by Jamie Wright
But I’m afraid I’ve invited you into a story that hasn’t yet reached its redemptive conclusion. As much as I’d love to spin a tale that wraps up nicely with a great big bow, this one does not. For I still have depression and anxiety. I feel insecure. I am dysfunctional. (For the record, I do not sleep around.)
I can tell you that, as I’ve walked along with God, I’ve experienced growth and development in areas I never thought possible. I’ve received forgiveness for things I once thought unforgivable. I’ve been healed of emotional wounds that might have killed me, had I never come to know this love. But—spoiler alert!—a life of faith is not the happy, clappy Valtrex commercial some would have you believe. God will not be swallowed like a pill to cure the herpes of your soul so you can run in a field of sunflowers with your hot boyfriend.
It just doesn’t go down like that. No matter how much we beg and plead, nor how fervently we pray, having faith does not release us from the hard work of maturing.
It’s true, I’m not the girl next door hiding in a biker jacket anymore….I’m a grown-ass woman in a biker jacket, thank you very much. These days I feel nothing but mercy for the girl I used to be—the party girl who once snorted coke off the back of a toilet, the naive teenager who couldn’t see that her much older “boyfriend” was actually a creepy pedophile, the scrappy little jackass who got in a fistfight, in a restaurant, over a salad…that girl needed love, and by God’s grace, I’ve learned to love her.
And even in my forties I’ve found that a brazen little girl’s badassery is useful from time to time.
If Brett Williams hadn’t sprinkled butt hair in my milkshake, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.
I would be some other Jamie, with some other husband, and some other kids, and some other memories, and you’d be reading some other book, because these stories would not have taken life and these pages would never have been written. This is all because of a handful of butt hairs, casually tossed into a chocolate milkshake amid the repressed snorts and giggles of the punk-ass teenage pranksters I called friends.
I am dead serious.
While I was in the bathroom, Brett Williams threw butt hairs in my unguarded milkshake, and, as far as I know, I swallowed at least some of them, and then everything changed forever. (So here’s an important piece of advice: If you are a juvenile delinquent hanging out in a twenty-four-hour diner after midnight on a weekday and you need to use the restroom, do not trust your uneaten food to your friends, especially if your friends are a bunch of assholes, because there’s a good chance it will be tampered with in your absence and you’ll end up ingesting something you’d rather not. Like hot sauce. Or coffee creamer. Or butt hair. And your life will never be the same.)
I should have trusted my instincts that night, because I knew something was weird as soon as I got back from the bathroom. The table was too quiet and my friends were practically humming with the electric buzz of anticipation. Watching them watch me, I dragged the tall frosty glass to the edge of the table, leaned over it, and, highly suspicious of the expectant looks on their ugly faces, I dove into that shake like my life depended on it. I drank deeply, with a rebellious flair, to show them I knew they’d done something but I was made of iron. Nothing would make me flinch. Before the straw left my lips, the group erupted in peals of laughter, howls of disgust, and breathless declarations, “Ohmygawd! Ohmygawd! You drank it! You drank it! Brett put butt hair in your shake and you drank it!”
A half dozen stupid fingers pointed from me to the shake to the bald spot on Brett’s hairy butt cheek, and all around me stupid mouths gaped open on stupid red faces, as my friends’ stupid bodies shook and twisted and quaked with mirth. There is no feeling in the world quite like the disturbing loneliness that comes with being the butt of a really good joke, and I’ve gotta admit, as a well-practiced bully I wasn’t used to it. It threw me off my game. Typically I’d have been ready with a biting remark or a snarky comeback, but I’d just eaten butt hair, so my brain was busy trying to kill itself. I stood up and stared back in uncharacteristic silence at the group of kids writhing in laughter at my expense, and I wished them all dead.
Adulthood taught me how to own the feeling of embarrassment, how to rock even the most awkward moment with a measure of grace, how to walk away with my head held high, dignity intact—or, at least, now I know how to fake it. But as a sixteen-year-old girl, overly defensive and totally insecure, my face burned with humiliation and my guts boiled over with rage. I wanted to barf, because butt hair, but I also wanted to cry, to scream, to hide, to break a bottle and cut somebody.
I did not want to laugh. I did not want to “be cool” or “chill out” or “relax.”
Certain I would never live down my new reputation as the girl who ate ass fur, I thought my best option was probably to set the restaurant on fire and flee to rural Arkansas, where I could live in the woods and be friends with squirrels and never make eye contact with another human being ever again. The only thing stopping me was that I didn’t have a lighter on me. Or a ride to Arkansas. And I’d just spent my last four dollars on a chocolate shake I would never enjoy.
When it was time to leave, I refused to get in the car with Brett, who was both the violator of my midnight snack and my middle-of-the-night ride home. Without a word, I walked past my usual spot in the front seat of Brett’s piece-of-crap Honda Civic and kept going toward the car parked directly across from it. I crossed through the narrow space in the glaring headlights between bumpers, making my way to the empty passenger side of a slightly less shitty Nissan Sentra, where I opened the door and climbed in, uninvited. Smiling over the dash, I waved a smug good-bye to Brett Williams—Do not mess with my milkshake, asshole!—and kicked him right in the teen crush.
Although we’d never hung out just the two of us, I’d been friends with the tall, broad, grinning football player in the driver’s seat next to me for a few months before “the incident.” It’s fair to say we were both surprised when I jumped into his car and turned a flirty face toward him for a favor, but no one would have guessed that I’d just asked the boy I would marry for a ride home.
That fateful night, I gave my number to Steve, the tall guy in the little sedan, and we started to write a love story the way teenagers did in the nineties; by talking on the phone for ten consecutive hours, doing it in the car, and listening to the Cure on an endless loop. After six months of dating like this, we did the most embarrassing thing ever and got teenage engaged. (I swear, there is nothing funnier than a teenage girl talking about her “fiancé.”) We genuinely believed that we were in love, but, to be honest, I don’t think our relationship would have lasted very long if things had gone differently. He lived an hour away at college, we saw each other only on weekends, and the truth is, we didn’t really have much in common outside of car sex and the Cure. We were probably on the brink of a classic adolescent breakup when, a few months after he put a ring on it, he put a fetus in it.
Whoops.
All in all, it was a year and a half between the life-altering moment at the diner and the earth-shattering second of my baby’s first breath. Eighteen months from milkshake to motherhood.
* * *
Screwing up my own life over and over again was one thing, but dropping a baby-sized bomb in the middle of someone else’s path was a startling expansion of my destructive capacity. I couldn’t ruin this guy’s life, could I? Though Steve’s reaction to the possibility of a pregnancy was kind and supportive, I didn’t think I could do it. I couldn’t have a baby….I couldn’t even keep my room clean.
For my first-ever visit to a gynecologist, I took great pains to prepare, showering, shaving, y’know, just generally sprucing things up. I mean, a few people had been down there before, but never a professional, and I didn’t want my doctor to think I was some kind of amateur. Despite my best efforts to play it cool, the office staff could tell right away that I was
a newbie, so they guided me carefully through each step of the awkwardness. Sign in here. Put your cup of pee there. Wear the gown like this. They were comforting and kind and almost motherly, and I thought, They are gonna be so happy for me when we all find out I’m not pregnant and this is just a big misunderstanding.
After I put on the requisite blue gown, open at the front as instructed, I sat on the paper-covered exam table and waited. While I waited, I reminded myself that those cheap grocery-store pregnancy tests are wrong, like, all the time, and I made a mental note that since I was already at the doctor’s office, I should definitely ask about birth control. There was a quick rap on the door before it swung open, and I nearly fell off the table. I knew I had a Latin American doctor, but I was not expecting Enrique Iglesias in a lab coat to glide in with a smile brighter than the sun, shake my hand, and blurt out, “Congratulations, you’re pregnant!”
I was speechless, still trying to get my head around the doctor’s blunt but definitive announcement (and also his beautiful brown angel face), when he asked me to lie back so he could get an idea of just how pregnant I was. Dr. Guapo took one look at my abdomen and said, “Wow, look at that cantaloupe!” and I lifted my head to see what I’d been ignoring for so long. Where there should have been a smooth flat plain between two visible hip bones, there was the soft round beginning of a baby bump. An ultrasound confirmed what the doctor accurately guessed with a little bit of prodding and a measuring tape—I was sixteen weeks along.
Six. Teen. Weeks.
That’s second-trimester pregnant.
That’s time-for-stretchy-pants pregnant.
That’s just-a-few-months-until-you’re-not-pregnant-anymore pregnant.
I would walk out of the office that day with a long strip of ultrasound pictures that smelled like ink and held, in fuzzy black-and-white images, a challenging contrast to the girl who’d worked so hard for so long to feel dead inside. Beautiful, terrifying, and utterly undeniable, there it was. Proof of life.
The moment I saw my itty-bitty bean of a baby wiggling around in a cozy home perched right above my bladder—that perfect little profile, the zipper curve of a spine, minuscule fingers and toes, and a heartbeat that flashed like Morse code to my soul—I knew I would never be the same. I’d been living a mannequin’s existence: hollow, fake, unfeeling. I’d emptied myself out to protect myself from pain. Suddenly I had a purpose and a future that required not just my physical presence but my heartfelt participation. I’d accidentally made a tiny person, and I probably should have been scared to death, but through the sonar whoosh whoosh whoosh of our heartbeats weaving together in the exam room, we shared an unspoken promise: I would bring that baby into the world, and that baby would bring me to life.
* * *
I shed my identity as a tough girl, trading in the black leather jacket and steel-toed boots for an overstuffed diaper bag and a poorly fitted wedding dress. Since I was only seventeen, it seemed especially important that I act, speak, and look like a responsible adult if I wanted to be taken seriously as a mother. Fortunately, in 1993 mom jeans were the only jeans, so the look wasn’t hard to pull off, but I’d have to fake my way through the other stuff. I got my driver’s license, dropped all of my community-college classes, and picked up a decent full-time job working swing shifts at a twenty-four-hour call center.
For reasons that made perfect sense at the time, Steve and I decided to wait until after the baby was born to get married. We didn’t want people to think we were getting married just because I was knocked up. We didn’t want to rush things just because there was an actual human baby on the way. We didn’t want to feel like we had to get married just because all of our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, neighbors, and strangers expected us to. We were practically almost grown-ups, dammit, and we wanted to do things our way.
While I was pregnant, I would live in my parents’ house, work for as long as possible, and save every penny in preparation for our family. Steve would stay in his dorm on campus, an hour away, and complete his sophomore year as an engineering major on a full-ride athletic scholarship. The timing was good, because the baby was due in February, after football season, and we could get married in May, after finals. Our plan would give us a financial head start before the kid came, plus some time to arrange for a little wedding.
It was the most sensible way to move forward, but it left me largely alone to walk through pregnancy and prepare for a baby, while Steve’s life carried on virtually unchanged. He went to classes (when he felt like it), ate cafeteria food, worked out, weight-trained, went to practice, watched football film, drank cheap beer, and hung out with his friends. On weekends during the football season, I rode to home games with his parents and waited anxiously afterward for him to emerge from the locker room, bruised, swollen, exhausted, and—if his team lost—pissed. If there was an away game, he traveled by chartered plane or tour bus, played his heart out, and then was free to drink himself into oblivion.
Mostly I worked and slept and ate. I went to doctor appointments alone and then shared any news with Steve during a nightly phone call, telling him how big my expanding belly measured and reporting any lab results or interesting tidbits about fetal development. At my twenty-week appointment, I learned our baby’s gender and rushed home to wait by the phone, willing Steve to call me from the pay phone in his dorm so I could tell him his wish had been granted: We were having a boy.
He was so excited, he dropped the receiver and started running up and down the busy hall, shouting and cheering, “It’s a boy! It’s a boy! I have a son!” to a reception of hugs and handshakes and hearty congratulations. While the revelry went on, I sat in the dark on the floor in my childhood bedroom with the phone pressed hard against my ear, listening and smiling, relieved by his overwhelming joy and thankful for the celebration happening on the other end of the line. I would wait until after we hung up to break down sobbing.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was only ever supposed to be a temporary stop for Steve, the bad girl on his way to happily ever after with some basic sorority bitch. Obviously, we were equally responsible for this unplanned pregnancy, and together we had agreed to keep our baby, but in my eyes Steve was a golden boy who could do no wrong, and I was the go-nowhere loser who would only hold him back.
* * *
On a chilly Tuesday morning in February, with my fiancé (LOL) by my side, that baby and I made good on our promise to each other. I delivered him into the world, and he thrust me into a love so deep and so pure, it set my soul on fire.
With my son’s birth came my first real glimpse of God, and I don’t mean in the “miracle of life” kind of way. I mean that when I held my infant’s body against my chest, when I smelled his downy head and let his fingers curl around my thumb, when I stared at his perfectly pursed lips, I could see God at work. I could see clearly how blessings are sometimes born of bad circumstances, how happiness can come through heartbreak, how peace and discord can walk hand in hand, and how a messed-up seventeen-year-old who can’t even keep her own room clean can still do great things.
In his tiny face I saw a bigger picture.
I watched my little bundle of boy with awe and wonder for hours, filled with a fierce, abiding love and a fresh new fear of the future. I still wasn’t sure if I could do it—raise this child, be his mom, nurture him and protect him and guide him. I felt honored but so afraid, and familiar feelings of inadequacy came creeping back in to convince me I was in over my head. Then the baby, my baby—the first person I had willingly suffered and sacrificed for, the one I would easily die for—arched his soft back to stretch his squishy little body. He opened a pair of dark eyes to take in the world and he started to whimper, because when you are naked and small the world is big and scary. When I spoke softly to my infant son, he calmed at the sound of his mama’s voice, and just like that, to one person, mine had become the
voice of comfort and authority. And it was as if God Himself leaned in to whisper, Look what you can do.
At six feet six inches and 280 pounds, my young husband-to-be was a monster of a man. He had a baby face over broad shoulders and a sloping back, with lats that pushed his arms out and away from his sides when he walked. His thighs were so big he had to cut the seams on the leg holes of his boxers to make them fit, and when he stood next to me, it made me feel petite in that lame, cutesy, girly kind of way, and I loved it.
Steve made sort of a Neanderthal first impression, but he was actually smart. Like, super smart. He was the only athlete who lived in the freshman honors dorm, and he loved all kinds of nerdy shit like advanced math and building computers and playing board games. To be honest, he was so smart that sometimes he made me feel dumb, and I didn’t love that—but I actually didn’t hate it either, because I loved being loved by such a smart guy.
I thought Steve hung the moon and the stars, and I found great satisfaction in simply being his. It sounds so syrupy and gross when I say it like that, but it’s true. I felt validated by his awesomeness. With no real accomplishments of my own, I could cling to his, as if they somehow reflected my own capacity for greatness. I happily forged much of my identity from scraps of Steve’s life, believing, deep down, that I was only as good as the best person who loved me.
And so I wanted nothing more than to be “Steve’s wife” forever.