Chapter 3: A Smile is Worth a Thousand Dirty Diapers

Shea takes her 4-week-old to visit her parents for the first time and old family drama continues.

Before I had children, I was embarrassed to talk about tampons. Now I have conversations about baby poop with random strangers in the middle of Walmart.

Jasmine

4 Weeks Old…

Everett and I have been debating over Zoe’s smiles for a week. I’m hell bent to see the first smile, but every time I point one out he tells me it’s gas. I tell him my daughter doesn’t have gas...she’s a lady.

This morning, Everett and I packed Zoe up for her first road trip. It was time to drive her the ninety miles to visit her grandparents--my parents. To say I’d been dreading this visit would be an understatement.  Nevertheless, we got up bright and early and packed up every toy Zoe received at her baby shower and stuffed it all, along with her, into the back seat. I don’t think she sees them as much more than colorful blobs at this point but we had no idea what to expect. We do now.

Let me tell you what to expect. Stopping every fifteen minutes. Diaper change. Nurse. Diaper change. Nurse. Rock to sleep. Diaper change. Nurse. Toy. Diaper change. Nurse. Either that, or arm yourself with Ibuprofen and ear plugs. Somehow, though, we did make it. It took us twice as long as the trip took us before we had her, but I wasn’t in what you’d call a rush.

We pulled in and my parents were standing on the front porch waiting for us. “Do you think they’ve been standing there since I told them we were coming last week?” I asked Everett. He shook his head at me in amusement. I thought I saw Zoe smile as I unbuckled her from her car seat and gasped. Everett pursed his lips and shook his head at me from the front seat. I flipped him off in the rear view mirror.

“When she smiles for real,” he said, “it will be her whole face, not just her lips.”

As soon as we got out of the car, I saw the tight-lipped smile on my mother’s face. She hated that I’d had a baby and at the incredibly young age of twenty-seven. Part of me felt pleasure in knowing that if she wanted to see her granddaughter, she’d have to get over herself. The other part of me just wanted to cry. Everett caught the look that passed between us and gave me an encouraging nod in her direction.

My parents greeted Everett warmly, after they fawned over the baby, of course. My parents always liked Everett. I guess even my mother had to have one good quality. It’s hard not to love Everett, though. He and my dad had bonded over cars the first time they ever met, and he slipped into the family fairly unnoticed from there.

I should take a minute to explain things about my mom, lest you think she’s the Wicked Witch of the West, or that I’m an overgrown ungrateful teenager. It all boils down to one thing, really--I grew up and my mom didn’t. At the age of five, I surpassed my mom’s capability for compassion and understanding of responsibility. This is the woman who took me to the salon and made me sit quietly in a chair for hours, at five years old, while she had her hair and nails done. At six, when my dad was out of town on business, she left me at my aunt’s house for days so she could go out with her friends. At seven, she taught me to do the dishes so she’d never have to do another one in her life. And this is the woman who, when I told her I was pregnant, said “Say goodbye to that body, darling.” She always told me I’d understand her better when I became a mother but now that I am one, I understand her even less.

Mom took the baby from Everett immediately and invited us in. With Zoe in her arms, she offered us drinks. I tried to take Zoe back but she refused, saying “You do remember I’ve done this before, right?” Yeah, and look how well that turned out, I thought. You raised a woman who is decidedly the opposite of you--a woman who plans and puts responsibility first to a fault. The only thing I’d done in my entire life that wasn’t written in pen in my planner was what she held in her arms, and the last thing I needed was her dropping Zoe in attempt to prove that she had once been a real mother. I talked her into letting me get the drinks.

And then the appraisal began. Zoe had my eyes and Everett’s nose and my upper lip but Everett’s bottom lip. Her toes were long like mine, but her chin was square like Everett’s. I told them she had Everett’s smile, but he assured them she had yet to smile.  After lunch, Everett took the baby and followed my dad out to the garage no matter how many Cyclops, laser-death glares I shot him. I washed the dishes while my mom interrogated me.

“How was the delivery?” she asked. That was the one area I was blessed in--most pregnant women had to file restraining orders to keep their mothers out of the delivery room. Mine stayed comfortably 90 miles away to ensure she didn’t get amniotic fluid on her pedicure.

“It was great. Fantastic,” I said. Normally, I avoided elaborating with my mother--she had a tendency to go after my balloons with a machete--but my excitement overruled logical thought. “It was long,” I added. “Longer and more painful than I ever could have imagined. I mean, how do they really expect people to do it...except, of course, that women do it all the time. And I did do it. I had to be induced, which may have made the contractions worse but I still managed to push her out in only half an hour. Without an epidural.”

My mom rolled her eyes. “You kids these days. Back in my day, we didn’t have drugs and would have killed for them. You have all the access to drugs you could ever need and you turn them down.”

“You know, Mom, there are a lot of women these days that like doing it without drugs. They want to feel and experience everything.”

Her only response was a snort of disbelief. I returned to the dishes, cursing myself for saying anything at all.

“How’s she sleep?” she asked. It was like she was deliberately going after the worst topics so she could blow them up into the Eiffel Tower to make my happy moments look like the dinky Starbucks around the corner.

“She sleeps great. Through the night already.” It was a lie. No baby sleeps through the night, especially not right away.

“Ya nursing?”

“Yes,” I said. I honestly didn’t know how to swing on that one. I realized for the first time I didn’t know if she’d even nursed me.

“You know when you’re finished, your b***s are going to hang down to your belt, right?”

I took that as a yes.

“I’ve heard. It’s a risk I’m willing to take.” I washed the dishes faster so I could bolt out to the garage. My mom came up behind me, though, and put her hand on my shoulder.

“She really is beautiful,” she said. I nearly hit her over the head with the pot in my hand and asked what she’d done with my real mom. “I hope you’ll be a good mom,” she continued and the moment was over.

I finished up the last dish and placed it in on the drain rack.

“Thank you,” I said, tersely.

“I just hope you didn’t have any plans for the next eighteen years of your life.”

I’ve never stood up to my mom in my life. Not even the time she pulled out naked pictures of me as a child and showed them to my teenage boyfriend, something all parents threaten but never actually do because it’s flat-out traumatizing. I didn’t say anything when she didn’t show up to my Junior play, or when she read my journal aloud to the women at her salon. I never stood up for myself. Something about the woman always intimidated me, and now that I was an adult, there was no point because I could simply get up and leave.

“Just that doctor's appointment next week,” I told her and excused myself to the garage. Everett read the look on my face, but I shook my head and took Zoe from him, telling him it was time for her to eat. I locked myself in my old bedroom. Surprisingly, it looked exactly the same as I’d left it, the white furniture perfectly aligned, ever picture of my friends from high school exactly in its place. I’d always expected her to turn it into a closet when I moved out. I took off my shirt and Zoe, smelling the milk, nuzzled up to me and rooted around for her lunch. On a whim, I stripped off her onesie and curled up on the bed. I held her close to me so her bare skin was up against mine. She was so soft and warm and smelled so amazing, I had to stop myself from crying.

There are a couple of things I haven’t told anyone. First, all throughout my pregnancy, the one thing I looked forward to most was breastfeeding. That intimate connection only a mother and child could share was the most fulfilling thing I could imagine, and the first time she latched on, it met all my expectations and more. The second thing is, Zoe and I have had the hardest time breastfeeding. It’s something I hardly want to admit to myself, let alone my mother who would hold it against me until the end of time. But as I held her in the bed I’d once slept in as a girl, she latched on like it was the most natural thing in the world. Because it was. It was like she sensed how much I needed her in that moment, and it made me think of how Riley had locked herself away with Alexis and how easy it would be to escape into her sweet scent and stay there forever.

I wondered if Zoe and I would one day be cursed to fall into the same patterns as my mom and me. Was is something that came with the territory or was it something I could control? If I led by a different example, could we be different? Could I be a better woman by being a better mother than my mom could ever be? As I looked down at her face and imagined the woman she would one day be, I realized that right now, right here, I wanted to be a woman she could be proud of...the kind of woman I wanted her to be.

I cradled Zoe in my arm until she ate as much as her happy little tummy could hold, and when she was finished, I dressed her and went back out to the garage.

“We’re leaving,” I said to Everett. “Pack it up.” Everett raised his eyebrows but followed my lead. I apologized to my dad, as much for my hasty departure as for having to deal with the mess I’d leave behind me.

“What’s going on?” my mom asked as we all came into the house and Everett and I made for the door.

“We’re going home,” I said.

“Already? Why?”

I stopped to look her directly in the eye so she knew how serious I was. “Because you don’t respect me. Not as your daughter, not as a woman and not as a mother. I refuse to let my daughter use your relationship with me as a model for my relationship with her, so until you can treat me like I deserve to be treated, you won’t be seeing me or your granddaughter.”

She stood in the middle of the living room with her mouth hanging open like she’d been slapped. I had my hand on the door when I remembered something else.

“And, you know what, Mom? The day I gave birth to Zoe was the best day of my life. I’d do it ten more times if that’s what it took to have her in my life. I’m happy to give up the next eighteen years of my life...or the next fifty if that’s what she needs from me. I’m sorry I don’t mean that much to you.”

And in an over-dramatic huff (I was making up for lost teen years), I slammed the door behind me. Everett stood on the porch looking at me like a deer in the headlights until we both burst into laughter. I rushed him down the driveway so my mom wouldn’t hear.

The drive home was just as bad as the drive there. Zoe didn't like the car. That’s what I decided. Somehow, wanting to get home so badly made every cry twice as loud, and after the fight with my mom, I was twice as irritable. She finally fell asleep five miles from our front door.

When we pulled into our garage, Everett and I both breathed an audible sigh of relief. Everett took all of her toys in and, careful not to wake her, I carried Zoe in with her head on my shoulder. I followed Everett into the nursery and laid Zoe in her crib. As I tucked her under the blanket, her lips turned up and the corners of her eyes creased. I gasped. Everett hurried over to see what had happened and then wrapped his arm around my shoulders and he nodded. Zoe was happy to be home, back to the new family Everett and I had created, and so was I.

Author's Note

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Reviews

[Noa]

Oof, hitting close to home on the doubts regarding Shea's mother. I cheered along with her when she finally confronted her after all those years. I really feel for your character, and that means you are doing a wonderful job characterizing her :)

I think you had a run-in with your word editor? There's several scattered " where I think a period or an ; should have been.

I love the recurrent theme of Zoe's first smile throughout this chapter, and I could feel the tension through the dialogue. Everett's silent support and shared laughter after Shea's outburst is great to see as well :)

Oh, and the quote for this one had me giggling.

Another wonderful chapter!
-Noa

[Ms_Sassypants]

Brilliant creation of different atmosphere! Anyone can relate to your characters - you give them such life! The tense conversation between Shea and her mom, reminded me of my own, and because of this personal connection, this is my favourite chapter so far. I am excited to read the rest. Well done!