Call Me Cockroach: Based on a True Story

by Leigh Byrne

  This went on for about half an hour. Big Chad saying my Chad wasn’t his son. My Chad saying he didn’t know how to prove it, and Bobbi and Trudy cutting in regularly trying to help, but only making matters worse. The word shoot was thrown around a lot and so was kill, but I didn’t think for a minute anybody was going to get shot, let alone killed. To me, it seemed like I was sitting in the middle of a bad play with a bunch of people who were overacting.

  Eventually Big Chad got tired of holding the gun and put it on the table in front of him. As the alcohol began to wear off, I saw reality dawn in his eyes. A while longer, and he nodded off, his cigarette with its long, curling ash burning dangerously close to his fingers. Seeing his chance, Chad grabbed the gun while Bobbi and Trudy helped Big Chad to bed.

  By this time, morning had slipped in, and it was too late for Chad to go to work. Bobbi called in a sick day for him and one for Big Chad too. For the rest of the morning, everybody sat around smoking and discussing the events of the night before.

  When Chad and I had a minute alone, I asked him what a chink was and he told me it was a slang word for a person of Asian descent. Actually he said it was a Japanese dude, but I knew what he meant.

  “Why would your dad think you were a chink? You don’t even look Asian.”

  “He thinks everybody’s a chink when he’s drunk. He fought in the Korean War, and I think he gets flashbacks sometimes.”

  I could tell from the family’s reaction that what had happened was not an isolated incident. Knowing this, helped me to gain a better understanding of Chad’s family, of why they were so tight, and why the grown kids spent so much time at their parents’ house. I could also see why Bobbi was so protective of them. As children, when Big Chad “went on a drunk” and became violent, they had clung to Bobbi for safety. Now they were still afraid, still clinging to her emotionally, and finding it difficult to break away.

  As hard as Chad had tried to conceal his fear, I’d seen it on his face as his dad held the gun to his head. He was not as tough as he would’ve liked for everyone to believe. My heart ached at the thought of Chad having to deal with such trauma as a young boy. That day, I loved my husband a little more.

  THE VIRUS

  Big Chad didn’t scare me, but I let on like he did, and used my feigned fear as leverage to try to get Chad to move out sooner. It must have worked, because a couple of days after Big Chad’s drunk Chad asked Bobbi to front him the money to buy a trailer. He promised to pay her back when he got his income tax return.

  Chad already had in mind the trailer he was going to buy for us. His sister, Lilly, was selling hers, so she and her husband could move into a house. However she was renting the land the trailer was on, so we would have to move it somewhere else. Chad had that figured out too. He’d made a deal with his Mom and Dad to put the trailer on the lot behind their house. Living behind Bobbi and Big Chad was not exactly what I had in mind when I asked Chad if we could move out of his parents’ house, but it was better than the alternative, and the arrangement was all we could afford at the time. The good news was we wouldn’t have to move the trailer very far because Lilly lived less than a mile away.

  Within a week, we’d bought the trailer and Chad had arranged to have it moved. The guys he hired to move it had some difficulty pulling up the steep hill behind his parents’ house. Once I held my breath because the trailer almost toppled over, but somehow, between Chad and his brothers-in-law, they managed to get it set up, anchored and underpinned, all in one day.

  Trailers had always been baffling to me. I’d never even seen one until our family moved from Tennessee to Kentucky when I was around twelve. I couldn’t make sense of why a house would need wheels unless its owners moved around a lot. From what I’d seen in Kentucky, once people got their trailers set up and underpinned they pretty much stayed put. In our case, I was glad our house had wheels, because if I had anything to do with it, we wouldn’t be living behind Chad’s parents for long.

  All the appliances, including a washer and dryer, came with the trailer. Lilly let the curtains go too, and she even threw in her old sofa. Chad brought his television set and full-size bed from his room. We scraped together the money to buy a yard sale dinette, and Bobbi gave us a couple of pictures to hang on the walls. It would take some time to get settled in and comfortable, but we were off to a good start.

  The trailer was old and outdated, and a faded chartreuse color, but I was happy Chad and I had a place to call our own. The day we bought our new home, I made a vow to always take good care of it. Each day I would clean until everything sparkled, decorate the rooms, and have dinner on the table when Chad got home from work. Our life was going to be perfect.

  The first night in our new home was perfect. We sat on the orange shag carpeted floor of the living room and ate our dinner of cheese sandwiches and pretzels by candlelight, and drank Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill straight from the bottle. We were both too exhausted from the move to talk and chew our food too, but in between bites we passed cheesy smiles back and forth between us. We had no need for words, and there were none to describe how ecstatic we were. Chad had to go in to work the next day, so after we ate, we crawled to our mattress on our floor, and passed out in each other’s arms.

  For a few weeks after we moved into the trailer, I busied myself with cleaning. There was a film of cigarette smoke on the windows and walls that took lots of Spic-n-Span and elbow grease to cut through. The curtains smelled of smoke, so I took them all down, washed them by hand, and then hung them over the shower rod in the bathroom to dry. Every morning I prepared Chad’s lunch bucket for work, and in the evenings I made our dinner. He didn’t seem to like my cooking as much as he did his mom’s, though. I could tell because he insisted we eat at her house three or four times a week.

  It didn’t take long for our new home to change from the love nest I was trying to create to a gathering place for Chad and his friends to drink and smoke pot. At first, I tried to play happy hostess, to fetch our guests’ beers when they needed them, empty overflowing ashtrays, and keep the chip bowls filled. But after a while, the nonstop party got old, and when a new film of smoke coated the windows and walls, I realized all the cleaning I had done was for nothing. When I protested, Chad made it clear he was paying for the trailer and his friends were always welcome, and unless I wanted to be out on the streets I’d better keep my mouth shut.

  If Chad threw me out, I knew I could move in with Aunt Macy and Edwin. But I didn’t want to, because then I’d have to admit to them my marriage had failed. Besides, I liked living on my own, having a place, being a wife, and I was content with my new life for the most part. I had plenty to eat, and Chad didn’t beat me or lock me in a room, and he only talked mean to me when he was mad, or drunk, or both. Everything was fine as long as I went along with whatever he wanted. So I sucked up my discontentment with a smile, tapped into the high tolerance I’d developed as a child, and went on living.

  Just over a month after Chad and I were married, I caught a nasty stomach virus. Everything I ate came right back up. When the virus persisted for more than a few days, Bobbi pronounced me pregnant. There’s no way I could be pregnant, I thought. Most of the time Chad and I were careful, as careful as two young newlyweds with raging hormones could be. I ignored Bobbi’s nonsense and went on for another week, throwing up every day, telling myself and everyone else I had a virus.

  When Chad’s shift at the mine changed to seconds, he took me to the doctor, who confirmed what I’d been trying so hard to deny: my virus was actually a four week old fetus. When the doctor passed on the results of the test, the truth slapped me in the face—I was going to be a mother. Mother? Mother! The mere thought of the word evoked nothing but negative reactions from me.

  The news of my pregnancy mortified me, but I didn’t let my true emotions show. I pretended to be the joyful, expectant mother, while inside I questioned my ability to take on such a role. Chad, on the other hand, was tickled when I told him. Getting
me pregnant played right along with his never-ending quest to prove he was a man. A big man. A strong man. A virile man. “Yeah, I’ve already knocked up my old lady,” he would say to his friends in between tokes. He couldn’t wait to get back home to tell the family. I wondered how Bobbi would react when she found out she was stuck with me.

  To my surprise, the family welcomed my pregnancy with open arms. Brenda and Lilly dug out some of their old maternity clothes and brought them to me. Everyone was chatty and attentive. Even Big Chad started smoking his cigarettes in a room away from me. Their enthusiasm was catchy, and soon I found myself filing through baby names in my head, and mentally turning the spare bedroom of the trailer into a nursery.

  Home alone that evening, after Chad left for work, I started thinking. Funny how I, of all people, hadn’t given any thought to having kids, as if being a mother wasn’t even an option for me. Chad and I had never discussed becoming parents. But then we never discussed much of anything. That was the Sutton way. They let stuff happen and then dealt with the fallout.

  Most days I tried not to think about the possibility that I could have inherited my mother’s legacy of abuse. And most days I didn’t, because I was so physically ill I could think of nothing but my illness. For the first six months, I threw up every morning, starting with my prenatal vitamin. Throughout the day, I threw up whenever I tried to eat, or when I came in contact with certain smells that turned my stomach, like the mustiness of coal on Chad’s clothes, and the green apple scented shampoo he used to wash his hair. And cigarette smoke, and ashtrays, and coffee, and the list went on and on. Even when my stomach was empty of food, when I smelled these things I threw up bile, and then when I’d emptied my stomach of bile, I dry heaved until my insides were in my throat. Sometimes I threw up for no apparent reason, as if my mind were punishing my body for getting pregnant without its consent. My doctor said he’d never seen such a relentless case of morning sickness. The only foods I could keep down were crackers and Popsicles, so that’s what I lived on for the first few months.

  When I wasn’t vomiting I was sleeping. To escape my reality, I surrendered to sleep’s soothing otherworld far more often than I should have. Locked in the trailer, curtains drawn, I sometimes slept for fifteen hours straight. But when I began having disturbing nightmares about becoming a mother, even sleep was no longer a safe haven. One dream was particularly frightening and persistent:

  I am in a hospital room, sitting up in a bed with pillows propped behind me. A nurse walks in cradling an infant wrapped in a pink blanket. As she brings the baby closer, I can see a downy head and tiny flailing arms, hear soft gurgling sounds, but as hard as I try, I can’t see the baby’s face, only a blurry, blank spot where a face should be. “Take her away!” I scream when I see my baby has no face.

  “You don’t want your own baby?” the nurse asks. “I know why you don’t want her; it’s because she’s ugly like you!” When I look up at the nurse I see she is my mother.

  The family became concerned because I was dropping weight at such a rapid rate, but I wasn’t too worried because, although the rest of my body was getting thin, my belly was steadily growing, and I could feel the life inside of me getting stronger every day. When I went for my check-up, the doctor assured me that somehow, despite my inability to hold down anything of nutritional value, the baby was developing normally.

  Toward the end of my pregnancy, my morning sickness began to subside enough for me to pick up weight, but the nausea never went away completely. I reached the point where I wanted the baby to be born so I would stop being sick, but at the same time, I dreaded its arrival. At least while my baby was inside of me I knew it would be safe.

  Early May, Aunt Macy called to say she and Edwin were going to Florida to get married and then taking a cruise for their honeymoon. She wasn’t happy when I’d finally gotten up the courage a few months earlier to call and tell her about my pregnancy. She knew a baby would kill the chance of me going back to college in the near future. But being the classy lady she was, she never showed her disappointment to me. I had sent her an invitation to a baby shower Bobbi and the sisters were giving me, but she was going to be on her honeymoon then. She apologized that she would not be able to come, but promised to send a gift in the mail.

  We had the baby shower at Bobbi’s house, as planned. The gathering was informal, with Styrofoam bowls of nuts and pastel mints, and plates of store-bought cookies. Middle-aged women in mom jeans and stretch pants trailed in with huge packages of disposable diapers and boxed infant sleeping gowns in tow. One woman had a yellow plastic tub filled with bottles of oil, lotion and shampoo. Another one, with a bad home perm, seemed to be particularly concerned with the proper cleaning of the baby’s orifices. She provided what looked like a year’s supply of Q-tips, and a nose suctioning device resembling a small turkey baster that I was sure I wouldn’t be able to figure out how to use. I didn’t know hardly anyone at the shower, and I had a funny feeling I could have stayed home and no one would have missed me.

  My doctor could not tell the sex of the baby from the sonogram. Chad had made it known he wanted a boy. In his family of many “split-tails,” male children were coveted. During the last month of my pregnancy, I found myself also secretly hoping we would have a boy, but for my own reasons. I remembered Mama saying over and over that she hated me because I was a girl and because I was ugly. I thought maybe the curse of abuse in my family was for females only. This theory made sense because she never touched my brothers. I decided if the baby came out a boy I would be safe. I stopped picking out girl’s names.

  As my due date neared, Bobbi began trolling the yard sales for baby items. She brought home stacks of slightly-worn unisex onesies, and some equipment the baby wouldn’t need for months: a walker, a playpen and a springy jump-chair thing. The trailer looked like a ghetto day care center. When I protested, she said, “I’ve had six kids; trust me, you’ll need these things soon enough.”

  June 27th, I went into labor around midnight. Chad, Bobbi, Trudy, Brenda and Lilly were huddled around me at the hospital, but even with all the support, something was missing. Someone was missing. I had stuck by my word and not contacted Mama since that day in the restaurant. I’d been so busy I hadn’t even thought of her.

  If my mind was indeed trying to punish me for becoming pregnant, it wasn’t done with me yet. Twenty hours into labor, I hadn’t fully dilated. At eleven-thirty the following night, after more than twenty-three hours of hard labor and intermittent vomiting, the doctor had to take the baby with forceps. It was a girl.

  The nurse prepared my baby for me to hold. I watched, terrified, as if she were about to hand me a giant scorpion. Like in my nightmare, I could see the baby’s arms flailing and hear her gentle throaty sounds. When the nurse lowered her into my arms, cocooned in a white blanket, I held my breath and looked down. She has a face; a perfect face!

  Babies are not particularly beautiful when they’re first born, all pink and puckered from being in water too long. It’s the idea of them that’s beautiful, their purity, their innocence, the awareness that they are part of you. In that sense my baby was beautiful. In reality, she had blotchy skin, her eyes were bulbous, and she slightly resembled a chink. I worried how she would be received by Big Chad the next time he threw a drunk.

  As soon as I felt the warmth of my daughter’s body against mine, my love was instant and undeniable, and my instinct to nurture and protect her overwhelmed me. All at once, she became my everything. The doll I was never allowed to have as a child. The unconditional love I’d always longed for. My second chance at happiness. All this was a heavy load for such a fragile creature to carry. A knot rose in the back of my throat, and I began to cry. I pressed my lips to her forehead and whispered, “We’re going to be okay.”

  BECOMING OUR PARENTS

  Because Chad and I had been so intent on the baby being a boy, we had no girl’s names selected. Chad hurried down to the hospital gift shop and bought a book of baby n
ames. After much deliberation and debate, we decided on Molly, and for her middle name, we went with Leigh, like mine. Molly Leigh, a name with a ring. It rolled off the tongue. I loved it.

  Chad had hoped for a boy and so had his dad. “Another split-tail,” Big Chad quipped. “You’ll have a half-dozen more before you get a boy.” Not me, I thought. If Chad and I were lucky enough to be halfway decent parents to one kid, with our families’ history of dysfunction, we had no business tempting fate again.

  Because I’d dropped so much weight during my pregnancy and labor, I went home from the hospital in some jeans and a tee-shirt I’d worn before I became pregnant. Bobbi had bought Molly a cute pink gown and matching cap to wear. Chad had the car warmed up and ready for Molly and me. He even opened the door and helped us in. He was the proud father doing everything right.

  The family had set up the bassinette, handed down from Lilly, in our bedroom in the trailer, and gathered everything we would need to care for Molly. Thanks to the baby shower, we had plenty of diapers and wipes and lotions. Thanks to Bobbi’s yard sale finds, Molly wouldn’t need clothes for at least four months. All the tools I needed to be a good mother had been provided. The rest was up to me.

  Molly was born a girl, but I couldn’t imagine how I could ever stop loving her, like Mama had stopped loving me. Still, even with all the love I had to give my baby, I wasn’t sure if I was capable of being a good mother to her. Mama’s emotional abandonment and ensuing abuse during my formative years had left me with one horrific model for motherhood. All I’d learned from her was what not to do, from there I was lost. But I genuinely wanted to be a good parent, so for the first few months, I asked a lot of questions, read books on child rearing, and like most new parents, winged the rest.

  What I lacked in experience I tried to make up for with attention and affection. Every time Molly whimpered, I pounced to her side. While Chad was at work, I spent my time dressing her in frilly outfits and taking her picture. When she slept, I was lonely for her. Sometimes I woke her up from her naps because I missed her so much.