging him for rent to live at home!
About four months along and we found we were to have a son. Cain’s father was more friendly to me then. The brood mare would put forth the first Grandson, so she was tolerable. Cain’s paternal Grandmother came down, a wonderful woman who was the one person in his family that truly made me feel welcome. Together she and Cain’s step mom purchased a set of nicer China for us, bought us a large second hand sectional couch in fantastic condition and bought a lot of baby items. I was at once overwhelmed, gratified and a lot freaked out by the generosity. I did not want anyone thinking I was using people to get this stuff. I felt a little bit okay with getting things from his Grandma simply because she seemed to genuinely want me to enjoy them. It was hard though. I don’t have that a lot in my family. I didn’t know what was expected of me for it. To me, some of it didn’t seem like it came without some agenda, though that could have been my own internal paranoia.
I know what it is liked to not be liked by people. As a child people had looked at me sometimes and weather it was my face, my expression or the fact that I had always been overweight I had children and sometimes grownups say things or just treat me in ways that made it perfectly clear they didn’t like me. This hurt my heart very much. I have quite a sensitivity to things like that and feel things very deeply. While I can hold a grudge, my most common reaction was to just build an internal wall. You hurt me once, I won’t every give you a chance again…so the litany in my head went. I had never done well with people who say cruel and nasty things behind my back then treat me as if I were a welcomed family member to my face. That duplicity leaves me in a constant state of indecisive insecurity. I always felt as if I were walking on eggshells. And it hurt. A lot. It is in my nature to want to be open and trusting with people. It is in my learned survival skills to hold back and come off as stand-offish or cool with people. When it is family, it is too much to bear. I dealt with it the only way I knew how. I just kept my mouth shut and tried to be invisible. When I was seven months pregnant my landlord told me he found a different house they were going to move onto the property. They would tear the old one, the chicken-wire shack, I liked to call it on account of the chicken-wire and plaster walls, and move this other one in it. He would have sold it to us for $10,000 dollars and I didn’t take him up on it because I was for one, a complete fucking idiot, and two, so naïve I didn’t think he was serious. I was also worried we wouldn’t be able to afford it. Or something. All I know is I had my head way up my ass and let that deal slip away.
When I first met Cain, I had been coming off my party-life, unemployment diet, which pretty much consisted of beer, coffee and very little else. I had lost over forty pounds in less than a month. I began to have dizzy spells and actually fell down a few times, though I didn’t lose consciousness. Not eating made me feel sick to my stomach which made me not want to eat. My thoughts were sluggish. I was horrified one day when I reached up under my hair and felt not one, but two bald spots. One was almost as big as a baseball. My hair had begun to fall out because I had no protein in my diet. But everyone told me how great I looked.
After I met Cain and got regular employment all my weight and then some came back. Cain’s father made comments to him about that too, I later learned. The pregnancy didn’t help. Always an emotional eater, it got worse and worse. By the time our son Carter was born, I was well over 200 pounds.
I had been very depressed when I got pregnant. I had been, for a year, taking belly dance lessons from a woman in her 50s named Molly. She was friends with both Cain and I. Yet, when I became pregnant, she started to treat me differently. Molly never had kids. At one point she and Cain and I were going to try and bike ride together to stay in shape. Being my first pregnancy though, I was always so tired I could barely function. I was still a night person. Molly started wanting to go bike riding at five o’clock in the fucking morning! Cain had no problem with it. Soon, she and Cain were going on daily bike rides and I was left at home. I wasn’t worried about an affair, she was married and faithful to her husband, but I grew to deeply resent the fact that the friendship I thought I had with her was obviously influenced by my soon-to-be-motherhood. Molly was the one person who threw me my one and only baby shower and I will always be grateful to her for that, but our friendship pretty much died by the time my son was six months old.
Being left. Ever since I was a small child, the idea of being left has held a fear paramount to nightmare proportions to me. I know in part it is connected to a few childhood incident. Shrinks call it “abandonment issues”. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been as jealous as I was of the friendship Cain and Molly maintained if it hadn’t been so obviously exclusive. It was hurtful. Yet Cain was never the type to nurture emotionally. Not even a little. He was respectful, courteous an attentive lover, yet there was no emotional feedback. He was and is a very self-centered person. He knows his own mind and desires and everything else must orbit around his world. He leans toward arrogance, being a very intelligent person. That is his preservation skill. He constantly spoke then, as now, about ‘stupid people everywhere’. Anyone that he considers of inferior intelligence is classified one of the ‘stupid people’. This bothered me a great deal.
Cain, after leaving school, and under constant pressure from his father, gave in to that pressure, paid the union dues and signed the books to become a lineman’s apprentice. He worked with his father’s company for awhile. While learning to run the backhoe he accidentally misjudged and tipped it over backwards. He was not injured, but it cracked the window of the backhoe. It also, no doubt, gave the other lineman something to laugh about. It did not sit well with Cain’s father, whose own arrogance was fucking mind-boggling. It was only a couple of months later that Cain fell asleep at the wheel driving a line truck home and drove off the road. He awakened enough to keep it from flipping, but it hit the ditch with both front wheels hard enough to drive them firmly up into the engine compartment, doing extensive damage. He was fired.
I knew Cain had no interest or desire for this field of work. But his fathers kept after him. Cain’s father and mother, both born in Canada had met at a drunken party one night. After that one night, Cain was conceived and his parents ’did the right thing’ and got married. After Cain was born his father worked for a few years there in Canada, but at the age of four decided that, to better support his family, he would become a lineman. Then he went to America to work. Needless to say, divorce eventually followed. Cain lived with is mother in Canada until he was fifteen. He never even went and stayed with his father. But he was not at all close to his mother and needed to get away from her. He wanted his father to be proud of him. His father was only proud of himself it seemed to me, and unless Cain lived his life according to his father, well, suffice it to say I never heard a ’Well done!’ come out of that man’s mouth.
Cain went to work for a printer. Carter was born in the fall. Three weeks after he was born Cain came home to tell me the printer’s business had fallen off and his job was cut. That was on a Tuesday. The next day, Cain got a call from the lineman apprenticeship program. They had a position for him. Be in Park City, Utah by Friday. That quick. Our son wasn’t even a whole month old and now his father was being called out of state to work. I felt my world shift again. I had no support structure outside of his dad and step-mom. My mother made it clear she was old enough to not want to deal very much with babies. My father hadn’t even come to see him until he was a week old. I had not friends but Jessica and we actually hadn’t spoken with each other in about two years. Cain was my world, weather he liked it or not. Now I had a new baby and a husband getting ready to leave.
I hadn’t listened to Depeche Mode since that one awful night, but I could taste its echoes in my head as a reminder: You’re going to be left alone.
Again.
