Chapter 47
SIX YEARS AGO
Motherhood changes you.
I should know. I’ve been a mother for almost two hours.
I feel like a completely different person than I was earlier today.
Now I’ve got my baby boy, who I named Dominic, cradled in my arms. His tiny body, roughly the size of a football, is swaddled in a blanket that my friend Lola brought over, and his practically translucent eyelids are closed as he suckles on nothing as he sleeps.
I’m lucky that Lola was able to come over so quickly when the contractions started.
A lot of women seem to give birth in hospitals these days, but Clay and I don’t have any money or insurance.
I never went to a doctor once during my pregnancy, but I read up about prenatal vitamins and took them every day.
Lola did a deep dive on how to deliver a baby, and she did a good job. We didn’t need the hospital.
Also, I was worried that if we went to the hospital, they would try to take Dominic away from me. They’d take one look at me and Clay and decide that we were inadequate parents.
To be fair, we have had our struggles. I ran away from home at age sixteen because I was sick of my dad beating me up and my mom not doing a damn thing to stop him.
They didn’t try very hard to find me—they were probably relieved to be rid of me.
When I was alternating between sleeping on friends’ sofas and the street, drugs gave me a brief reprieve from the mess that had become my life.
I met Clay two years later. He was a decent guy compared to some of the other creeps I met on the street, but he wasn’t in much better shape than I was.
We both had drug arrests on our records, which made it challenging for either of us to get a good-paying job and crawl out of the hole we were living in.
We’ve been together four years now, and getting knocked up was definitely not part of our plan but also not entirely unexpected.
We tried to use a condom, but if we were both high, things got blurry.
And to be fair, we both used to be high a lot.
I got pregnant once before, when I was about twenty. I was excited at first, but then I started bleeding a lot, and I lost it. When I got pregnant again, I figured it would go the same way. I didn’t even quite believe I was going to have the baby until I started to show.
That’s when I realized things had to change.
No more getting high, for one thing. Now that I was a mother, I was done with that for good. I’ve been trying to clean myself up for a while now, but I’ve never had more motivation than this little bundle in my arms.
I’m not going to screw up your life, I silently tell the tiny infant in my arms.
“He’s beautiful,” Lola tells me.
My best friend is sitting in a beanbag next to my bed.
She looks tired from holding my leg up during the two hours of pushing, although not as tired as me.
Her face is still shiny with sweat, and her straight black hair, streaked with brown highlights, is pulled into a ponytail.
She tried to convince me to go to the hospital, but when I said no way, she was cool about it.
She said that if this was what I wanted, she was going to be there with me.
“Will you be his godmother?” I ask her.
She giggles. “How do I become his godmother?”
“All you have to do is say yes,” I say. “And then you’re it. You’re Dominic’s godmother.”
“There’s no ceremony?”
“Nope.”
“Well, okay then,” she says. “Yes!” She tilts her head thoughtfully. “Does he need a godfather too?”
“I don’t know,” I reply honestly. I’m very unfamiliar with this whole parenting thing. I only have one friend who had a baby, and she ended up giving it away. But I’m not giving Dominic away. I would rather die. “I’ll ask Clay if he has a friend who he wants to be the godfather.”
“You need to take him to a doctor too,” Lola tells me. “Like, a baby doctor. A pediatrician.”
She’s right. Dominic will need a pediatrician.
I think he has to get shots or something like that.
It will be expensive, but I want to give him everything he needs.
That means that Clay and I need to get jobs, and we need health insurance.
If we get married, though, only one of us needs to have a job with good insurance.
I don’t know about marrying Clay though.
I mean, I love him. We’ve been together for a long time, and I can’t imagine being with anyone else.
But he hasn’t asked me, and I feel strange about suggesting it first. I had no idea I was that traditional, but apparently, I need to be presented with a ring from a man on one knee.
As if on cue, Clay bursts into the bedroom, his arms bulging with packages.
Like me and Lola, he looks tired and sweaty, because he was holding my other leg while I was pushing.
His shaggy brown hair still has traces of the blue hair dye he likes, although he hasn’t put in any color in a while.
He drops everything on the floor and says proudly, “I got everything you asked for.”
I never quite believed that I was going to have a real baby, so we were utterly unprepared. We didn’t have diapers. We didn’t have baby clothing. We didn’t even have a place for the baby to sleep. The only thing I bought for him was a baby elephant toy that I now recognize is as big as he is.
I sit up straighter in bed, doing my best to try not to disturb sleeping Dominic. “Did you get the car seat?”
“Yup. It’s all buckled in.”
I’m afraid to ask him how much everything cost. We didn’t have much money in the bank, and this may have wiped us out.
“Father of the year.” Lola winks at Clay. “Anyway, I’m gonna head home and get some rest. I’ll check on you tomorrow, mamacita.”
When Lola gets up, Clay falls into her spot on the beanbag. He slumps down, his eyelids sagging slightly. It’s been a long day for all of us, but he needs to wake up. The two of us are parents now, and we need to have a talk.
“Clay,” I say.
“Uh-huh?”
He is twenty-four—two years older than I am—but he looks so young sometimes.
He’s long and skinny like a string bean and not much different than the twenty-year-old guy I started dating years ago.
His background is totally different from mine.
He came from a good family and had a relatively normal, happy life until he was in a skiing accident at age sixteen.
His right leg was shattered, and while he was healing, he got hooked on pain meds.
Even when his leg was all better, he couldn’t quit, and he soon discovered that heroin gave him an even better high than oxycodone.
Just like that, all his plans for college and medical school evaporated.
His parents desperately tried to get him help, but after a particularly brutal argument, they finally kicked him out.
He came from everything, but at the time we met, he had nothing, just like me.
But things have changed since then. No matter how hard it is, we have to get our lives together for the sake of our son. We’re parents. It’s time to grow up and be responsible.
“We need to get cleaned up,” I tell him.
“Yeah, I agree.”
We have talked about this before. Many times.
After I got caught with a balloon of smack, I said that’s it, I’m done.
But the cravings always got the best of me, and a month later, I was back to using again.
Clay is even worse. He actually got caught selling and had to go to prison for a little while.
Just like me, he said never again, but then when he got out, it was so hard to get a job that he gave up.
Whatever work he can get is usually done under the table, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he still sells.
“I mean it this time,” I tell him in a stern voice. “I am not going to touch any drugs of any kind ever again, and I want you to promise you’ll do the same.”
He looks at me in surprise. “Ronnie…”
I squeeze Dominic tighter to my chest. “You have to promise me. Because if you don’t, I’m going to leave, and you’ll never see your son again. I’m not going to have that be part of his life.”
Clay looks from me to Dominic, and his eyes fill with tears.
“Okay, Ronnie. I’ll do anything for the two of you.
You’re my life now. And…” He gets up off the beanbag and reaches out to grasp my free hand with his own.
“If you’ll have me, I’d like to… I mean, I think we should…
” He squirms on the bed, a nervous smile on his face.
Then, without warning, he falls to one knee. “Will you marry me, Ronnie?”
If I hadn’t been holding Dominic so tightly, I might have dropped him. Of course, the idea of marriage was floating around the back of my head, but I didn’t expect a proposal—not now anyway.
“You don’t have to answer now,” he says quickly as he scrambles back to his feet. “But like I said, you and Dominic are my whole world, and I want us to be a family—officially. I don’t have a ring yet, but…”
Even though I didn’t expect the question, there’s no doubt in my mind about the answer. “Yes. Of course I’ll marry you.”
“Really?” The surprise on his face is enough to make me laugh. “Wow. Okay, well, that’s…that’s amazing. I love you so much, Ronnie, and…and I’m going to get you that ring when we’ve got some money.”
“You don’t have to get me a ring,” I tell him. “But you do have to get a job. A real job with benefits so we can take Dominic to the pediatrician.”
“I’ll start looking right away,” he agrees.
Clay crawls into bed beside me. I hand him the sleeping baby, and he stares down at Dominic with such love in his eyes. I want to believe that Clay can do this. I want to believe he can be a good father and a good husband. But if he can’t, I won’t hesitate to do what I need to do for my son.