Mama Bear

by Shirley Smith

  All day Tokunbo and I listened to the radio and that passed the time. I loved it when Naughty by Nature looped back around to being played every hour. That was my song. I was this little thing who swore I was down with them double because Naughty by Nature was from New Jersey. Tokunbo did his li’l toddler stomp to the music, and I did my freestyle dance, just swinging back and forth, hand in the air, “Horray hooooo haaaay hoooooo.” Tokunbo had me laughing, stomping around in circles holding one hand close to his body, with his lip sucked in like he was concentrating and just swinging his other arm back and forth like some old man. “Go BooBoo! Go BooBoo!” He was one of those little brown-skin kids you just want to kiss on all the time. Dancing around the apartment with him just took the crazy empty confused feeling away, made it feel like I wasn’t waiting.

  I was always waiting, though. Just sitting somewhere waiting for Mama. It would be me and other kids, sometimes, sitting in a room, and the grown-ups would be in another room of a two- or three-bedroom apartment. Just gone, high, forgot about their kids. We would play and hang out, jumping and flipping on some old mattresses.

  One time it was just me, no other kids, no TV. It wasn’t the day of the iPad, just me sitting there, waiting, not knowing how much time went by. Mama was in the bedroom doing her thing getting high, using drugs with other people. Apparently, they didn’t have the crack she needed to smoke that day, but she needed to get high right then. So instead of the pipe she shot up with a needle and because that wasn’t her drug of choice, she wasn’t mentally or physically stable after that. “Come on Shirley. I need to get out of this house.” I had learned to just observe, play, and obey.

  She was wobbly and disoriented like a drunk as we left. Mind you, I am short now, and was short then too, but my mother wasn’t but five feet one inch tall. I wasn’t any taller than her, but I had to get her home. Mom was so high it was like walking with somebody who was walking in their sleep.

  I don’t remember saying anything while we walked. I didn’t have a voice. I remember sounds, though. I did a lot of listening while my voice was silent. I remember the sound of the bus, like the air coming out of the hydraulic thing when people were getting on, then the squeaking of the steering wheel, and the brakes when it took off. I remember every time we passed an alley, I smelled piss. I was just there with her out on the street at night and doing what needed to be done.

  I always paid attention to which way we were going, so I knew how to get home. I held her up as we walked over the bridge, and the eight blocks back to our studio apartment. 24 South Grove Street in East Orange, New Jersey, on the first floor, the third door on the left. I kept repeating it in my head like I practiced in case I ever had to tell an ambulance where we lived. My shoulder hurt and it seemed like those blocks lit by East Orange streetlights with crooked sidewalks went on forever. I didn’t care, I was with my mama, helping my mama. I guided her home, holding her up, stopping to keep her from crossing the street, guiding her to step up on the curb, and when we got home, I took her keys out of her purse to open the door.

  We got into the apartment that night, and she just lay on the bed. She looked beat down like that part on Losing Isaiah when Halle Berry is in the trash can. Her hair was all sticking up and she smelled bad, like piss and old sweat. I was so worried that night. I just took her shoes off and watched her sleep, but at least I was with her.

  Tokunbo and I sat down on the sofa bed when the radio commercials came on with men talking too fast about buying cars, and the commercials came one after the other. I just wanted my music back.

  The music kept me from having memories so they flooded in without it. I started asking myself, Why is my mom like this? My little head was just spinning. I folded up the sofa bed by myself, real slow so it didn’t pinch my hand the way it sometimes did. By the time “O.P.P.” was playing for the fifth time, I knew I needed to feed me and Tokunbo again, but the cereal was all gone, and I knew I wasn’t supposed to leave. Plus, what if she came back?

  When it started to get dark, I looked through the little apartment refrigerator and looked in the cabinets. In between I prayed, “God please bring some food.” Then I opened the cabinets and refrigerator again. People in the building came home from work, shutting their doors and creaking around on the floor. The smell of onions and fried food was wafting into our apartment, and I got to opening the cabinets and closing them waiting for the magic. Tokunbo played too, laughing and smacking shut the bottom cabinets. The neighbors must have thought my mother was home and we were cooking up a storm, making all of that noise. When the building got quiet with TV sounds and plates clinking, my belly got this sinking feeling in it like I was disappearing like Mama.

  The lights on Grove Street flickered in the window, and I had to turn on the lights in the apartment. Thank God the electric bill had been paid. I heard a siren outside and said the prayer I remembered hearing people say at our church, “Father God in Heaven, protect . . .” and I inserted “Mama.” I opened my eyes and waited for God to send her walking up Grove.

  The hungrier I got, the more confused I felt. I was standing there in the room looking out the window onto the empty sidewalks like I was in some kind of trance.

  I turned off the lights and hid with the TV in my closet bedroom. Tokunbo curled up and went to sleep with me with the Johnny Carson show keeping us company. I wrote in my scratch-and-sniff journal, “Well Rosie, today my mom left again, and I’m mad she did.” Tokunbo’s breathing went deep, and at least he was sleeping so I could worry about just Mama, but then he woke up. “Shirley, I’m mon eat. I’m mon eat some food.”

  Then I remembered something. It’s funny how instincts aren’t part of your reality until something triggers them. Lying on the floor in my closet, I remembered one Christmas, our neighbor Mama Jessie gave me and Tokunbo a real Christmas tree. My brother Darryl brought it in and leaned it against the wall and went back out in the streets. I had some Red Hots and popcorn and decorated the tree, but when Darryl and Mama didn’t come back for hours, I picked them off and ate them with Tokunbo.

  I didn’t break down crying or anything like that, the way any little girl should have. I just did what had to be done, like I was born with some maternal light switch. I got up off the floor, turned the light on, and went into action.

  Back in the day we had our people that we clicked with who would always tell us where there were apartments available, people who had our back and we had theirs. Mama Jessie was one of our people. She lived in our building but had lived in the same building as us on two other occasions. Mama always had trouble keeping the lights on and rent paid, so we would move often. Mama would just tell somebody in our welfare network, “Girl, I have to move out by such and such date. Let me know if you hear of anything that opens up.”

  I put Tokunbo in a clean diaper and set him on my hip. I knew where to get food. I was like Mama when she used to get us up and get down to the welfare office. She used to say, “Do your business before twelve p.m. Get your food stamps, calculate the groceries, know how much food stamps you have for the month? Budget and don’t go over.” I was taught the early bird catches the worm, and my mom was very serious about that. She would be up and at the welfare office first thing, and I’d have my shoes on, dressed early, and would be right there with her. That’s part of what helps me be the businesswoman I am today, because I was always with her. She used to hold it all up and hold it together until she started getting really far into the addiction and gradually fell apart.

  I walked barefoot down to the last door at the end of the hallway to Mama Jessie’s. I knocked on the door a few times. I knew that if she didn’t answer the door to just knock again because it was late after Johnny Carson went off, so she was probably sleeping in her chair. When I look back, she reminds me of the mother in the movie Precious played by Mo’Nique. You know, with a scarf tied to the front with rollers. Mama Jessie might have looked like Precious’s mean mama with the housedress, slippers, and that deep scratchy voice
, but she was the opposite of mean. She was the sweetest, most nurturing person you’d ever want to meet.

  “Hey, baby, what’s up. Where your mother at?” The TV flickered on where she had been sitting with a blanket in her chair, and the smell of fried pork chops from hours earlier wafted out into the hall.

  I was straightforward. “Hey Mama Jessie. We hungry; I need some food. Can we have some cereal?” If she had it, she’d give what she had to who needed it. If she didn’t have it, she’d give you something different. She always looked out for us. She would let Mama run the extension cord if the lights got cut off, and let us use her land line. People would call her phone for us, and she would take a message. I was very comfortable with her.

  Today I get a lot of my caretaking, and my mannerisms and way of being, from her. If I have it to share, I’ll share it. “Here, beautiful. No problem. You don’t owe me anything.” If I don’t and you are in need, I’ll at least call somebody and try to hook you up. Mama Jessie said, “God is always there, and if he can’t be there baby, he always have somebody there for you as his replacement.”

  She gave me an opened box of Cheerios. “Here baby. Take the whole box home.” I don’t know how she knew we were using faucet water for milk, but she put it in a plastic bag and put a quart of milk in there too. She hung it on my one arm that was holding Tokunbo’s butt up on my hip. “Come back down here if you get hungry.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  Mama Jessie was my ram in the bush that night.

  I don’t know how I knew what to do in that situation. Instincts are amazing. They just kick in if you are in survival mode. But who wants their child pushed to that point? I can’t imagine my eight-year-old Demi having to wake up here in this house with her little sisters and me just missing in action, leaving her to call up her maternal survival instincts in order to see herself through to the end of the day.

  3

  A Baby Story

  Premature is considered any baby born younger than thirty-six weeks. If they are born anywhere as young as twenty-five weeks, they have a low survival rate. Dakota was a day shy of twenty-two weeks in my womb.

  Dr. Young squeezed my hand. “Well, she’s going to be born that early.” There was a pause like in playing cards when you have played your hand and are hoping the other players won’t put anything lethal on the table.

  “Okay.” I held on to Dr. Young’s hand and asked one more question. “Can you just please continue to be honest with me?”

  She smiled. “Can you continue to ask questions rather than yelling at all the nurses?” JR, Dr. Young, and I all chuckled, the first sound of anything that resembled normalcy. As she exited the room, she drew the curtain around JR and me and Dakota in my belly. We stayed like that in our little bubble for only a couple of hours. JR was able to get out his first words to me that didn’t have the sounds of nurses cutting in around his thoughts.

  “Babe, babe. This is unbelievable, but I’m glad I’m here.”

  I didn’t think I was ever gonna say this, but I told him, “I’m glad you broke your thumb.”

  He smiled that sleepy smile at me, knowing what I meant. Then, our moment of normal ended when Dr. Young returned. She went over to the little sink, scrubbed her hands, and then put on those blue gloves that I was already sick of looking at. “Before I raise the bed up, I’m going to check your cervix again.” She put one blue-gloved hand on the sheet around my knee when she talked to me, the same way she did earlier when holding my hand.

  I looked at JR while she poked around down there. I heard her scoot her rolling stool back. She didn’t look at me at first, just went to tap her foot on the trash can and toss the gloves in before coming back to hold my hand. She raised her eyes to JR and then down to me. “Honey, it’s not looking good. Dakota’s feet are right there. She’s breech.” She just kept talking, like she wanted to get to the assuring part. “But we are going to try. We will try to keep her up there for as long as possible. She might turn around on her own.”

  She pulled the curtain back around us, and JR and I were just quiet, trying to hold on to each other while trying to deal with what we were hearing. A nurse came in and attached a drug to my IV bag to stop the contractions. Then another drip for a light dose of pain medicine. I watched her like I used to watch the pigeons outside of the apartment window when I was a kid, trying to ground myself in their busy movements until my mother came home.

  I looked at JR and he was just holding my hand, like he was waiting for me to say something. “Babe. It’s gonna be okay,” he said, and I started crying. I didn’t even know at that point if I was registering it all, but the tears were a release; couldn’t nothing else happen with all of that but tears.

  He looked helpless, too. “I’m gonna get you some ice chips.” He needed to do something, anything to make it better.

  He put the ice chips in my mouth and it felt good to have his hand to my lips; the ice tasted like salt with my tears. He adjusted the pillow under my butt to help keep me elevated. Every now and then he just said, “Babe, it’s gonna be okay,” and somewhere in there, I fell asleep.

  I woke up just past dusk to the smell of hospital dinners and the sight of the dark room and all those little glowing green lights on everything. The inside of my mouth was burning like I was holding a mouthful of hot coffee.

  I turned to see JR’s silhouette sleeping in the chair. I said, “Babe, I’m hot.” He leaned forward, put his hand on my forehead, and immediately picked up the nurses’ button near my bed.

  Through the night, they gave me light meds to bring down the fever. By noon the next day, the nurses said they were going to have to break my water. I was twenty-two weeks exactly that day. It was still too early. I got an attitude. “No! That’s going to make her come out! I thought the point was to keep her in there, that all I had to do was keep my butt elevated and count the days. I can do that.”

  I didn’t understand that they needed to break my water to test it for infection. I didn’t understand that having a fever that wouldn’t go down put them in emergency mode. I kept protesting, but three of them in their aqua scrubs rolled a tray of gadgets in, put those blue gloves on, and the next thing I knew, I felt pressure where they stuck something in my vagina like I was getting my yearly exam.

  It was quiet for a second, and one of them asked in a low voice, “Is the fluid green?” and another one said, “She has an infection.” They were lifting my bottom to change the pad under me, and I saw a little of the green stuff. Things were wavering again, like the night two nights before when I was on the couch; I was struggling to keep my eyes open. One of them took a swab of some of the green stuff and put it in a long tube. I saw the IV bag being messed with again. I heard them tell JR “group beta strep.” I felt them rolling me over and I held JR’s muscular arm while they gave me a shot in the butt, and I fell asleep for what must have been another hour.

  Group beta strep is an infection that pregnant women have that is normally dormant—like so many other diseases that Black women end up with. It’s dormant, but a stressful life is like the alarm clock that wakes it up. That afternoon, Dr. Young explained to me and JR that they usually test for it in every pregnant woman around her thirty-fifth week, but I didn’t make it anywhere near that.

  JR asked the questions, his eyes barely open, like exhaustion was about to take him down. “Is it dangerous?”

  Dr. Young kept her promise to be honest. “It can be deadly, but Shirley is already here in the hospital. She’s already on meds.”

  “What about Dakota? Does she have it?”

  “She’s running the risk of having the infection, too.”

  That’s when the thoughts got to rolling. Why? When I was pregnant with Demi, I was fine. How did I get this? When I first moved to Ohio there was a period of time when I was uninsured, and I had an abnormal Pap smear. I had to have a colposcopy through some jankedy insurance at my clinic. Maybe all the scraping they did in my uterus left me vulnerable? I had no id
ea but my thoughts were running absolutely wild, wondering if I had somehow caused this even accidentally.

  Dr. Young responded like she could hear me thinking. “There’s no explanation why it shows up in some pregnant women and not in others.” At the time, that’s all doctors knew. It was a mystery why women of color, or women who had it hard from the get-go, got things like group beta strep and preeclampsia while pregnant. Doesn’t even matter if you had it hard and life got better, some illnesses just be in there waiting for stress to set them off. It doesn’t matter that childbirth can be celebratory good stress. The body doesn’t understand good stress. It just feels the stress, thinks the hard times are coming again and breaks down, no matter how much money you have in the bank.

  She paused and took a breath before saying, “Shirley, JR. We are going to take Dakota.”

  I pleaded, “Please don’t take her. I want to have a natural childbirth.”

  JR cut in. “Dakota may not have the infection, and then we’re taking her when she should have stayed in.”

  Dr. Young remained calm, but her voice became stern. “The risk is high. We’d have to monitor you and her every ten minutes and she’s in distress already, and we sure can’t do anything to save her if she passes in utero.”

  While we were arguing with Dr. Young, my ears latched on to one nurse’s question to JR. “Have you thought about funeral arrangements for Dakota, or do you want something quiet with the family here?” For a moment, I asked myself if I was delusional. I hadn’t slept and felt like I was barely holding on to my sanity. Did I hear this woman ask my husband about funeral arrangements for my baby? I blurted out, “Don’t nobody else come in here talking death about my daughter! Everybody, get out of here! I don’t want nobody but Dr. Young talkin to me!”