If You Could See What I See (28 page)

On my deck, my head throbbing from being drunk for the first time in forever, my body ill, I acknowledged that Blake and I had another problem. It was a clash of personalities.

Blake was used to leading. He’s a leader. A natural leader.

I, however, lead, too. And I cannot, will not, follow again, as I did with Aaron. I will not be out of control of my own life or my own head or my own emotions again. I will not give up that control ever. I will never, ever
follow
again in a relationship, nor will I live reacting to disasters that mess with my mental stability.

I will never let a man run the show. I will never cater to a man again, I will never be in a relationship where I have no voice or choices, I will never be smothered, I will never be manipulated by him or be toyed with in any shape or form. I will never alter myself in any way, or let a man push my personality around to suit his needs or wants. I will never allow myself to get trapped again.

I will not allow the man to control our sex life, and what Blake was doing now, not getting involved with me sexually, that smacked of control.

Control over me.

Blake is a man who wants a serious, committed relationship. He’s a man who wants the closeness and intimacy and trust that I am not giving any man again.

Therein lay our insurmountable problem.

 

During the third week of filming, I started having contractions.

I told Aaron. He waved his hand
in my face
and said, “You’re fine. You’re overreacting, emotional as usual. They’re the Braxton Hicks contractions I read about in the baby book.” Aaron had read three baby books. He was now an authority on my pregnancy. He told me what to eat and what not to eat, cleared food out of our pantry, and filled it with a whole bunch of stuff that looked like rabbit meal. I refused to eat it, so he called me a “neglectful mother.”

“What you eat now determines the health of my baby, Meggie, so eat this. We’re not leaving the table until you’ve eaten what I made, even if we have to sit here all night.” I refused to sit there the rest of the night, so he raged, then gave me the silent treatment for a week.

He was obsessive and critical. “I’m not sure how you’re going to be as a mother, Meggie, because you want to work so much and you have to have absolute control, and you’re a perfectionist and way too ambitious . . . don’t cry, I want to talk this out before the baby comes and I want you to be a good mother. Women like you who are career oriented often don’t have a lot of maternal skills.”

“Where did you read that?”

He hemmed and hawed and said, “I know it instinctively.”

And I said, “I’ll be a great mom. If you stop going to bed for weeks on end, if you stop throwing temper tantrums and being critical, and if you stop taking painkillers and smoking pot and instead take your medicine and see your doctors, maybe you’ll be a great dad.”

He flew off the handle at that, walked off our worksite, and I didn’t see him for a week. Our cameraman, sound technician, and assistant were thrilled to have him gone. So was I.

When the contractions returned he said, “You can’t get upset about every little thing. You’re high-strung to begin with. Try to ignore your emotions, Meggie. That’s what I do when I don’t know what to do with you. Damn.”

In the middle of the night, weeks later, I woke up with a gripping contraction, and I knew I was in trouble.

I woke Aaron. He said, “Lie down. You’re fine. Don’t be hysterical. At this stage of your pregnancy, you’ll be even more irrational and hypersensitive. I’m having serious concerns about you being a mother.”

I ignored him.

I drove to the hospital.

At least, I tried to drive to the hospital. When the pains became too sharp, my teeth clenched in agony, I pulled over and called an ambulance. The police and the paramedics arrived.

They were the kindest people. One of the police officers was a woman. She held my hand as I gave birth in the back of the ambulance. “It’s too soon,” I told them. “Oh, God, help me. It’s too soon.”

She was tiny.

She was not ready for our world.

Despite heroic efforts by the hospital staff, she was dead within two hours.

I held her in my arms at the end and watched the life drain out of her. She was a tiny soul leaving, returning to the heavens, her time another time.

Aaron was hysterical, furious, and raving. He was eventually dragged out of the hospital by security. He made vile accusations against the doctors and nurses, saying they had “murdered my child by incompetence. This is your fault. You did this! Fuck you!” He then started toppling all sorts of things in my hospital room, including my IV pole, medical equipment, and a medical cabinet.

I clutched my baby to my heart, though her heart had stopped beating—her face, her fingers, her toes, absolutely perfect, so fragile. Around me the doctors were restraining Aaron, his black curls and black feather flying, his jaw unshaven. He railed and yelled, and the most foul words came out of his mouth, along with spittle, his sweat flying.

Other doctors ran in, security ran in, a nurse jumped into the fray, and there was yelling and screaming.

The room was in chaotic disarray, like an uncontrollable human tornado had touched down. In the midst of that tornado I held my baby close and kissed her, my tears raining down on her still, pale face, my body bleeding and trembling. She had a shock of fuzzy black hair—from Aaron or from Sperm Donor Number Two? She had lips like a rosebud. She was so sweet, so loved.

I blamed myself for her death. I thought Aaron was right. I worked too hard, maybe I didn’t eat right, I was stressed and anxious, I cleaned late at night, I didn’t sleep enough, I became stuck on my racing and negative thoughts, and I obsessed over small things because I couldn’t control the cauldron of insanity in my life: Aaron.

I cried often, which probably upset the baby. She probably thought the tears were about her. She heard her mother crying. She had made her mother sad. I had also had small contractions and thought they were normal. I was wrong.

Yes, it was my fault. I killed my own baby. I suck. I hate myself.

I named her Josephine.

 

I have never felt that much pain in my life.

I thought I was being split in two with an ax.

I have never recovered from that split. I never will.

Some grief never leaves.

You deal with it as best you can.

That’s what I’ve done. I’ve done the best I could.

 

Josephine, my beautiful baby.

Always, always in my heart.

I miss you, my sweet. Every day I miss you.

I will see you again someday. I will hug you, and kiss you. We will play and laugh and read books and bake cookies.

I am so sorry.

Mommy loves you.

19

I
wasn’t surprised at the photo of my mother in the Living section of our local newspaper. I had seen the show a couple of days prior.

My mother was the featured guest with Emmy Shandil, who is the host of the nationally syndicated talk show
The Emmy Show
. My mother was dressed in the pages of her book. She’d had her favorite designer make the pages into a dress. The dress dropped to midcalf. It had a low neckline with a curved bodice and a slit in front. She wore shiny red heels with it. She was a cross between a book and Dorothy of
The Wizard of Oz
.

“I love your dress, Brianna,” Emmy gushed. She has exceptionally large teeth and a short brown bob. Now and then she fillets her guests if she doesn’t like them.

“Ask me to tell you what I’m trying to say with my dress.” My mother sat straight up in her chair, those red curls hanging down her back reminding me so much of Lacey’s.

“What are you trying to say with your dress, Brianna?” Emmy dutifully asked.

“Free yourself.” my mother declared, and stood. She then started pulling the pages of her book off her dress. “Free yourself from your inhibitions and fears that were drilled into you by your childhood, by your marriage, by your life.”

The audience chuckled.

“Free yourself from a spouse who tells you who to be, who smashes your sexual self, your spiritual self.” There went more pages. “Don’t let him suck you dry.”

The women cheered. Emmy Shandil, who went through a nasty, public divorce when her husband, Brian, had an affair with a twenty-year-old actress, stood up and flung her arms straight out. “He sucked me dry, Brianna!” she announced. “I’m dry!”

The audience laughed.

“Reinvent yourself and your love life, Emmy!”

“Oh, I’ve already reinvented my love life, Brianna. Hellllo, Tony!”

“You decide who you want to be.” My mother walked to the end of the stage to address the audience. “Stop being prey. Stop letting other people, your mother, your in-laws, your annoying neighbor, run your life.” Page, page, page.

“I will not be prey again! I am not prey!” Emmy said, standing beside my mother. “He was a creep! Weak chin, floppy bottom. Pig breath. He wore my panties!”

“Daydream. What do you want for your future?” my mother asked, pages flying. “Write it down. Write down the steps to get to that goal. Follow the steps. Are you frumpy?”

A number of people in the audience shouted, “Yes!”

“Then defrump yourself.” Page, page, page. “How can you be all you want to be if you’re a frump? How can you be good in bed if you feel ugly?”

Page, page, page.

In the end my sixty-plus-year-old mother was standing in one of our company’s leopard-print negligees and her shiny red heels, the audience totally enthralled. The lingerie had a tasteful, black gauzy skirt attached, with tiny crystals. “Join me, Emmy! Let’s vow to never become frumpy!”

Emmy didn’t hesitate. She’s as unrestrained as my mother. She unbuttoned her own blouse and yanked it open with flair. She was wearing one of our designs, a purple lace push-up bra that my mother gave her before the show. “I will never be a frump!”

“Join me, audience!” my mother encouraged. The camera panned. My mouth dropped open. A number of women were unbuttoning their blouses and baring their bras. Three men took off their shirts.

“Say it,” my mother commanded. “I won’t be frumpy any longer!”

“I won’t be frumpy any longer!” they boomed back.

“Take charge of your life,” my mother shouted over the clapping and hooting, an arm around Emmy. “Travel. Have adventures. Be beautiful! This is your life. Don’t you let it end without you in it!”

“I won’t, Brianna,” Emmy said, staring right into the camera. “I am beautiful! And Brian Forrester, my husband who ran off with a twenty-year-old named Tammy Underhill of Oklahoma City, you are ugly! Yes, ugly and frumpy!”

“Say it again, people!” my mother shouted. “I won’t be frumpy any longer!”

“I won’t be frumpy any longer!” The audience bellowed back.

Brianna O’Rourke and Emmy Shandil picked up pages of my mother’s book from the floor and threw them to the audience. The camera showed the audience jumping for the pages, half dressed. Emmy grabbed my mother and they danced across the stage, Emmy in her purple bra and my mother in our leopard-print negligee and red heels.

 

We talked later by phone. I complimented my mother on her page-throwing performance. She said, “Thank you, dear. Did you receive your hat and scarf? Oh, I’m so glad you love it. The colors are perfect, aren’t they? Are you sleeping better?”

“Straight through.” No. It was worse.

“Are you being a workaholic, as usual?”

“Not at all.” Fifteen hours a day.

“Are you taking time to relax and rejuvenate?”

“Every day. Yoga. Reading. Listening to music during my daily serenity walk in the woods.”

“I wish you would quit lying to me, young lady.”

“I know, Mom. I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

I woke up to a mouse.

No kidding, a mouse’s nose was inches from mine.

I screeched, scared the mouse, and scared Regan, who let it go accidentally, and the mouse scampered across the bedspread, leaped like a kamikaze pilot off the bed, and skittered down the hallway.

“Help me, help me!” Regan yelled, running after it. “George is loose, Mom! George is loose!”

Lacey hollered from downstairs, “Then show us how fast you can move on the football field and chase that thing down, Regan. Move! Move!”

“Come here, George, come here!” Regan thundered out of the guest bedroom as Hayden came in. I was in one of Lacey’s flannel nightgowns. It had yellow tulips on it. “Hey, Hayden.”

“Hi, Aunt Meggie.” He climbed onto the bed. He was wearing a long, blue nightshirt with a picture of Marilyn Monroe on it. “I’m glad you stayed the night after game and pizza night.”

“Me too. It was fun. Thanks for inviting me.”

“You’re welcome. Mom seems a lot happier since you came home. Not so stressed out, less yelling.”

“I’m happier now that I’m home, too.” That was true. “How are you, honey?”

Those blue eyes showed how he was. He semiwhispered, “I’m scared.”

“Because . . .”

“Because remember when I told you that I’m going to write an article for the school newspaper about being in the wrong body?”

“Yes.” I envisioned him being jumped in the hallways.

“I wrote it.”

“You did?” I envisioned him smashed into a locker.

“Yeah. Doing the video with you helped a lot. It helped me say out loud all that I think in my head. I wrote the article and I’ve edited it, and wrote more, and deleted some stuff, but I already talked to the newspaper teacher and she wants to print it, but she’s waiting for me to be, like, totally ready.”

I felt my skin tingle. As in, tingle
with fear.
A kid coming out as transgender. When I was in school, kids didn’t even come out when they were gay. The rules were: Open the door to the closet, walk straight in, and lock it up with six dead bolts. Don’t say a word.

Anyone who appeared gay hid it. If they didn’t, they were teased, harassed, beaten up. It was awful. It was wrong. It was sick.

And now Hayden.
Transgender
. More confusion for people, more rejection, more “he is mentally ill” or “ewwww, gross, that’s so weird” or “perverted and disgusting and dangerous.” Gentle, kind, sweet, lovely Hayden.

I shuddered thinking about what might happen to him. “Hayden, I’m going to say it again: This could get really ugly, really fast.”

“I know, but what’s already ugly is not being myself. It’s hard for people to understand. I get it. The only way I can explain it, Aunt Meggie, is to ask you: Do you feel like a woman?”

“Yes.” A struggling woman. A messed-up woman, but yes. I felt like a woman and I like being a woman.

“If I told you that you had to be a man, cut your hair like a man, dress like a man, take on the personality of a man, and I forced you to do that for years on end, never letting you act like a woman, who you were in your heart and your head, how would that be?”

“I couldn’t do it. I could not act like a man.” I thought about it, knowing there was absolutely no way I could get the full picture here. “It would feel totally unnatural, fake, and like you said, I would feel like a lie.”

“That’s it. Now picture a whole lot of depression and loneliness, hating my own body because it’s the wrong one, seeing a girl trapped in a boy body when I look in the mirror, having people treat me like a boy when I know I’m a girl, or treating me like a gay guy, and not dressing like a girl, and you’d start to get it. I mean, I’m a girl, not a boy. I know it, I’ve always known it, but I can’t be my full self. Only a part of my full self, and that’s no good. It’s not good enough.”

I hugged him. “Hayden, I’m here for you, and I back you up one hundred and ten per cent. Always have, always will.”

Hayden left to work on a design he had for a pajama line I wanted to launch. “You’ll love the frills,” he said. “Totally darling.”

The second he left, Cassidy skipped on in wearing a white flannel nightgown with pink ribbons and pink tulips. It covered her from neck to toe.

“Aunt Meggie, I think it’s going to be wicked hard for me to get into heaven.” She sat cross legged on the bed.

“I feel that way about myself, sweets. I don’t let it worry me much at this point. But why do you say that?”

“Did Mom talk to you yet?” she whispered.

“No, she didn’t.”

“I snuck out last night after she and Dad went to sleep. I had to sneak-ola because I’m grounded.” She flipped her red curls back. She looks so much like her mom. “I went to one party, came home, hugged Mom good night, then I went back out through my window to meet up with Cody.”

“Did Cody spend the night again?”

She gasped. “Mom told you about that!” She threw her hands in the air, so indignant that her mother told me she was having sleepovers with her boyfriend.

“I’m afraid so.”

“She shouldn’t have! That’s private!”

“Doesn’t sound like it was that private when your mom and dad found you snuggled up with Cody under your pink bedspread like two teddy bears.”

She huffed and puffed as only a teenager can do. “That night was
gross.
I can hardly get it out of my head. I feel damaged
forever.
Mom came in to check on me. Cody and I were both asleep and he was going to leave at five in the morning because he had to study for chemistry. Anyhow, she barged on in and she screamed when she saw there were two heads in my bed instead of one. We were so scared, we started screaming, too. I mean, we thought she was an ax murderer! Cody said he almost wet himself!”

More huffing and puffing from Cassidy as I tried not to laugh.

“And it got worse, if you can believe
this,
Aunt Meggie! Cody tried to get out of bed quick to save me from the ax murderer and he got all tangled up in the sheets and hit the floor on his
face,
then he stood up with his arms out, ready to karate chop the murderer.”

I pictured that precious, precious scene. My sister in her nightgown, pregnant, bent over screaming, and Cody and Cassidy screaming back on full throttle, the whole room exploding as if, indeed, an ax murderer had wandered in, then Cody struggles out of bed and falls on his face and struggles up to karate chop my sister.

I laughed and laughed, my stomach starting to ache.

“Then Dad ran in because he heard everyone screaming their heads off, and I mean, like, Aunt Meggie”—her eyes widened—“I heard his feet pounding, and all of a sudden he was pushing Mom out of the way like, you know, he was going to do battle or something, and Mom turned on the light and well . . .” Her voice trailed off and she shrugged.

“And, well, you and Cody were there naked, not an ax murderer to be found.” I wiped tears from my cheeks.

“Not naked, I’m sure, Aunt Meggie.” She was indignant. “I was wearing this. This is my favorite nightgown. I like the pink tulips, and he was wearing . . .” Her brow wrinkled. “Okay, you’re right. Cody was buck naked . . . standing up . . .” Her brow furrowed.

“Not what your parents wanted to see.”

“What was even worse, Aunt Meggie, is that
Dad
was naked.” Cassidy slapped both hands to her eyes. “That’s why I feel that I’m damaged. I saw my daddy naked. Gross, oh so gross. That’s not a sight for young eyes. It’s like a scar in me now forever.”

I pictured yet another precious, precious scene and tried to muffle my laughter.

“It’s not that funny.” Cassidy shook her head in bafflement. “They were pissed. I mean, Dad was like,
yelling
at Cody to get the hell out of the house, and I think he hurt Cody’s feelings ’cause Cody started to cry and said he was sorry a million times, but Dad threw Cody out naked, then he threw his clothes out the window, and Mom was screaming at me that this was her house, I had to follow her rules, I could get pregnant if I skipped a pill, my life would be over, all this stuff . . .”