“Yeah,” I say as I head to the door. I don’t need a friend here, and I don’t imagine we have anything in common.
Brittaney chatters at me about all the pregnancies she’s successfully predicted in the past the whole way back to the room and our folding chairs. Before sitting down, she assures me that she’ll be able to tell me the sex of my baby if I give her a few more weeks.
“Cool,” I say and am relieved that Dr. Singh is calling the room to order. I manage to not meet her eyes for the rest of the group therapy session, and afterward I quickly leave and find Mom in the waiting room, ready to escort me to the car. The same chill I’d felt in the basement greets me outside. My jacket is too tight around my middle. I’m going to have to let Mom buy me a maternity coat before much longer.
“How was it?” she asks. “Do you think it will be helpful?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
seven
“Oh, this would have been nice to have.” Angie eyes the poopsleepplay, which is standing next to the couch in my mother’s immaculately decorated living room. She sits down next to it and nods. “You’ll barely have to move. Change the diaper, put the baby back down…”
“I’ll read to it too,” I say. “And play? You’re supposed to do that even in the early weeks, right?”
I’ve been doing my research. I conquered my fear of judgmental looks from the staff that had watched me grow up checking out stacks of books each visit and made my way to the library. In addition to a book on French parenting and another on baby development, my bravery was rewarded by excitement from the librarians and flyers about story time and pre-K reading clubs.
“Yeah, you will,” Angie says. “Mostly you’ll…rest.” She says “rest” like a gentle euphemism for something more grim. “Guinnie is starting to get really fun to play with though.” She laughs in an odd way. “It’s so weird not to have her with me.”
“It was nice of Dave to offer to spend the afternoon with her so we could hang.” I sit next to her on the couch and groan a little bit. For being so small, my bump now stops me from closing my jeans, and I’m running out of dresses and baggy shirts. My mother wants me to go maternity clothes shopping with her. She hasn’t mentioned bringing Aunt Angelina with us.
“Dave owed me,” Angie says, and I raise my eyebrows. “We had a big fight because he had the fucking gall to tell me that all I ever talk about is the baby.”
“Ooh.” I know how this comment would have stung. I’ve started to realize how difficult it will be to be a mother and a writer. Just one of those feels impossible some days.
“Autumn, the way I burst into tears…” She grimaces. “We ended up better for it. We understand what each other’s going through more, you know? But he still owed me.”
I’m quiet because I don’t know. When Jamie and I fought, even if we both apologized for the things we said, nothing was ever resolved, and we certainly never ended up understanding each other better for it.
It wouldn’t have been like that with Finny when we eventually found something to fight about if he’d lived. I know we had learned our lesson about making feelings known.
“Hey, I promise this whole hangout won’t be baby related, but can I show you upstairs?”
“Yeah,” Angie says as she stands. “Did you get a crib?”
I lead the way to the stairs. “I haven’t decided what sort of, uh, sleeping method I believe in.”
“What do you mean? You put them on their backs to sleep. That’s the only thing. People argue about everything having to do with parenting.”
We reach the top of the stairs, and I open the door to my room. “Yeah, I’m learning that.”
It isn’t about having a modern baby or a hippie baby; I have to choose whether I’m a Montessori mom, an attachment parent, or one of the many other theories or combinations I could ascribe to in my pursuit of a more perfect child. It’s like suddenly being asked to choose a religion when it never occurred to me there may be a God.
“I was told we had to let her cry it out. We live in one room with the baby, so that didn’t happen. No matter what you chose or do, someone is going to tell you that you are wrong, as if it were their business.”
“Well, of course. I’m already an unfit mother because I got pregnant as a teenager in the first place, right?” I snort. “Here, this is what I wanted to show you.”