On June 8th, 2011, the world stopped spinning on its axis at the exact split second that the father of my son kissed my impatient and quivering lips. The only individuals on this expansive planet were the two of us, embracing for the first time on a chilly evening dedicated in honour of those having died of cancer. My grandparents having succumbed to this ferocious and unforgiving killer, I had asked *Edward* to meet my friends and I at an event, which happened to be occurring on my late grandmother’s birth date. We had walked hand in hand along the candle-lit paths within the park after we had placed the candle he had bought for me in honour of my two deceased loved ones; we were now at a picnic table and my friends had continued walking, choosing to give us a little alone time. So, here we were, imaginary fireworks illuminating the evening sky as our lips connected and our souls seemed to dance in recognition of finally having found each other.
Needless to say that with such a heady and intense connection, our mutual attraction and apparent compatibility brought us together as quickly as it took us to remove the words ‘caution’ and ‘risk’ from our respective lives and vocabularies. I was flying high in paradise after having finally fallen upon a man who seemed to understand me without the superfluity of words. Furthermore, the stars seemed to align for us to move quickly seeing as my then roommate had decided to move in with her boyfriend while my new beau was having issues with his – so why NOT move in together right away? We were saving ourselves the whole choreography every other couple were entangled in since we were already in love and wanting to live together.
Pretty soon after he moved into my apartment, our conversations began revolving around the idea of starting a family and seeing him with his young daughter from a previous relationship made my heart melt at the same time that I commenced hearing the faint biological ‘tic-tock’. We both wanted a baby, we both felt ready to take this next step, though neither one of us had a stable job or income, but we convinced ourselves and each other that there would never be a ‘right’ moment.
Once again, what did ‘caution’ or ‘risk’ signify when here was a man claiming to love me and desiring to create a life with me? Thus we declared naively, but excitedly: ‘Let’s see what happens’.
As a result, on October 28th, 2011, I exuberantly called my boyfriend while he was at work and exclaimed: ‘Baby, we’re having a baby… I’m pregnant!!!’ Our embraces and kisses when he came home that evening were that much sweeter with the knowledge that there was a little bit of both of us now growing in the depths of my belly. Life continued uneventfully and our happiness lasted a little while longer until custody complications over his daughter began; I had grown attached to his beautiful little girl and the whole situation between him and his ex both perplexed and worried me. His reactions to everything that was happening on that front should have also sounded a loud warning siren in my head, and my friends pointedly asked me about his unstressed and nonchalant attitude towards the whole ordeal, but I chose to ignore them and the little voice frantically whispering, ‘Now, wait a minute here…’
To calm and reassure me that everything would be fine, my mother presented my new love with my grandmother’s engagement ring and wedding band, both of which she had promised to me and I had entrusted to her in safekeeping until I had found a man who wanted to marry me. These two rings symbolize the most sacred of relationships for me since my grandparents managed to remain in love even through the death of one of their adopted sons; moreover, my grandmother had been one of the most important women in my life, next to my own mother of course, and her blessing over my eventual marriage would have meant everything to me. My mother was therefore giving *Edward* these two bands as an indication that she approved of him and accepted him into our family. So, he took my grandmother’s engagement ring right then and there, got down on one knee and proposed. I gleefully accepted and so we were engaged and expecting a baby by Christmas.
In my excitement, I pushed my worries and reserves to the extreme recesses of my mind and shoved that annoying, yet so very persistent, little voice in a tiny box, securely fastened a lock and unceremoniously threw away the key. Now prenatal hormones were beginning to wreak havoc inside my body as our baby developed and blossomed in his various toadstool-like states of being; at the same time, I was managing a closing greeting card store and was soon placed on preventive leave with the CSST. That miniscule container into which I had placed my intuitive voice began shaking and trembling violently as it once again tried to make itself heard since so many little things were so very wrong in our relationship; I, however, believed that the hormones and my staying at home were the guilty parties and the cause of my unhappiness continued to elude me. I was engaged with a baby on the way, I had friends and family members who loved me, I was generally healthy and experiencing a satisfying pregnancy, so why wasn’t I singing joyful tunes while preparing our home for the happy arrival of our precious little one?
Well, sooner than I could have ever imagined, our one year anniversary was upon us and we had planned a lovely meal that we were supposed to cook together before going on the same romantic, yet nostalgic, candle-lit walk we had taken not so long ago. I happily waddled to our nearby grocery store to acquire all the needed ingredients, with the added touch of a, albeit store-bought, pecan pie, but a sudden and unexpected rain shower brought about ill omens and sentiments. At this point he was no longer answering my texts after having told me that he would stay downtown a bit later after work in order to write a much overdue letter to his ex-girlfriend’s lawyer. He finally answered one of my calls at 8:00 in such a way that made my blood boil and tears stream down my already tear-streaked face – he decided to come home soon after and blamed ME for ruining our evening. From that moment on, a sour stench began permeating our whole relationship but my nostrils still refused to pick up on the scent of our dying love.
Of course the next event to take over our lives was the birth of our beautiful baby boy on June 25th, 2012. The actual delivery itself was nothing like I had expected or imagined seeing as I was in labour for more than 24 hours and then an emergency C-section was performed on my strained and spent body.
“Why isn’t he crying already?”, a question that would soon be used to mock my apparent incompetencies as a mother, projectiled out of my shivering lips as Zachary was hauled out of my gaping womb; my arms placed in a crucified-like position, and being numb from my toes to my neck, I could not even hold the squirming and red-faced bundle that was positioned near my blotchy and perspiring brow. My foggy brain could not contemplate anything beyond the physical pain and discomfort we had both just endured and I was taken to a recovery room without seeing anymore of my tiny crab.
The next few days in the hospital passed by in a blur as I tried in vain to breastfeed, regain stability in my swollen legs and learn to deal with the new numbness in my mid-section due to the incision that had been made. The constant proddings and pokings of the nurses punctuated the days until we were officially released to begin our life as a new threesome. The dreadful pit-in-my-stomach feelings over my relationship with my fiancé slowly ebbed away in the rushing tide of new motherly preoccupations and the passionate pleas coming from that locked box subsided.
At first glance, everything seemed fine, but just as an iceberg hides most of its composition underneath the surface of its oceanic dwelling, so did the anguish, turmoil and madness about to erupt in our home choose to hide their ugly faces beneath the layers of both our skins. About a month after we had been let go from the hospital, my anxiety stemming from having become a new mother frantically clawed and twisted itself around both my mind and body, incapacitating me to the point where I could no longer eat, sleep or enjoy the company of anyone, let alone my gorgeous son. I was paralyzed by the fear of not being able to meet my baby’s demands or needs and at first my beau was understanding and helpful, trying to guide and instruct me in the ways that he had raised his first child. Seeing as he had experienced fatherhood before, I began seeing him as an authority figure who knew what our baby wanted and needed in all the ways that I believed I was incapable of doing; consciously or not, he toyed, played and preyed on this new dynamic within our relationship to the point where I deferred to him anytime Zach was upset or I was unable to bottle-feed him properly. This of course offset a vicious cycle whereby I was no longer able to calm or soothe my baby boy because *Edward* was always called upon to do so and so neither I nor Zach were comfortable with each other in those instances. My sanity was slowly unravelling like an old woollen sweater that has been worn too often and I was ready to jump off my balcony or jump in front of a moving vehicle; the father of my child admitted that he did not trust me with the well-being of our baby if he returned to work and that I was no better than a babysitter because I could not breastfeed or bottle-feed our son, nor could I calm him to sleep when he was tired. Thus, we both decided that he should stay home the full five weeks he was allowed as a new father, to give me enough time to adjust and grow into my new role. Being home together 24 hours a day, 7 days a week however was equivalent to our relationship sitting in the front seat of a car with the windows rolled up, the garage door closed and the exhaust running – a slow, but definite self-murder. We were trying so hard to communicate and understand each other, but it was as though our mis-strung sentences were hitting and splattering into the windshields of our respective minds. My feelings as a new mother were not normal in any sense of that over-used word and *Edward* withdrew into himself as his understanding of my dilemma receded and disappeared. All I kept pondering when Zach awoke from his many naps was ‘Why can’t he just go away?” or, the idea that kept bubbling up from the depths of my despair, “Why can’t I just vanish all together so that Zach will be better off without a horrible mother like me?” I began hearing my baby crying at all times, even when I was smoking a cigarette out on the balcony and he was sleeping, or when I was in the shower, when I did decide to wash myself.
Finally, after pondering what my gory insides and guts would look like splattered on the ground below my balcony, I shakily called the nurse that had come to our house to weigh Zach a week after we had left the hospital and I told her that I was not feeling well at all. She instructed me to call my mother so that she could be present as well and both came over to our house; after having me answer a questionnaire on post-partum depression in which I scored relatively high, both my mother and the nurse, with *Edward’s* consensus, decided that I should be brought to the emergency right away. I was hospitalized for six days, two of which I spent on an actual psych ward, on account of my having possibly developed post partum depression and having experienced a psychotic episode. At this point there was a definite shift in my partner’s attitude towards me – the comprehension and understanding that had seemed real was replaced by an abhorrence and a cynical attitude. He told me while visiting me on the psych ward that I had a choice to make and I had to stop thinking merely of myself, that I had to accept my responsibilities or else I could decide to remain on the psych floor for the rest of my life. Thus, I attempted to make the right choice – I knew I was not crazy, but I was not completely normal either nor was I healed from all of my inner despair and grief. I was diagnosed by the attending psychiatric with an inability to adapt with an anxious/depressive component, but was released with prescriptions for anxiety and sleeping pills.
Nothing was the same between *Edward* and I from the moment I first stepped back into our apartment and the two weeks that followed were nothing short of a journey through Dante’s Inferno, multiplied by twenty thousand. Our little family’s hellish experience culminated in an unforgettable and unforgivable night in which my fiancé called me a “fucking bitch, fucking cunt, fucking psychopath” because I had awoken to my baby’s wails and *Edward’s* cusses and had walked in upon the latter trying to force feed our son his nightly bottle. At that very moment, the little voice in my head had cleverly picked the lock that had kept it imprisoned for too long, and it had commenced screaming wildly within the confines of my skull; the nasty things he had told me and the situations between him and my son that had made my skin prickle all began whirling and swirling behind my now wide-open eyes. My then two month old son did not need to be called a fucking moron when he did not want his bottle at night, nor did he need his bedroom door slammed while he was wailing to be taken care of, nor did he deserve to be told to “shut up” when his father wanted to sleep but he did not; moreover, he did not deserve to have a mother afraid to hold and cuddle him in fear that his father would make silly remarks about how he was becoming an “arms baby”, nor was he obligated to cry himself to sleep because he was apparently old enough to soothe himself…
After having a heart to heart with a family friend in which I divulged all of the things that had been happening, I decided that enough was enough and I told the man of my nightmares to get out once I came home. He slammed doors, cussed me out, threatened to take Zach away from me and to sue me and then declared that everything was my fault. My younger brother and my mother took turns sleeping at my place as I slowly became accustomed to taking care of my son all by myself; in addition to this, my mother and I established an evening routine and with their love and support, my ex’s harmful words and actions began to seep out of my pores and thoughts.
I may have failed myself and my son in my inability to have a natural birth, my incapacity to relax enough to breastfeed and my self-imposed blindness to the violence occurring within the walls of my home, but I did succeed in putting a stop to the last. Violence does not need to leave physical marks or scars to be harmful, and mental and psychological bruises are more hurtful and lasting than any wound inflicted upon the surface of the skin.
With the help of my family and select friends, I slowly re-built a life for both myself and my wonderful son; it has taken me a full year to be stable, more self-sufficient and accepting of the fact that I am actually quite a good mother rather than the horrible fiend I imagined myself to be at first, though as all other human beings, I am far from being perfect.
Thus, the best decision I have ever made in my whole entire life was choosing the welfare of my son above my own safety and I chose my son over an imagined love, fireworks and all – and he has already thanked me a thousand fold by being the best teacher I could ever have asked for. Albert Einstein once said that “In the midst of great difficulty lies great opportunity”, and this past year is evidence of that for me because I have grown both as a person, but more importantly, I have grown into my role as a mother. I would climb and stumble through Dante’s seven levels of hell a million times again if it meant that at the end of it all I would be safely and securely holding my baby boy in my arms.
