by Unknown
Dear God, only three more days and I’ll be rid of him. I won’t even have to spend Thanksgiving, Christmas, or, most importantly, New Years with him. Thank goodness, I’ll get to spend my favorite holiday in peace.
And, yes, I’ve dreamt of you too.
November 20, 2006
I sit in the waiting room of the OB/GYN office in Womack Army Medical Center, my leg bouncing up and down excitedly as I wait for the nurse to call me back. I’m exactly sixteen weeks along.
My mom and Anni are with me for this special day. We’re here to officially find out the sex of the baby, even though we all already know it’s a girl. We just know. Finally, my name is called, and the three of us follow the young nurse back into one of the exam rooms. The nurse takes all my vitals, and after looking at my record, she breathes a sigh of relief when she sees I’m starting to gain weight.
It was seriously mind-blowing. The exact day I moved into my second trimester, the morning sickness abruptly stopped, replaced with an overwhelming hunger I had never felt before in my life, along with a craving that wouldn’t stop. McDonald’s McRibs. And just my luck, the damn things weren’t available yet.
McRibs are only available for a limited time every year. But the demanding little thing growing inside me would hear none of it. My only choice? I actually called McDonald’s. Yep, I called them and pestered them until they finally gave in and told me when the secret release day of the McRib would come this time. And thank you, baby Jesus, it was only in a week. I could hold the little mongrel off until then, distracting her with chicken nuggets dipped in BBQ sauce.
The second the clock struck 10:30am on the day the McRib was released for the season, my happy ass was in line at McDonald’s with what I’m sure was a scary, ravenous look in my eyes as I stepped up to the register and ordered one.
My mom and I sat down at a table, and as she ate hers at a normal pace, I devoured mine in three bites. I hopped up from the table, BBQ sauce still covering me from one cheek to the other, and ordered two more. Those were gone in minutes. Mom watched me with wide eyes, and I could tell she was trying to hold in laughter as she handed me a napkin. I wiped my mouth, let out a relieved groan, spun my butt sideways in the booth, and lay down on the bench seat. It was the best day I’d had in a long time.
The nurse tells me it’ll only be a few more minutes until one of the ultrasound rooms would open up, and we could just wait here until then. True to her word, only a little while later, she comes and gets us, leading us to a curtained off area of a dark room. She pulls over another chair to sit beside the one next to the padded table I’m about to lie on, and Anni and Mom take their seats, the excitement evident on both of their faces.
“Okay, Miss Kayla, just hop up there and roll your pants down as low as you are comfortable with, and pull up your shirt to just under your breasts. Your technician will be right with you,” the nurse tells me, and then leaves, pulling the curtain closed behind her.
I do as she told me to, exposing my little bump, and I rub it in wide circles. “All right, baby. It’s show time. No hiding the goodies, okay? Make Mommy proud.” I’d read in one of my parenting magazines that sometimes the baby could be in a position where you couldn’t see their private area. I’m so excited, and have been counting down the days until this appointment. It would be devastating not to get a glance, confirming I’ll soon have a little princess. I’ve been holding off buying anything for the baby until I know for a fact she’s a girl.
The technician calls out, “Knock, knock,” and I let out an anxious laugh, telling her to come on in. She takes a seat on the high, rolling stool next to the sonogram machine on the other side of me, and gives me a big grin. “Are you excited? I’m excited. This is my favorite appointment during a patient’s pregnancy,” she says happily.
I like her already. Nothing is more frustrating than being super excited about something and the people around you being party poopers. “I’m dying. Let’s do this!” I plead.
“Eep! Okay. I’m just going to squirt this on your belly, but we’ve got these new fancy warmers now, so it’s nice and heated, not painfully cold like it used to be,” she explains, shaking a white bottle above my belly before squeezing a large amount onto my lower stomach. She sits it to the side and grabs the wand, sticking it into the glob of clear goop.
Soon, the loud, fast sound of my baby’s beating heart fills the room, and just like the first time I heard it, and at the following couple of appointments I’ve had since I found out I was pregnant, tears fill my eyes. I look over at my mom and see her wide smile.
“Alrighty, let’s give this little one a photo shoot,” the technician says, more to herself than to me, as she sits closer to the screen and pushes buttons on the keyboard. The image switches to a much closer angle, and she turns down the volume of the heartbeat.
I watch fascinated as the baby comes into view. You can see her little hands are up next to her face, and we can even see it when she opens her mouth wide, like she just yawned.
She moves the wand to the left side of my belly, wiggles it a few times to get the baby to move a little, and that’s when we see it. Drawing an arrow on the screen, the technician types out G-I-R-L. As plain as if my daughter is lying right here in front of me, we see her little hoo-ha. My mom was right. Josalyn Ava it is.
The technician says she’s going to take a few more pictures to have on record for measurements, to keep track of her growth, and all I can do is nod. I’m overwhelmed with the knowledge I will be the mother of a beautiful little girl. I knew she’d be a girl. It was just a feeling, even if my mom hadn’t said anything and put it in my head. But actually seeing it, observing that she’s clearly got female parts, it fills me with the most wonderful emotions I’ve ever felt. For the first time in my life, I feel complete. As long as I have her, I won’t need anything else in the world. Anything else good that comes along will just be icing on the cake.
You know me all too well. My only desire, to bridge our division
Thanksgiving, 2006
I’ve been thinking a lot about Jason lately. It’s weird. I mean, he’s always in the back of my mind. Every day, something reminds me of him, whether it’s a song on the radio or a memory that just happens to pop into my head. So it’s extra creepy when after spending all day helping my mom and granny cook Thanksgiving dinner, and then enjoying it with practically my whole family, I get a call on my cell phone. The caller ID tells me it’s him.
My heart jumps into my throat, and my hand shakes as I press the send button and lift the phone to my ear. When I go to say, “Hello,” my voice catches, so I clear my throat and try again, this time succeeding.
“Hey there, beautiful.” Oh, dear God. That voice. That perfect, deep, rich, Texas-accented voice. My knees buckle beneath me, and I plop down on the side of my bed.
“Hey, Jason,” I breathe. “Happy Thanksgiving.” I’m so proud of myself for getting the words out.
“Happy Thanksgiving to you, too. How are you feeling?” he asks.
His question confuses me. I haven’t heard from him in six months. Although we’ve remained friends on MySpace, he’s never commented on one of my pictures or anything. Has he been keeping up with my profile? Does he already know I’m pregnant? He answers my questions without me having to voice them, as always, knowing exactly what I’m thinking.
“I’ve looked at every picture, read every comment and note…I know you’re having a little girl. I’ve wanted to message you for so long, but with you being pregnant, I thought you were finally happy with Aiden, and I didn’t want to mess anything up,” he confesses.
“Then why are you calling me now?” I question quietly.
“I just…had a feeling. I felt like I needed to call you. I know it sounds weird, but something just told me I should call and check on you. Are you okay? Everything going all right?” he asks, and I can hear the genuine concern in his voice.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Aiden is deployed again, so I’m actually bett
er than before,” I tell him.
“Wait, what?” he asks, confused.
“Aiden and I are anything but happy together, Jason. Yeah, I’m having a baby girl. I’m so,” I let out a heavy sigh, “so very happy to be having a baby. But the circumstances aren’t what you think.”
“Tell me about it, babe. God, I’ve missed talking to you. Just unload. Tell me everything,” he prompts.
And I do. I tell him absolutely every detail of what’s been going on since his MySpace messages stopped coming. I even send him the links to my blog posts so he can read anything I might’ve forgotten in my outpouring of the last six months.
And just like that, I have my best friend back, and exactly like I thought, it’s like no time has passed at all.
From: Jason Robichaux
December 8, 2006
I remember kind of blowing you off when you asked me a long time ago about me wanting kids. You said you saw on my old Plenty of Fish account that I wanted them someday, but then I told you I couldn’t have any. I don’t think I ever got around to telling you why I can’t.
I was like eleven or twelve when it happened. I was at the park—you know the one off FM2351 before you get to my neighborhood? I was there with a group, Boy Scouts or a church thing, I don’t fucking remember. What I do remember is riding my bike, and then all of a sudden the most excruciating pain I’ve ever felt hit me right in the nuts. Like, forget what it feels like to get kicked in the balls…not that you know what it feels like…but multiply what you think that feels like by about a million.
I was on the ground holding my junk and crying, and my buddy ran over to me to see what was wrong. All I could do was tell him to call my dad. At the time, there were no cell phones or anything, and he was a friend I played with regularly, so he thankfully had my number memorized. He got on his bike and hauled ass down the road to the gas station and called my parents.
When my dad got there only a few minutes later, he picked me up and put me in the truck. I thought I had just wracked myself with my bike or something, and that the pain would just go away, so he took me home. But before we got there, the truck heater caught on fire, filling the whole cab with smoke. By the time we got home, the pain had doubled instead of lessened.
My mom kept asking me what was wrong. I was in so much overwhelming pain that I cussed her out. I used every profanity I’d learned up to that point, but through the cursing, she was able to make out that something was really wrong with my balls.
This is the part that pissed me off. There are so many fucking hospitals and urgent care clinics within just a couple miles of where we live. And yet, my mother made Dad drive all the way downtown to Texas Children’s. At the time, I thought she didn’t care I was in so much pain. Couldn’t she hear me screaming at the top of my lungs in the back seat? In the end though, I’m sure it was for the best, since I had to have surgery.
When they finally got me to the hospital, my dad picked me up again and ran into Emergency. All my parents could tell them was I was having severe pain in my testicles.
They got me back in a room, and when they pulled off my jeans and underwear, I watched as my dad seriously got ghostly pale. I don’t know why I remember that, and how he couldn’t be in the room after he saw my balls were literally blue. Not the metaphorical kind.
Anyways, they immediately gave me morphine for the pain. I remember I kept seeing a bunny on the floor…
They took me back into surgery and fixed me up. Apparently it’s a pretty common thing when boys hit puberty. What happened to me is called torsion, and it’s when the two nuts start twisting around each other inside the sack, and it eventually cuts off all the blood circulation. So they stitched each one of my balls to its correct side of my scrotum. They caught it just in time before I would’ve lost one, but after the test results came back, the doctor said I’d have less than a 1 percent chance of ever producing a child naturally.
Which, even at that young age, sucked so bad. I was adopted, and I was an only child, so even when I was little, I always said I would one day have a big family with lots of kids.
I still want that. I want four kids, just like your parents had. I’ll either have to adopt, or do all the fertility shit my parents tried before they eventually adopted me.
From: Kayla Lanmon
December 9, 2006
Gross.
From: Kayla Lanmon
December 9, 2006
Totally just kidding. Dear God, I’m so glad I’m having a girl. Jeez, between the two of us, if we ever had a boy, he’d be fucked in the balls department. Mix your torsion with the fact the boys in my family seem to have one ball that doesn’t like to drop, and he’d have some bad luck. My girl only has to worry about getting her mommy’s itty bitty titties.
I felt her kick for the first time today. It was crazy. At first I thought it was just gas or something (so sexy) but it kept happening over and over. You can’t feel it on the outside with your hand yet, but I could feel it inside. So cool. I’m starting to like the feeling of being pregnant now. After all the morning sickness went away and I was able to keep down some food, it hasn’t been bad at all.
They call the second trimester the honeymoon trimester. It’s after all the symptoms of the first, and before you get so big and uncomfortable during the third. The only bad thing is nothing freakin’ fits me. Hey, maternity clothes makers! Skinny chicks get knocked-up too! I used the hair-tie trick for a while, where you loop the tie through the buttonhole and then hook it onto the button to keep your pants closed. Yeah, I’m getting way too big for that now. So I went to Motherhood Maternity at the mall, and I tried on jeans in their “Extra-Small”. It looked like I was trying on a circus tent.
From the back, you can’t even tell I’m pregnant. I’m just as little as I’ve always been, only now I have this little soccer ball right in front. I’ll take some pictures and show you.
From: Jason Robichaux
December 14, 2006
So how long are you going to keep working? Are you going to keep your job and just take maternity leave, or are you going to quit? Personally, I think you should quit. You said you only have the job so you feel useful, and you can’t get more useful than being a good mommy and raising your girl.
I have an old friend who had a baby and became a stay at home mom, and she eventually started going a little crazy though. So maybe you could finish up your degree or something. I’m sure there’s a bunch of the classes you need that you could just take online. I hate that you’ve given up your dream of becoming a writer. Your blog posts are so fun to read; I can only imagine what one of your books would be like.
I’ve refrained from reading the ones from when you lived here. I’ve opened them up a couple times, but ended up chickening out. I don’t want to remember what an asshole I was to you. I mean, I should, I deserve it, but I already feel guilty enough. I don’t want to relive that shit.
Anyways.
I busted my ass when I got to Canada the other day. I got off the plane all decked out in my Texas shit, Wranglers and my cowboy boots, and as soon as I stepped outside onto the ground, my feet shot out from under me and I landed right on my ass. Not fun.
From: Kayla Lanmon
December 18, 2006
I talked to Casey at work today. I warned her that I’d be quitting in a few months. I already can’t stand up at work for my whole shift. I had to buy a cushioned fold-up chair and bring it to work, because my back and hips start hurting when I stand for too long. I’m not even that big yet. But the doctor said it’s this stuff called relaxin in my system. It’s what gets your pelvis to loosen and then open up to let the baby out. It sucks. It feels like my hip is going to pop out of joint. Casey was very understanding though, and made me promise I’d bring the baby to see her.
I’m thinking about taking a tour of FTCC. It’s Fayetteville’s community college. Before I moved to Texas, I had gone to Methodist College. It was a private college that cost an obscene amount of money. B
ack then, all I had ever heard was ‘college is expensive,’ always hearing things about student loans and stuff. So I thought the price of their courses were the norm. Turns out, the same College Algebra class I took there, I could have taken at Kingwood College or here at FTCC for a fourth of the cost. There should be a class in high school that teaches you that shit.
From: Jason Robichaux
December 20, 2006
All right, I’m jumping on the bandwagon, because I’m bored as fuck. I’m sending you one of these survey things that’s always going around MySpace.
Facts
Name: Jason
Birthday: January 25
Star Sign: Aquarius
Height: 6’
Weight: 185
Shoe Size: 10W
Favorites
Favorite Color: Red
Favorite Singer: Serj Tankien
Favorite Movie: Boondock Saints
Favorite TV Show: Three Stooges
Favorite Play: Phantom of the Opera
Favorite Food: Meat
Dreams
Dream Vacation: Egypt
Dream Job: Billionaire Project Controls Manager
Dream Pet: Pharaoh Hound
Dream House: Plantation style