The Definition of Insanity

Stop me if you heard this one. A recently laid off man is job-hunting on his computer. His wife asks him to watch the baby while she straightens up the kitchen, and almost immediately the baby starts to cry. The wife hollers a suggestion to stop the crying, and the husband shoots it down because he tried it before and it didn't work. She tells him to try it again; just because it didn't work last time doesn't mean it won't this time. The husband snaps back, "Honey, do you realize that's the very definition of insanity?" And his wife says, "Not with a baby!"

Okay, I know that wasn't funny. That wasn't even a joke; that was an actual exchange heard in our house just a few weeks ago. Except our house isn't our house anymore. We recently survived what will be remembered in our family as the Crash of '09. As of late we are sharing space with my sister and her fiancé, because times are hard, we needed help, and so did they. Of course, after we were forced to start a Code Enforcement investigation on our house, broke our lease, packed most of our things into a storage unit, and moved in, times got even harder when my husband lost his job, leaving the two of us unemployed spouses alone in a house to debate such issues. Now we don't know what is right and what is wrong. That is one definition of insanity.

For a little while there I was doing an okay job of standing by my man. It was actually working out well for the most part. I put my husband in charge of all the bills, and he started a record on Quicken of our expenses, our budget, our payments, etc. Where we came up short (thanks to our outrageous health insurance premiums and the outlandish utility bills we charged up living in a house with next to no insulation) he found a way to provide, and I didn't question. He kept track of where we were on the grocery budget and how much I could spend at the store each week. I took care of the planning of meals, the grocery list, the cooking, the dishes, the occasional deep cleaning, and other household worries. I watched the baby while he worked, and he watched her in the evenings while I worked. I asked for help when I needed it, sometimes he offered it, and vice versa. Having to move out of our house was not an ideal situation, but at least it moved us into a safer, cleaner environment for Lucy and took some major economic pressure off of us and my sister. It also put us closer to my husband's job, which didn't hurt. We cut our time and effort losses (the Code Enforcement case is ongoing), and we looked forward to getting caught up and back on our feet, and back into our own place as soon as we could, without the constraints of a lease. Then things really began to look up when I landed a contract writing job that offered me part-time hours and a pay scale similar to the day job I left in June. With my sister's occasional baby-sitting help, I started squeezing work time where I could into my busy schedule, and Lucy's.

Then, it seemed, the bottom dropped out when my husband came home one Friday evening and informed me he no longer worked for the law firm where he'd been employed for the last two and a half years. Due to budget cuts and re-assignments of duties, his position in the debt consultation division was no longer needed. Got to love the irony in that. At the beginning of October we were informed that we had my husband's remaining pay and vacation, a reasonable severance, and less than a month left on our health insurance coverage. And that was about it until my paychecks started rolling in. So my husband's new job became looking for a new job, and the following Monday he started working from home, with me.

How is this ever going to work, I thought, from the very first day. Remember how I was saying I wouldn't question how my husband fulfilled his role as long as he did it? Well, I got used to that idea, and suddenly I was presented with the challenge of standing by my man right in my own proverbial kitchen, not because he was there to see me but because he didn't have anywhere else to go. The bills were still getting paid (somewhat), food was still on the table (from his mom), and we still had a roof over our heads (my sister's), but I couldn't help wondering how long all that would last when my husband was spending so much time at our house. I tried to carry on as if he was just away at the office for another day. But while he was job-hunting I found it extremely difficult to just pretend he wasn't there, especially when I had my hands full of dirty dishes and the baby started screaming, or when I had my hands full of dirty diaper and the cats started fighting, or when I had my hands full of . . . you get the picture.

In the meantime, out of necessity, I also worked. Through my sister who was also laid off and had recently found work, I'd been referred to a self-named business guru who was publishing a sort of directory of industry professionals and donating proceeds for cancer research through a celebrity charity. My sister had taken over the position of Tour Coordinator from a friend of ours who was resigning, and she would be planning the book's publicity tour remotely from Austin. But the publishers in Vegas also needed some writing help with their website, their blog, some of their press releases, some of the copy in the book itself, and in the future possibly even a ghostwritten book about the upcoming publicity tour. She pointed them in my direction, and after a series of short phone interviews it was determined that I would be the book's newest editor and copy writer.

Just a few short weeks before my husband lost his job, I signed a contract and began work on my first professional writing job. And I was excited! I was working ten to twenty hours a week on my own, reporting to my employers by phone or by e-mail between feedings and diaper changes. I was rounding up all the materials I'd been sent from the previous editor, who'd resigned to spend more time with family, and I was about to embark on a mission to contact over a hundred artists and professionals so I could write or edit biographical paragraphs and feature articles about them, for their individual spreads in the book.

But it seemed as soon as I signed the contract red flags started popping up. When I sent in my first invoice (for my first four days of work), the accounting department tried to negotiate my pay amount, citing the contract they'd sent me to sign as "unclear". Because of this lack of clarity, not twenty days after I signed my ninety-day trial contract, my employers asked me to sign a revision that said I had to work more hours for the same rate of pay. I refused, and they backed off, assuring me they just wanted me to understand the job would require closer to twenty hours a week than ten, that they didn't want to be "taken advantage of". Then I began experiencing a flood of problems when reaching out to contact their clients.

The contact list I'd been sent turned out to be inaccurate and unorganized, e-mail addresses weren't working, and an e-mail signature I'd been asked to use, which was full of links advertising the project, kept tripping up my spam filter and those of my would-be recipients. Few people were returning my calls or my e-mails, which I was making from my personal cell phone and a Gmail address I set up just for the job, because I wasn't furnished with any of it. I was given a toll free callback number to give out, as well as an inbox e-mail address, but I was not given access to my messages either way. I had to depend on the project office in Vegas to send me my messages. By the time I decided to drop the spammy signature, stop trying to reach clients by phone, and give them my Gmail address to reply to, communications from my bosses had all but ceased.

I hadn't heard from Lisa, the woman who'd hired me, in weeks. Her husband and partner, Todd, and the sales manager, Brad, were e-mailing me and on rare occasions calling me, but it became apparent that many e-mails supposedly from Brad were actually written by Todd. Soon it became obvious so were the communications from the "accounting department", a separate company employed by my bosses, or so they'd implied. By then I'd already realized their local business address was a UPS box (conveniently explained by their recent change in headquarters to Vegas), and I figured out their accounting department was Todd. And I still hadn't received the standardized time sheet they'd promised me, or any paychecks for that matter (according to my contract they had thirty days from my invoices, and that time was not quite up). Whenever I made inquiries on these and other issues I was given short, vague, dismissive answers alluding to the pre-launch publicity gala scheduled to occur in Vegas that month. They were running around like crazy trying to get ready for it, and things would be back on track after that, they said, thanking me for my patience and good work. I was getting frustrated at this point, especially when I learned that the friend who'd referred my sister was still waiting for her last two months of pay. I also wondered why the previous editor had really quit; it certainly seemed like she hadn't gotten much work done. My load was starting to feel too large for someone coming in less than two months before press time. And I still hadn't been given a concrete date on when that was supposed to be. The book was supposed to be selling in January.

After about six weeks of this mess (by then my first paycheck was officially overdue) I learned that the huge, star-studded, charity-benefitting gala event they'd been using to sell their product all along was canceled less than a week in advance, causing the charity beneficiaries and some of the clients to drop out of the project. And I learned this not from my bosses but from my sister, who'd been experiencing her own problems on the job. At this point we were reading clients' testimonies on ripoffreport.com, and it became undeniably obvious we were not going to be paid. So I was forced to admit to myself that I'd been scammed and decide what my legal options were. At the end of October when yet another invoice became contractually overdue, I wrote my letter of notice. My bosses responded by pleading with me to reconsider, promising to pay me by the end of the week and on time thereafter. I told them I'd reconsider pending payment, and if they paid me everything I'd billed them for, I'd finish my contract. They thanked me and told me to stay tuned for a conference call later that week, and that was the last I heard from them. I still haven't seen a dime. The only light in any of it is the clause in my contract that gave me ownership of my written materials if they were just late enough with my pay. Of course, they were, so I wasn't required to turn in anything I'd written for their use. Unfortunately I can't really do anything else with it. No future employers will want to read the materials I wrote for a book that was never published because it was a scam.

In the midst of all this I was sharing with my husband the space I'd convinced myself was mine to rule, trying to figure out how one stands by a man who's barely standing himself. We'd agreed to a half-on, half-off system. He'd spend the mornings in the office, looking for a job while I watched Lucy. Then I'd have the office for the afternoons and on Saturdays, while he watched Lucy. But it didn't work out that way. After a couple disheartening weeks of full-time job-hunting, my husband started getting out of bed later, starting the hunt later, showering and getting dressed later, going out on errands later, getting home later, and therefore handing over the office later. These delays in combination with Lucy's nursing needs and our need to eat dinner each night cut my work hours into smaller and more erratic pieces. And when Saturdays rolled around my attempts to catch up became little wars over the better computer, my husband's. I'd found myself in a situation not unlike the old one. There I was again, working on making money, working on the house, taking care of the child, asking for help, going through power struggles, and feeling completely overwhelmed. Only this time my husband wasn't reporting to work every day. This time we weren't in our own house, not even our own bedroom. This time was worse than before. So in an effort to keep from going insane, ironically enough, I drove myself in the opposite direction of where I wanted to go. I gave my husband one more plea, like I had so many times before, just in a more blunt form of language.

"What do you want me to do?" I asked him, many times over the course of several days.

If there is ever a time I ask my husband not to do something (and there is), I offer him an alternative. If he's not making me happy, I try to tell him how he can make me happy. I ask him to do the same for me. Because despite what he tells me in times of peace, I'm not always making him happy. But he won't do it, and I can't figure out why. Again I've been left to come up with my own conclusions.

So I guess I was just driving myself insane. I guess this is just another case of goose and gander politics, and I should just deal with it. Maybe when the kingdom beats up on a man, the castle beats up on a woman? In an effort to keep myself from going insane, I've made a decision. If my husband can decide what his job is, do it, and not worry about much else, I can too. If he can "come home" from a day of his worries and take the evening to relax, so can I. Now that I'm free of my first so-called writing job, I've decided to relieve myself of the responsibilities of work and finance, just like my husband, in action, has relieved himself of the responsibilities of the house. I'll take care of the house and the baby all day, I'll cook, I'll clean, and I’ll do the shopping. But I'm not going to worry about much else. I've tried, and my repeated actions always yield the same results. It wasn't my dream to give my husband so much responsibility, nor was it my dream to take on so much for myself. I didn't ask for this role, but I'll play it.

My father, a minister, cherishes an essay Wendell Berry wrote on poetry and marriage; in lieu of premarital counseling it's required reading for any couple he marries, including my husband and me. To paraphrase Berry's thoughts, what you alone think marriage is going to be, it won't be. I was warned of this, and it appears to be true. Because I thought we'd live in our own house, take care of it, work hard for it, and enjoy it. I at least thought we'd eat dinner together. But I'm typing this as I eat mine alone.

Stand By Your Man

I think Tammy Wynette had my husband in mind. Relating to old school country tunes has never been my bag, but Tammy and I might have a thing or two in common. In fact Tammy might have something in common with every woman who's ever been married; maybe I just don't know it.

My primary wedded role model, my mom, seems to think it's so. Whenever I get on the phone with her to chew about whatever my husband's doing wrong today, I hear a little Tammy in her. Common pearls from my mother include "Try to catch him doing something right" and "It's hard on him too", and my favorite "Things will never be 100% equal". From someone I used to consider a raging feminist, this advice strikes me as strange. I don't know. Maybe she just really loves my husband and wants him to win.

There are a few things about my husband that must be understood. First of all, family in the traditional sense is a second language for him. My husband went home from the hospital in Austin in 1973 with his grandparents. His parents were young and inexperienced when it came to children: his father the eldest of three street kids adopted by a postal worker and his wife, a teacher, his mother the youngest of six born to a military man and his wife. They'd married after finding they were expecting, probably because that's just what people did, but when my husband came along, I guess they just decided they couldn't handle it. My daughter and I take our name from the postal worker and the teacher who opened their home to three children from the street, and then did it again for a grandson, my husband. He stayed with them until he was old enough to go to school, which he started just before his fifth birthday. Then he finally lived with his parents, who were a little bit older and wiser in their mid-twenties. Before he was ten years old however, they were divorced, but not before my husband witnessed some drug use and some domestic violence. He and his mother moved in with her parents, but the situation proved unstable when his aging maternal grandmother attempted to harm him in her increasing senility. So it was back to the paternal grandparents' house for him, and there he stayed until after his grandfather passed away. Then he was a freshman in high school and decided to have one more try with his mother, who was finally living on her own. The situation proved volatile, and he only stayed the length of a semester before a fight with his mother prompted him to move back in with his grandmother. He finished high school there and started his freshman year at UT. Barely a year later his grandmother went to live in a nursing home and soon passed away, leaving him eighteen and virtually all alone.

He was left a reasonable sum of money and his grandparents' house as an inheritance, or so he thought. After he blew through the money, as any eighteen-year-old might, he learned that his grandmother's will had been changed by her cousins, who'd been granted power of attorney while looking after her estate before her death. However legitimate or illegitimate it might have been, the house was apparently theirs, and my husband was forced out of it, coming home one day to find the locks had changed. By then he'd dropped out of school and he didn't have a decent job if any, he and his mother didn't get along, and his grandmother's funeral was the first time he'd seen his father in years, so he went to the only place he could.

My husband's best friend since high school is Bret. Bret's mother is Bianca, a widowed librarian with three children of her own and an entire family of full-grown adoptees. My husband is probably the oldest of those. When he was kicked out of his house at eighteen, he went to live with Bret and Bianca, and Bret's younger brother and sister. He spent a couple years there, working off and on and otherwise screwing around, until Bianca finally sat him down and told him he needed to do something with his life, and if he didn't go back to school or into the military he'd have to leave her house. So he enlisted in the army, with Bret, and after basic training both of them went to study at the Defense Languages Institute in Monterey, California. From there Bret decided to make the army his career. My husband came home. One day Bianca told him the story of her first child, a baby boy she'd had before Bret, who died shortly after birth. She told my husband she'd always known she was meant to have four children, and he was her other son. He met me some ten years later and still called Bianca's family his. Now Bianca is my mother-in-law, my daughter her granddaughter.

So my husband never knew anything close to a traditional, stable family until he was an adult. Before that he was raised by, well, grandparents. They were dead long before I came into the picture, and I know they were very special people, but if my parents' love for my daughter is any indication, I know these people spoiled the hell out of my husband. He wasn't made to do much that didn't please him. Vegetables weren't forced, housecleaning was optional, and self-entertainment was key to my husband's childhood. The television was probably on non-stop in their house. As for male role models, my husband had an old man, an actual old man, who left this world just when my husband was becoming a man himself. What resulted is a bona fide meat-and-potatoes bachelor with an extensive knowledge of television programming and old pop standards, who frequently entertains by talking to himself or making other sorts of music with his mouth. Well, that among other things.

Then here am I. The first born to young parents from large families, and a big sister before I was two, family is all I know. I grew up in a family of five, with grandparents, several aunts and uncles, and a host of cousins and family friends nearby, and pets too. I came to Austin from a small East Texas town, which for good or for ill champions a family atmosphere of its own. In my house space was shared. I didn't have my own room until I was seven or eight years old, and I can remember more than one fight with my mom about keeping it clean. As for the rest of the house chores were the rule, simply because when five people live in a space without cleaning it up, it ceases to be a functional space. That and the old adage "if Mama ain't happy, then nobody's happy" certainly applied in our house. I left home to live on my own when I was nineteen, leaving town to go back to school at twenty-two, and I definitely spent a few years doing my own thing. By the time I was twenty-five I'd made up my mind to be happy with whatever life handed me, whether it was a magical man, a magical woman, or the single life. I left behind my carefree, typical early-twenties attitude and focused on the future, my future. Then as soon as I stopped looking, he appeared. After I met my husband and he got down on his knee, my mind promptly switched back into family mode, if it ever really left.

And perhaps this is where I started screwing things up.

I didn't even want to think about marriage until I'd finished school, but my husband and I celebrated our first (pre-marital) anniversary just a few weeks before I was supposed to graduate, and he couldn't pass up the opportunity to propose. So I finished my last semester of college both exhausted and engaged. As soon as the summer began, my single life began falling apart directly. My much anticipated graduation, conditioned on the completion of one college algebra class, was postponed when I quite miserably and impressively flunked. Then my nine-year old car fell on its last legs, and I had to buy a new one, with my fiance's help, of course. We planned to marry on our second anniversary the next spring, and we wanted to go ahead and find a place to live. So my roommate beat me to the punch and found a new place to live himself. Unable to pay the rent on my own, I had to ask my fiance to take my roommate's place, although he had three months remaining on his own lease. After three months of awkward bouncing between "my" apartment and his, he finally, officially moved in. We ended up postponing the wedding plans for another year, due to the usual restrictions on time and money, but for the time being we were happy cohabitating. At least I think we were.

Anybody who's ever lived with, well, anyone, knows that's when you really get to know somebody. The two years I lived with my husband before he became my husband, I was getting a full dose of a man I didn't quite know before, his grandparents' grandson: the meat and potatoes, the ever-expanding encyclopedia of television that was in his head, his cooking and cleaning habits (or lack thereof), his disliking of animals, his disliking of my side of town, his command of obscure and useless trivia, and a love of role-playing games and miniature-painting that went to a level never before seen even by an English nerd like myself, although to be fair, he did warn me on our first date that he was, in fact, an uber-geek. We had two bathrooms in our first apartment and didn't share for the most part, so that at least was an experience I spared myself until we got our first house. I might not have been able to handle it. Some of the biggest problems my husband and I have today originated in those first couple of years. We weren't yet married, but it seemed the honeymoon was already over. A wonderful, blissful year of being in love but not being on the same lease was forever behind us.

At first I saw it as an opportunity to start anew. Yes, we were engaged to be married, but we simply saw ourselves as together, a year and a few months into a relationship that would last forever, no matter what we called it. I certainly didn't see our living situation as playing house; I saw it as making a home. I wanted to put into motion the systems and traditions I saw us incorporating as a family. My husband-to-be, of course, was part of that family, the figurehead, in fact. So I began asking him questions about things I thought were an important part of family life. How would he like the kitchen cleaned? How would he like the bills paid? What did he want to do about trips to the grocery store? When did he want to eat dinner? And I wasn't just asking about banal, rote household chores. What did we want to do to keep our bedroom warm and inviting? When did we want to go out on dates, now that we were no longer "dating"? These were just a few things I had opinions on, and I wanted to know his. I wanted to come up with some way of living that would be ours, and harmoniously so.

These questions made my husband look at me as if I were speaking Swahili. And I got my answer; over and over again it was usually the same. It was whatever. He had no opinion. He had no stance. In fact, these were things he'd never "really" thought about, he said. Sometimes I found this answer off-putting. Sometimes I saw it as an opportunity to teach him how I did these things, thinking I had some good pearls to offer. Sometimes I asked him to think about it and get back to me. Either way I began to develop the impression that he didn't care that much, especially when I re-addressed these "get back to me" issues and found he still hadn't really thought about it. So I figured if and when he didn't care to take a stance on an issue, we could just do things my way, right?

Not exactly. As it turned out, he did have strongly felt opinions when it came down to the time to do something, or to get out of doing it. I never expected him to just know intrinsically what I saw as the correct way to do things, although sometimes his lack of household knowledge did irritate me. I realized where he was coming from, and I tried to teach him by asking him to do things, like closing cabinet doors after himself, not leaving his boots in front of the door, wiping down the kitchen counter tops at the end of the night, or even eating at the table with me in the first place. I tried to get him to drink water and eat vegetables, and to prepare them as part of our daily meals. I tried to convince him that the bedroom floor in front of our closet was not the best place for him to keep his dirty laundry. And most importantly I tried to teach him that I would not be the only one responsible for making sure all these things happened. I thought we were running a household in the only way I'd ever seen one run: two grown adults, both bringing home the bacon and both taking care of the place, and taking care of each other. I even accepted his adamant denial of any duties pertaining to my cat, particularly her feces (he never went near it until I got pregnant; we, or rather I, had two cats by then). Still, my husband-to-be resisted my requests.

So I welcomed him to plead his case. Why don't you want to do things this way, I asked. How would you like to do it? I refused to believe he just didn't care. The most common answers I heard were "Because I don't" or "Because I do it this way", or again, "I never really thought about it". And usually I'd retort with the reasons I did things the way I did, the reasons I thought my way was better. More often than not, these discussions turned into our earliest arguments, and my husband, gentleman that he was, usually ceded. But I quickly realized he was doing it to end uncomfortable discussions, when the chores continued to go undone or be done by me. This dodging strategy left issues to keep coming up, and I kept getting more irritated every time. After all, these were not the things I wanted to talk about. These were things I wanted out of the way so we could enjoy life, but not at the expense of just leaving them undone. I was persistent as hell. I tried to think of better approaches, such as not bringing things up in the heat of the moment. Instead of bringing things up when I was exasperated because the sink was full of dirty dishes again, I picked calm, detached times to bring them up, like when we were riding in the car. But nothing I tried worked. Usually this just made things heat up, and suddenly I was responsible for starting another argument.

Inevitably my husband began to accuse me of wanting everything done my way. He insisted that I was more worried about how it was done than if it was done. While I'd admit that my detail-oriented, female brain is prone to such desires, I didn't feel that was the case. I'd also agree that men's brains are not wired to deal with details as well as women's brains are. But I really didn't care how he went about cleaning the kitchen. Sometimes I snickered at his methods, because it was obvious he'd taught himself, hamfistedly, as a bachelor. He snickered at me the same way when I couldn't figure out how to do something on the computer. In reality, I really just wanted jobs to get done. And the way he most often chose to do something was to leave it undone. Even when we agreed it was his job, because I'd done it the night before, or I'd cooked, or just because he said he would, I'd usually wake up the next morning to pots and pans with dried food all over them and crumbs all over the stove top. It's not that he wasn't doing it the right way; he wasn't doing it at all. His suggestion was that I learn to work around messes like he did. The real problem, I eventually realized, was we had entirely different ideas about what needed to be done in the first place. Where were these ideas when I'd asked about them? I had no idea.

This began to turn into a vicious cycle. When I asked, he had no opinion, so I thought it wasn't important to him, and I got more used to doing things my way. When an issue came up, suddenly he had an opinion to discuss. But discussion of methods (his vs. hers) made him feel like I didn't value his opinions. So he refused to share them. His battle cry became the heroic anthem: "If you want something done a certain way, do it yourself!" And when it got too hot for me, I'd take his advice to heart. Okay, I will, I thought--until I realized that left me to do almost everything and got frustrated. It was ridiculous, but it just kept going and going. We tried a few successful interventions along the way. We made little agreements to try to keep each ourselves from driving each other crazy. I'd make an effort to keep the Brita pitcher full and cold if he'd make an effort to make the bed in the mornings. He even brought up the idea of joining a website that disguised household chores as a role-playing game, with XP and leveling up and all that, and much to his surprise I agreed. For a while it even worked. We got competitive about house-cleaning and the house got cleaned, and since we both agreed we couldn't claim any housework unless we claimed it on the website, arguments were settled before they began. But our little agreements weren't happening often enough, and we soon grew lazy about logging housecleaning XP. The game grew unrealistic, and household problems just re-surfaced. These arguments went on long after our wedding. I'm sure our daughter heard plenty of them from inside the womb. After all my being pregnant with our child didn't exactly light a fire under my husband to do a little extra housework (cat poop excluded).

About halfway through my pregnancy we went for the silver medal of the American dream. We moved out of our apartment and into a rent house. A duplex actually, the larger of two units built out of an older house in a charming neighborhood in north central Austin. We had agreed that our now cluttered two-bedroom apartment wouldn't be enough room for a baby, her parents, and two felines. We hadn't agreed on where in town to live. I had always lived on the south side and loved it. My husband had the same feelings about the north. So we decided whoever found the best house would win. He found the place on Craigslist. It was in a great neighborhood, (actually it was exactly where we wanted to be, should we move north of the river), and it had a pool. The pictures looked nice, it had three bedrooms, the rent was manageable for us and great for the area, so we decided to have a look. If it looked half as nice inside as its location was, we wanted it. We took a look, and we liked. It was much larger than we'd expected. It looked a little more run down on the outside than the pictures implied, but the interior was something we could work with. We weren't interested in buying it; although we'd originally hoped to find a rent-to-own situation, it needed quite a bit of work. But it would do just fine until we found something we did want to buy, hopefully in that neighborhood. So we applied and were approved for our first house.

Again I looked at the move as a new beginning. By then we'd spent more than two years under the same roof, and finding a new one was more than refreshing. We'd have an additional room to contain our lives and accommodate the new one coming in. The cats would have plenty of room to run around. And we were moving in six weeks before our lease ended on the apartment, so we could move in slowly and only bring what we needed, purging useless crap along the way. On top of all this we'd have all the comforts of a free-standing house, which outweigh the costs so heavily when you're used to living in an apartment. We were thrilled.

But the intensity of it was short-lived. The move took its toll on my husband, who handled most of the heavy lifting himself, except on the actual moving day when we hired movers and called on friends and family. There was some financial stress in the beginning because of our choice to pay double rent for six weeks. We also chose to move over the Christmas holidays. Our slow moving plan dissolved into a reality of ignoring all the stuff we'd left in our apartment until the last minute. Of course, my hormones were out of control. Just after the New Year, we had the worst fight I can remember, after I prepared a nice dinner in our new kitchen and my husband delayed coming to the table to do something I found less important, leaving me to eat alone. After we fought over the same old issues I left the house and went for a long drive, but when I came back I was still mad. So I said nothing to my husband. I broke up a cat fight on the way to our bedroom, and then I holed up with a book to distract myself, and shortly after that my husband left. He went over to Bianca's house and hung out with his brothers until I called him in tears, because when I finally came out of the bedroom I realized one of the cats was missing from the house. We'd been in the neighborhood little more than two weeks, and the cat I'd loved since the age of nineteen, when I'd first moved out on my own, was gone. I was a wreck. I felt like all the fighting had driven her from the house, and I was desperate to find her and get her home so I could make it up to her. But repeated searches of the neighborhood turned up nothing, and I was miserable for weeks. All the baggage we'd left in our old apartment ended up coming right back into our lives, much of it literally, as time ran out on the old lease and we had to move it somewhere. For a few more months, things didn't really change. We just had bigger things to fight about. Even painting our daughter's bedroom turned into an argument.

Then came Lucy.

We were good to each other the first couple weeks Lucy was in our new home. My husband was on family leave. My mother was there with us while I recovered from surgery and Lucy and I learned to breastfeed. And of course, family and friends visited frequently to get peeks at the new arrival. We were all tired, and the house was far from spotless, but we were all happy to be centered around Lucy, and not much else mattered. We got a little snippy with each other during a couple of Lucy's late-night crying jags, but as soon as we realized we were better served to work the nights in shifts, we got along fine. Then after a couple weeks my mother went back home and my husband went back to work, and I began my new life as a stay-at-home mom. I quickly realized just how much work a newborn requires, and everything in my life had to be adjusted yet a little bit more. It was stressful at times, but I loved it. I was right where I felt I should be.

Then some more weeks went by, and soon the time came to think about going back to work. I was allowed twelve weeks' leave from my day job, but only the first six were paid. I planned to go back to my home business after six weeks, but because of my surgery I couldn't. I waited until the doctor gave me the green light, and when Lucy was two months old I started trying to drum up business to get myself started again. By this time I'd decided I didn't want to go back to my day job and couldn't afford day care if I did. I was going to depend solely on my work at home to pull in my half of our income, and my husband was going to provide our health insurance. It would mean a pay cut, but we could handle it. I resigned from my day job.

But as it quickly turned out I'd highly overestimated myself. I was not under the delusion that I'd be able to care for an infant, work full-time with said infant by my side, and keep a sparkling clean house, but caring for Lucy was a priority that couldn't be questioned or compromised, our need for money was a reality, and some things did have to be done around the house. For example, for this new, old house we'd given up having a dishwasher, and there was always laundry and grocery shopping to be done. We'd splurged on an automatic, self-cleaning litter box for the cat poo, but it still had to be maintained, and it jammed occasionally, filling our house with the smell of shit soup. Also, in the six months we'd been there, the house had revealed many new characteristics with which we were less than pleased. Most notably it had shifted on its foundation as the seasons changed, creating some situations that were merely irksome, like doors that stuck, and some situations we realized could be dangerous to our daughter, like cracking floor tiles. I soon found myself completely overwhelmed, and my appeals to my husband to help me around the house were louder than ever.

My logic was simple. If I was going to stress myself out trying to pull in half the income while staying at home with the baby all day, how could I possibly be expected to take care of the house too? What had changed besides where I was working and what kind of work I was doing? I was still working. Obviously Lucy had added new dimensions of stress and worry to both our lives, but my husband still found time to watch TV at night when the dishes needed washing, and to go play role-playing games with his buddies on the weekends when the laundry was piled up, while I worried about every aspect of our household around the clock. He still left behind work for me to take care of: his breakfast remains in the sink, his clothes and painting supplies on the couch, his laundry in the dryer with no basket in sight. I knew he didn't do these things intentionally or spitefully, but he definitely did them thoughtlessly. By putting chores off for later, whenever he could, he essentially left them for me. With him gone eight to ten hours a day and me home alone, somehow I always got to his messes before he did. On Saturdays I begged him to help me get the house under control, and he reluctantly agreed, quite often with a heavy complaint first. I felt like everything I asked him to do was a huge and bothersome inconvenience, and I found myself weighing in my mind whether the task at hand was worth the trouble of asking for help. After much ado, I could usually get things going for a little while. But when I sat down to nurse the baby, which I did approximately eight times a day, sometimes for an hour at a time, he must have thought I was taking a break, because he usually excused himself for some computer time. If I protested, we were usually on our way into another argument. But since the baby it wasn't so much about methods anymore. It was about freedom.

It was an argument as old as time, I'm sure. My husband worked forty hours a week, and when he came home he wanted to relax. Who wouldn't? All along I'd been trying to get necessary evils like housework out of the way so we could enjoy as much time as possible together. Who knew? Maybe we could even enjoy the housework. I was all for the two of us being happy together. And I was all for personal freedom. I definitely wanted more of it for myself, especially after Lucy was born. I just didn't want for us to enjoy so much personal freedom that our household ceased to function. To me it seemed perfectly acceptable for us to devote a certain amount of time each day to personal fulfillment and relaxation, just as long as we spent the rest of the day focused on our family's needs. I would respect his time if he would respect mine, which I felt I deserved just as much as he did. And at the very least I'd be happy at the end of the day, knowing we both did as much as we could to keep our family on its feet, and then enjoyed ourselves. So I made it my mission to find out just how much freedom he wanted from me, so I could respect it. But I came upon the same roadblocks. He didn't think about things that way; he didn't have a time period in mind. Sometimes he wouldn't even answer, as if he knew where the road was going. As usual we could never come to an agreement, and soon I just came to the conclusion that he wanted to feel free to do as he pleased all the time, or it wasn't freedom at all. I was just some dominatrix trying to make a work horse out of him. All I wanted was work, work, work all the time, and never any fun. When would I understand?

Which brings me back to Tammy.

I understand the evolutionary theories about women and men. I know that women have traditionally taken care of the home and the family because their natural abilities are honed for the job. I know that men have traditionally brought home the meat for the same reason. I know that things have generally worked out well this way, and I'm fine with the man ruling the kingdom and the woman ruling the castle, as long as exceptions are allowed. I see great balance and fairness in that. If a woman wishes to stay home and take care of children and a house while her man goes off to work, that's what she should do. If she wishes to work, she should. I'm glad I was born after the feminist movement, with my own choices to make in life. I'm glad women are working all over this country, and men for the most part are on board with that. After all there are dual incomes for them to consider. We now live in a dual-income society and a dual-income economy, where it's been made difficult at best to live on one parent's salary. Men and women, for the most part, are sharing the responsibilities of food, clothing, shelter, cars, and big-screen TVs. Women have taken their new responsibilities and run with them. So when are men going to get the memo on dual parenting? When are they going to get on board with housework? If a woman is working to help her husband support their family, shouldn't her husband be helping her take care of the kids and the house? Shouldn't they be working a second shift too? Shouldn't a woman be able to enjoy some free time without leaving the house to fall down around her?

Apparently I've failed to make my husband understand this concept, and I'm just about ready to give up. The only thing holding me back, besides my conscience, is my suspicion that he's pretended to be clueless so I'd stop asking him to do things, like the Shel Silverstein poem about the kid who hates drying the dishes so he starts breaking them. Consequently I have also failed to bring in the income we so desperately needed, as the summer rolled on and our utility bills soared, and the hospital bills came, and my husband's paychecks choked on health insurance premiums. So I decided to try something new; my original plan wasn't working. I decided to stand by my man. I relinquished control of the family finances. My man makes the money, so he pays the bills. When I go to the grocery store, I go with an allowance he decides. My home business income, from what little business I manage to do, amounts to spending money for me, "the little woman". Obviously the responsibility for Lucy lies with both of her parents in the end (my husband's not a complete caveman), but the responsibility for household chores now lies with me. I'll not question my husband's methods of making money and paying bills, as long as he does it. And things around the house will get done my way or not at all, because I'll do them or blow them off myself. It's time to let a woman be a woman and a man be a man. If I need my husband's help, I ask him. And if he needs my help, he has to ask me.

Will this work? Or are Tammy and I both insane?

Sugar's Note:
Since writing this I've learned a little bit more about my husband's estranged father, who unfortunately passed away recently. My husband's father was actually the youngest of three siblings, who were not adopted from the street as my husband previously believed. My husband's biological paternal grandmother died when her youngest child was only three, and her children were sent to live with relatives, who raised the three children and later became my husband's grandparents. The grandmother who raised my husband is a relative of his biological grandmother.

Dreams to Remember (Rhetoric)

So things didn't turn out the way I thought they would.

College, adulthood, work, love, marriage, childbirth, home . . . once upon a time I saw myself doing all these things, just not in the ways I did them. I guess the "me" I saw in my dreams wasn't me at all. I guess my imagination is only good for one thing, and picturing my future isn't it.

The best advice I never took I was offered in high school. Maybe I should take it now and stop saying never. In fact maybe I should stop saying "should" too. Neither word has ever done me a drop of good.

Sugar Goes to the Hospital, Part Two

My daughter, my "executioner", my little star, (let's call her) Lucy, landed on this Earth at St. David's North Austin Medical Center in Austin, Texas, early Monday morning, April 6. She was taken from my belly into a cold, cold room, where a doctor helped her first breaths from her lungs and clamped her umbilical cord, and nurses rubbed her down vigorously with dinosaur blankets. She was brought to me by her father, swaddled and capped, and given a kiss on her plump cheek. And then she was wheeled away in a little cradle and taken to a corridor, where she met a band of admirers who gazed and cooed and cried tears of joy and happiness at seeing her brand new face. Then she was taken to a nursery with her father, where several others slept in dim light. She was carefully examined while her admirers watched from windows nearby. And finally she was taken to her room to wait for her mother. When I was brought back to my room from recovery, my daughter was there, and finally, something like two days after she'd made her first signs of an appearance, I got to hold her. New lives began instantly: hers, her father's, and mine. Not a bad way to make an entrance, eh?

Day One (After Lucy)

So I managed to walk into a hospital having never spent a full night in one, and I liked my first night so much I decided to stay on for a second and (what the hell) have major surgery. By Monday morning I was nursing my brand new infant daughter from a bed I couldn't leave, and looking at two more nights in this strange new world at least. One would think the idea of parenthood would sink in for someone hanging out in a room full of machines with a baby attached to her tit, but I actually had quite a bit more to go through. For all my pre-baby studies about the hospital birth experience I couldn't remember much at all about what happens after the baby is born. Whatever the cause the experience was slow to come on. We spent most of Monday receiving guests in our posh labor and delivery room, because the weekend rush had left the hospital short on postpartum rooms just like it had left them short on operating rooms the night before. We were hardly even bothered by the nurses, who were busy with mothers who were actually laboring and delivering. In fact I don't remember much interaction at all besides me asking when I could eat and when we'd be moving. A pediatrician came to check on Lucy, but I guess I felt like they'd forgotten about me.

Finally some time that afternoon they came for us. My catheter and my anti-clot socks were removed, and I was assisted out of bed and into a wheelchair. Lucy was put back into her transport cradle, a bed, stroller, and changing table all in one. Some visitors helped us gather our things onto a cart, and we left the room in a big caravan to the postpartum unit, my husband, my daughter, and I, with the appropriate number of nurses. As we waited for the secured exit door between the L&D and postpartum, a woman being admitted for her scheduled C-section stepped aside with her husband, eyeing my new little person and sighing a breath of envy, not so much for my baby, but for the experience being over with. And so we were wheeled over a sky walk and into the postpartum wing, the Motel 6 to the L&D's Radisson (as they'd warned us on the tour).

We were soon taken to our Room 253, a little corner room by the stairwell and right next to the nurses' desk. I met our first nurse, and the postpartum routine began. Blood pressure check, incision check, pain assessment, pain meds, breast check, bum check, baby feeding check, baby diaper check. I didn't know it, but the next forty-eight hours would be a constant repeat of this process, several times over and over. I'd always heard that the sleep you get after delivering a child is the best sleep of your life, but I guess that went by so quickly I couldn't remember it. It seemed not two hours ever went by without someone asking me questions. And even without the questions there were plenty of adventures.

We discovered very soon just how effective the newborn security system was. Probably the most impressive thing I'd found on the Labor and Delivery tour was the HUG system. Immediately upon delivery Lucy was outfitted with an electronic ankle bracelet, removable only by the head nurse upon Lucy's release into the wild world. The ankle bracelet transmitted Lucy's location at all times to the nurse's desk and was to be matched to my admission bracelet each time she was brought to me. And should any apparent tampering occur, or should her ankle bracelet come too close to an exit, the entire postpartum wing would lock down, sounding an alarm and putting all staff on instant alert. Needless to say I had no worries about my baby being switched with someone else's or being stolen by some desperate, childless nut ball. Unfortunately our room was so close to the stairwell (and consequently, its exit) that one whole side of our tiny space became off limits. As soon as Lucy's grandma had a seat with her on the little pull-out couch, the alarm system was tested and passed. The nurses located her right where they'd left her, and we were asked to keep her on my side of the room for the duration of her stay. Luckily my bed was just far enough from the exit on the other side of our wall. This was Blow #1.

By nightfall our room was free of guests, and my new right arm, Nurse Tina, reported for her shift. Nurse Tina, we would soon learn, was not only a nurse but also a mother of four, and not much older than I was. Like the other nurses who'd passed in and out of our lives for the last three days, she was to the point, firm if not stern, but not in an unnerving or condescending kind of way. However Nurse Tina had a slight edge over the other nurses. She'd been through it before, and I knew it. Her first order of business, after all the checking of my blood pressure, pain level, etc., the baby's eating record, pooping record, etc., was to instruct me on how to clean my incision. The twenty-four-hour mark was approaching the night after my surgery, and what felt like layers and layers of bandages had to come off.

In the meantime I had my baby to feed and a log to keep, detailing all her eats, pees, and poops for the staff. I had taken a breastfeeding class at basically the last minute (three weeks before my due date), but I hadn't exactly studied or practiced anything afterward, and after my crazy weekend I wasn't remembering much but the most prominent details. I had apparently forgotten how often newborns were "supposed" to eat, and my instructor, a middle-aged South African woman who'd nursed five children completely bottle-free and consulted women on lactation for nearly forty years, certainly hadn't promoted any kind of a rigid schedule. I figured I was just supposed to nurse the baby when she indicated hunger by crying or something. One problem: Lucy loved her sleep. Waking up to eat every two to three hours was not on her agenda. This would turn out to be an issue plaguing my conscience for months, leading me to obsess so hard about my daughter's weight I almost didn't realize how lucky I was to have a baby who liked to sleep. And it all started her first night in the hospital, with Nurse Tina. By the time we left the hospital, Lucy had lost one of her 9.32 pounds, but not for my lack of trying, and certainly not for Nurse Tina's.

I got into the shower around one o'clock Tuesday morning while my husband slept and Lucy went to the nursery for some routine testing. My nurses had made several remarks about how well I seemed to be managing my pain, which really wasn't bad. I was taking hospital-strength Ibuprofen every few hours, and it did the trick just fine. Obviously I wasn't turning cartwheels or anything, but the worst pain I felt was when I coughed up all the phlegm I'd accumulated over the weekend. I was more concerned with watching my bleeding (there was a lot, and that's as gross as I'm going to let myself get on this forum) and, of course, dealing with the incision. It actually felt great to get in the shower. I may have taken a shower before coming in Saturday morning; I may not have. I definitely hadn't had one since. This also was the start of a new trend. After my release from the hospital, after the initial healing was through, I became at least as lax about showers as I became obsessed about pounds and ounces.

For my first post-baby shower I left our warm, dimly lit, temporarily baby-free quarters for the cold, hard, fluorescent bathroom. I spent a few minutes just soaking in there, which was advised due to the strength of my bandages. I let some soapy water wash over the area, and then I started tugging. Nurse Tina had suggested taking it off, well, more fast than slow, which I kept in mind. But this was no Band-Aid. My abdomen was covered in an impenetrable layer of surgical tape. Underneath that was some kind of gauze pad thicker than a super-absorbent maxi, and underneath that I wasn't sure what was holding me together. When I got the tape peeled off past the edge of the pad, the pad started to come off with it, and it was just a matter of removing the tape around the edges. It only took a couple minutes or so to pull the whole thing back and reveal the blood that had seeped and dried in the twenty-four hours since I'd been closed up. It was not an alarming amount. In fact I was relieved to have the bandage off and still be in one piece. Since I'd gotten out of bed that afternoon I'd entertained ideas of my insides spilling out like Lake Pontchartrain. But there was no such spectacle, so I got out, disposed of my bandages, and patted the area dry. Then I stood in front of the mirror and got the first look at my hot new bod. Looking at one's body in the mirror after giving birth is kind of like looking at one's face in the mirror while on mushrooms. It's not for the weak-minded. I was not shocked that my face and hair looked terrible. I expected the disappearance of the big, ripe belly I'd had the night before. What killed me was the deflation effect. It was just like a balloon, once full and taut, now empty and wrinkled. I had to take back my declaration that my stretch marks didn't look that bad. Stretch marks on a pregnant belly are one thing. Stretch marks on a vacated belly are a whole new animal. And I had a very pronounced new pooch. In fact I had to very carefully lift it to see my incision. And there I found staples! I'd expected Steri-Strips. No, I had metal staples in my body, staples that would eventually have to be removed. The incision itself was barely visible though. There was no redness or swelling or oozing. Just a grin of metal staple teeth. Ew, I thought. And then I put on a fresh hospital gown and climbed back into my bed to get some of that mythical stuff called sleep.

Day Two (Hell Day)

Again, the sleep was over in what felt like a matter of seconds. We had asked Nurse Tina to keep Lucy in the nursery for a little while after her tests, so we could indeed get a little sleep. Rooming in was the way of things at North Austin, but we'd been told by everybody from our co-workers to the nurse who gave us the tour that the nursery would essentially babysit if we asked, and for the love of God we should take advantage! Of course, that meant until feeding time. And for Nurse Tina, feeding time meant two hours after the last feeding whether Lucy seemed hungry or not, and she knew exactly what time to bring her back. I'd barely lain down my head when Nurse Tina returned with Lucy in her rolling cradle, and it was time for me to practice this breastfeeding thing again. Of course, I was getting pretty used to this beautiful child staring up at me, so I didn't mind. I fed her a bit, and then we went to sleep maybe around three, in the dimmest light the switch would muster. Apparently there's no such thing as a dark hospital room.

Some time around five in the morning I was awakened by a strange nurse who was there to take some of my blood. I knew I wasn't dreaming, but this was a bit surreal. I didn't even have a mind to ask her why she was taking my blood. I let her do her job, and then I went back to sleep. At six, who was there to wake me up but Nurse Tina? Three hours since last feeding. Time to go at it again. This was when I started to feel like I was in Baby Boot Camp. This was Blow #2.

I probably slept a little more after the six o'clock feeding, but once Lucy woke for her third feeding of the day I was up for the morning. My mother, who'd bid farewell to my father and spent the first of many nights at our house, called early and headed back to the hospital to greet us. Pleasantries were exchanged, I had a little breakfast, and we watched some stand-up comedy on TV while taking various pictures of the new arrival. This was not a picture of the day to come. My little corner hospital room soon became a revolving door.

A lactation consultant came to visit and help us out, and then my OB/GYN stopped by to see me. This was when I was told my baby had been vacuumed out of my uterus. I was a bit shocked that I'd somehow missed that, but the good news was my incision was beautifully done, and healing nicely. My surgeon deserved kudos, I was told. Then someone came to give us the paperwork to fill out for Lucy's birth certification, and we started Baby Girl on the road to an official name. I received a little hand-sewn pillow to hold against my incision when I laughed or coughed, my congratulations on my C-section from some women's hospital league. Then came the hearing test lady, to certify that Lucy could officially hear, and Lucy gave us the delightful experience of hearing her fart when the lady asked her for a reaction. Then came a lady trying to sell us fancy newborn portraits in fancy decorative frames and birth announcements, which we politely declined (my husband's brother-in-law was a former professional and had already taken several beautiful candid shots and posted them on Facebook). Then came the pediatrician to take another look at Lucy. She'd seen her the day before. We'd been a bit taken aback by her complete lack of an inside voice (loudest pediatrician ever), but she'd told us Lucy looked great, and that was fine with us. Now, we thought, she was back to tell us again. She did her exam, in a much quieter, calmer, more child-friendly voice. Everything seemed fine until she noticed a hint of yellow in Lucy's skin and eyes that hadn't been there the day before. Lucy had to get her heel pricked again for another blood test, and we were told they'd test for jaundice.

And so began a beautiful afternoon that spiraled into the longest day of our lives. The results came back for Blow #3. Lucy was jaundiced. We had a problem. The good news was all she had to do was eat and poop to get the excessive bilirubin out of her blood. So we tried to pep her up to eat for long stretches every two hours or even more frequently, whatever it took. But Lucy just wanted to sleep and sleep. Nurse Tina was back for the evening shift, and of our feeding log she did not approve. What was I supposed to do? I really didn't know. I was waking the baby every two or three hours, which went against everything I'd been taught about sleeping babies, and I still couldn't force her to eat. I could put the breast in her mouth, but I couldn't always get her to do much with it, at least not for more than a few minutes. My anxiety was already growing when we got Blow #4. The blood test also revealed low blood sugar. Apparently my boobs just weren't cutting it. That was when Nurse Tina came in with the formula bottles. This upset me, because I'd been told specifically not to give Lucy any nipples but mine until she was at least three weeks old. I asked Nurse Tina if we had to give her a bottle, and she basically told me it was a bottle or a feeding tube. I chose the bottle, but not without the fear that I was ruining my chances at breastfeeding.

And so we went at it with the bottle for a while. Supposedly I've heard, bottles are easier than breasts, a sort of automatic transmission if you will. Surely, we thought, Lucy would be able to get a little more reward for her efforts, temporarily anyway. But as the afternoon went on, with Nurse Tina's constant checks, her eating habits didn't change. She woke up, or we woke her up, she usually ate for a few minutes at a time, and then she stopped. Then came Blow #5. Another nurse came to tell us that Lucy would be undergoing photo therapy. I had no idea what it was, and I had no time to ask. I was in the middle of a feeding attempt, and the nurse couldn't wait. But we found out not much later. Another cart was brought into our tiny room with what looked like a slide projector. It was attached by a hose to some kind of pad. We made room for it in the tiny space left by the cradle beside my bed. Nurse Tina plugged it in, turned it on (the pad glowed an intensely bright greenish blue), and gave us a very short tutorial and demonstration. Put the pad up the baby's back, swaddle her, put the pad up the baby's chest, swaddle her, alternate, repeat, and don't expose it to her eyes. It would help break down the bilirubin for removal, and we had to do it for the next twenty-four hours. That wasn't it in a nutshell either. That was pretty much it. The alternative was to take her to the nursery and put her under some kind of fry lamp with special goggles on. So we were left with a Glo-Worm of a baby, who had to be swaddled and held or put in her cradle, attached to a hose and a machine on a cart, which had to be plugged into the one outlet between my bed and the wall, completely cutting everybody off from the sink in the corner and a good chunk of the little floor space we had. Oh yes, and we had to keep everything away from the bulb in the projector-thingy, because it got really hot.

Naturally that's when visitors started showing up. A rapid succession of friends began making their way up to our room. Nobody stayed long in our tiny room, but many came, and between the feedings, the diaper changes, the photo therapy, the cramped space, all the faces, and my painkillers, I began to get a bit overwhelmed. I probably should have called my mom, who by this time was at our house straightening things up for our arrival (whenever that would be; it seemed years away). But I rode it out and was actually thankful my friends were there. Otherwise I might have cracked at that point.

Eventually another nurse came along and cleared out most of the remaining visitors to take another blood sample from Lucy's heel. At this point her poor feet were covered in little spots where needles had pricked her repeatedly through her first two days in our world. Some of these pricks I'd witnessed. Some had been done in the nursery. For this one I was unprepared. I watched as the nurse unwrapped Lucy's little foot, sanitized it, and pricked, and Lucy's face crinkled up into a look of such sadness I couldn't quite bear. Her face turned red and she let out a piercing scream. It was everyday business for the nurse, who went about taking her sample as my husband held the baby. I, on the other hand, had to excuse myself to the bathroom and cry for a minute. Finally, I'd hit my worst moment of the whole ordeal and could head downhill. Watching my baby in pain, no matter how minor, was worse than anything I'd been through since I'd arrived. If I could go the rest of my life without witnessing that again, it would be worth a catheter and hours of contractions every day. I guess it's both a good thing and a bad thing I can't.

After that the evening grew a little quieter and a bit more calm. Finally all the guests were gone and the nurses stayed away for a while, and it was just me, my husband, and our little Glo-Baby, just chillin', and wondering when we'd get to go home. Nurse Tina made another check on Lucy's feeding log and noticed we weren't having the best luck even with the formula bottles. So she took her to the nursery to give it a try herself. When they came back she told us Lucy had a "weak suck". We were instructed not to use low-flow nipples, except for my own, of course.

The evening began to wind down and the three of us started getting ready to settle in as best we could. As I was nursing my husband tried to grab something from the sink in the corner and stumbled over the photo therapy cart for the last time. For the first time since we'd arrived, he finally lost his cool and got visibly irritated by the ridiculousness of it all. Then Nurse Tina returned and asked if she could help with anything. I think she was feeling a little bit sorry for us at this point. So my husband laid it on her and asked if we could get a new room. I felt a tiny bit embarrassed at first, thinking the place wasn't a hotel. But it was a quiet Tuesday night in the postpartum unit, and there was actually a room open, and Nurse Tina said we could have it. Joy! It was the best news we'd heard all day.

Nurse Tina alerted the nurses' station to our change of venue. We gathered our things with the help of Nurse Tina and another nice lady and rolled the baby show to Room 257, right down the hall and a world away. We were moving into a corner room normally reserved for mothers with wheelchair access needs. It was huge, with open floor space everywhere we looked, an entire wall of windows, and a grand bathroom. And the would-be babynapper's escape route that was the stairwell was nowhere near us. We felt like we'd been upgraded to first class. The night was looking up. We found new places for our things, set up the cradle and the photo therapy cart in plenty of room by my bed, and watched TV until we all felt like going to sleep, until the next nurse check anyway.

Day Three (Fingers Crossed)

When we woke up Wednesday morning in Room 257, we felt like we were in a whole new world, and things began clicking. Lucy woke up hungry and ate ravenously. A breast pump was brought in for me to explore; my milk hadn't come in, and Lucy was still feasting on colostrum. One of my doctor's other midwives came in to check on me, giving me the news that my iron levels were low (blood sample mystery solved), but I could be discharged that day. But if the baby was not discharged, she said, I could stay an extra night as a non-patient. I hadn't even considered the possibility of being discharged without Lucy, and I didn't like the idea. I decided to stay until she could go, and I eagerly faced the day.

While my husband slept I got on the laptop and finally hunted for a pediatrician for Lucy's first appointment; we'd picked a clinic but had to name a specific doctor in order for her to be discharged. I decided on a pleasant-looking Johns Hopkins grad and Austin native with a logical-sounding approach, Dr. Nielsen. I set up her first appointment for that Friday and double-checked her eligibility with my insurance. We called upon the birth certificate office to have her papers process completed. And then we fed the baby. And fed, and fed. Suddenly she was eating like a champ, latching on like a vacuum and eating for an hour at a time, every two or three hours just like she was supposed to. We decided she'd had enough of the heel sticks and wanted to go home too, wherever that was. She had to stay on the photo therapy until seven that evening, when a blood test would reveal the results. Hopefully the villain my husband and I had named Billy Rubin would be exiled from her little body, and she could go. She ate, she pooped, she ate, she pooped. We changed diapers and watched the clock. I called my OB/GYN's office just to make sure she let the hospital know I'd be discharged if my baby was. And we waited some more.

Finally seven o'clock rolled around, and we actually called the nursery to make sure someone was coming to test our child. I'm not sure I've ever been so antsy. Home was a ten-minute drive away, and we didn't care if we left at eleven at night. We wanted out of there, to take our baby and run! Finally a nurse came to take Lucy for her tests, and we waited with our fingers crossed, packing up as much as we could just in case. Lucy came back as soon as her samples were taken, and we waited some more for the results. And even more finally, around eight o'clock, we received word that Lucy had a green light for home.

The next two hours were a blur of exit paperwork and packing. Surveys to fill out, evaluations to write, checklists to check. Nurse Tina had a whole packet of items to go over with me, mostly to make sure I knew how to basically care for an infant and my healing insides. I wrote Nurse Tina a glowing evaluation. Then all our things had to be packed, Lucy had to be changed out of her hospital garb, and she wanted to eat again. Grandmas were called; my mother and my husband's mother showed up to help us. We put Lucy in a tiny yellow dress my mom had bought in the newborn size (a little bit too small for our surprise nine-pounder, who was by then an eight-pounder). She wore with it the tiny white lace bonnet I'd worn home from the hospital in 1979 and carried in my wedding twenty-nine years later. It's now in a box awaiting her wedding day.

Her father brought around the car, left the car seat in it, went back downstairs and got it to show the head nurse, and we were released after five long days inside. I walked downstairs to the car. Everyone seemed shocked, but they'd asked me if I wanted to walk or be wheeled. I'd spent five days in bed, and I felt like walking, so I did. I went to the driver's side of the car to pop the trunk for my husband, and my mother scolded me because she thought I was trying to drive. The head nurse watched as we latched Lucy into her car seat base, we got into our little car (now a family coach), and the grandmas got into theirs. Wheels started rolling, and Lucy started screaming. My husband pondered aloud which route he should take, direct way or freeway. His mother and stepfather, who had never been to our house, were following us. I asked him if he wanted to handle red lights with a screaming baby in the car, and he said, "They can keep up." I turned around in my seat the best I could and offered Lucy my finger to hold. She grabbed on, and after a few minutes, she was snoozing in the backseat.

And so we headed home, where friends and family were waiting to greet us, having cleaned up our house, fed our cats, and even put the finishing touches on Lucy's nursery. We were finally relieved to be home, where our lives could revolve into a spinning world of lactation, doctor visits, incision cleanings, and Peri bottles--which now seems like it was years ago. That's it. That's my hospital story. Ask my husband to tell you about his first diaper change. It's a hoot.

Sugar Goes to the Hospital

Before April 4, 2009, I'd never spent the night in a hospital and my husband had never changed a diaper. By the end of the weekend we'd both conquered these rites in spades, and so ended the chapter of life so many others have wrapped up by our age. I guess it better serves to say how all this began.

My husband won me over exactly four years before our daughter was born. When it happened we were on our fourth date. After waiting out the first two, he'd finally kissed me on our third date, under an oak tree on the northeast corner of Sixth Street and Lavaca, after an Easter movie at the old Alamo Drafthouse Cinema downtown. It was an awkward kiss to say the least, and although I found myself strangely attracted to him I went home and told my roommate I didn't think anything special would become of it. Nearly two weeks had passed before that fourth date found us outside a coffee shop in South Austin. I was attending college and working at the time, and with only a year left I was dedicated to the last leg of a long, hard race. I'd been banging together my degree off and on for eight years at that point. A busy girl I truly was, and determined as well. As I explained to this handsome new suitor why I hadn't seen him for so many days, I left out the part about how awkward our kiss had been and filled him in on my busy week of midterms. He listened patiently to my diatribe, and then he replied, "I want you to be the best Sugar you can be." I couldn't help smiling, and suddenly I wanted the night to go on a little bit longer. I offered him a ride home, knowing he planned to catch a late-night bus back to his neighborhood all the way across town. I ended up driving him instead, and outside his house we enjoyed a second kiss that was, let's just say, less awkward.

Things progressed nicely after that, clicking in a way neither of us had ever clicked before, like clockwork really. A month later we were a definite pair. A year after that he proposed. We married in a beautiful outdoor ceremony in the spring of 2008, and I was pregnant within two months. We moved out of our apartment and into a rent house big enough for three people and two cats. And suddenly it was spring, we'd spent four years of our lives together, and we had my burgeoning belly to show for it. These were the last days of life as we knew it.

So that Friday night, two days after our due date, we indulged in dinner and a raucous comedy at the Alamo again, which would turn out to be our last trip and remains such. We'd been to more than a few final-hour dinners and movies, and we thought we were in for another long weekend of vain anticipation. My parents were coming the next day, in hopes that their long-awaited grandchild would show up while they happened to be in town. But realistically, we thought, we'd just knock a few more things around the house and the baby would be days away. We weren't paying too much mind to the "due date" after all. It wasn't even our original date. I'd first been told March 15, when I showed up at a local birthing center the summer before with a regularly scheduled exam and a missing period. Of course, that date was based on the average 28-day scheduling chart my cycle had never quite fit. I was all but turned away from the birthing center because of my slightly high blood pressure, so I found a new doctor who was natural birth friendly, an ultrasound was performed, and we discovered I was actually two weeks behind the previous estimate. Somehow my due date became April 4, probably through my own defective math skills. Then when the impending arrival got closer my clinicians began referring to April 1. But no matter what everybody said we knew it wouldn't be either date, until my water broke just hours after our movie date, lo and behold on the morning of April 4.

Day One

It was 2:45 when my husband came to bed after some late night TV time. I woke up when he opened the bedroom door, and I immediately got the feeling my water had broken. A flick of the light switch revealed that it had, and it became even more real when I headed down the hallway to the bathroom and left a light trail behind me. Behind the closed door I took a few minutes to myself to let the idea sink in as my husband rushed about, calling my mother and getting the bags ready to go, even though he knew from our childbirth class that broken water wasn't necessarily a green light for the hospital. I let him shake off the initial excitement while I thought to myself, okay, here we go.

The next phone call went to the midwife, or rather to the doctor's answering service, who had the midwife call me back. Just as I expected she told me to go back to bed and try to get some rest, and to come in around nine o'clock that night if my contractions didn't kick in earlier. When the shift changed and another midwife came in, she would call and check on me. So I happily tucked myself back in with a towel over the wet spot and tried to sleep, even though I could feel the first contractions beginning like little cramps that came and went in little rippling waves. Mom and Dad were on their way from East Texas within the hour, only leaving a few hours earlier than they'd originally planned.

My mother arrived shortly after I woke up a few hours later, ready to go for the whole show. I was walking around trying to get ready at that point, still having minor contractions and hoping to have some breakfast while I could still eat. I was also feeling a little morning crud in my throat. Then the on-call midwife rang with my chart in her hand and reminded us I was supposed to have antibiotics during my labor to prevent the baby from catching Group B strep. It took four hours to administer, so we were asked to proceed to the hospital. Dad arrived, I ate, we packed our bags into the car, and the four of us headed to the L&D for our fun-filled baby adventure! At least that's how my parents looked at it, this being their first grandchild. My husband and I were a bit more serious, this being our first labor.

We reached the new Women's Center at St. David's North Austin Medical Center before ten and took the elevator up to the Labor and Delivery unit. It really was like checking into a hotel at first. The shiny new lobby had that welcoming appearance, and even the ladies at the counter were expecting us and had our room all ready. It was quiet when we got there. Nothing exciting was happening; no one was screaming. I was one of the first new moms to check in for the weekend, and the nurses laughed lightheartedly when they spotted the new grandparents from a mile away, snapping pictures of me and my husband through the little windows by the unit entrance. Then we were taken to our large, luxurious labor room, the same one we'd seen on the Labor and Delivery Tour a few weeks earlier. The first of so many nurses came in and introduced herself, and we got right down to business. When it was all said and done, I'd have a huge new respect for hospital nurses. Before I'd had very little to do with them.

I said goodbye to my clothes and suited up in the ugly hospital gown I'd be sporting for the next few days. I had my vitals taken and climbed into bed, where I was soon fitted with an automatic blood pressure gauge. I used to get nervous getting my blood pressure checked, which is probably why my readings typically come out just a little high. There's just something about that boa constrictor squeeze I can't make myself like. But I can say I'm no longer afraid of it, having endured it every few minutes for an entire weekend. I was also hooked up to fetal monitors, given my IV port, and finally, the antibiotics and some fluids to keep me hydrated. And there I sat, strapped to the bed for all intents and purposes, with nothing to do but watch the monitors, wait for the contractions, watch TV, and talk to my support team. Yet I still managed to screw up the fetal monitors every time I moved, losing the baby's heartbeat or mine in all the shifting it took just to make a minor change in position in my hospital bed. Going to the bathroom with my IV cart trailing behind me was an even bigger undertaking. But the nurses were patient with me, and I always ended up back in bed with medicines pumping and machines chirping.

The day went on and on like that. I received my antibiotics and visitors. I checked in periodically with my favorite midwife, Leah, who fortunately for me was on call until Tuesday and would without a doubt deliver my baby, or feel very sorry for me. I ate a bit of food that was brought to me. My relatives took a few last minute photos of my huge belly. I had contractions, but I found them easily manageable, so I knew I wasn't anywhere near hard labor, yet. Leah was reluctant to examine me internally for the simple fact that my water had already broken and I was therefore prone to infection, so we went by observation of my condition and my monitors. My contractions were escalating, but things were not moving quickly; that was for sure. I was still smiling and making jokes even, between contractions anyway. So when my antibiotics were finished and pulsing through my veins, I was allowed to disconnect from my bed and walk around, with my IV cart following, of course. I went for a short evening walk around the unit with my mother, my aunt, and my husband, hoping gravity would work in my favor and pull the baby a little closer to the exit door. I guess it worked, because the contractions began to intensify after that. And naturally that's when my sun went down and things began to get dark.

I remember exactly when things turned. It was nearly ten o'clock that night, I'd been there for about twelve hours, and my water had broken about nineteen hours before. There were several people in my room--my husband, my parents, my aunt, a friend, my two younger sisters, and their significant others at least. My flamboyant friend, Jordy, was doing one of the spontaneous stand-up comedy bits for which he's famous, and my whole family was cracking up and relieving quite a bit of tension. I would've joined in right along with them, if I weren't in labor. But things were far too serious for me. I'd been sitting around having contractions with people all around me all day, without a problem. At that moment it was no longer okay; I didn't have it in me to smile. I was suddenly, seriously hurting. I pulled my husband close and assigned him the task of getting everyone out of the room, at least everyone who'd never been through a childbirth--meaning Jordy, my sisters, and their boyfriends--but I settled for everyone because it was easier. I was sure things were about to get ugly. It was really only the beginning.

Before my due date I'd told myself that I'd give labor a good eight-hour try before considering the drugs. I was born drug-free in eight hours to a first-time mother, and I figured if she could do it, so could I. Of course, my mother was ten years younger when she had me than I was when I had my daughter. But short labors had been her forte, and according to my doctor that bode well for me. I was optimistic. And I didn't want any needles in my spine. Or a doped up baby, or a doped up uterus for that matter. So when the hard stuff started, I told myself I'd probably have a baby by the next morning. And so I labored. And labored. I breathed. And breathed. I squeezed my husband's hand, and my mom's hand, and my aunt's hand, and my dad's hand. And squeezed. I did it all night long. Leah was back around six o' clock Sunday morning, and I just had to know how far we'd progressed, especially if we were going to have a baby that morning. So she checked me out. Since my water broke, a period of about twenty-seven hours including the eight painful hours I'd just spent breathing my way through contractions, I'd managed to dilate a little more than three centimeters, about a third of what I needed. It was epidural time. No explanation needed.

Day Two

After a short wait I met my first anesthesiologist, a nice man with a big needle. That was all I needed or cared to know. I listened wanly to the steps as they talked me through the process, which I'd heard before but never thought I'd need. I got my needle in the back plus a urinary catheter. That part I'd forgotten about since childbirth class, and it was definitely my least favorite, although I forgot about it again as soon as the medicine took effect, about ten minutes later. Then, attached to fetal and blood pressure monitors, IVs, a pee bag, and a pair of legs I could no longer feel, I lay back and enjoyed the sensation of my contractions melting away to Nowhere Land. I now join millions of mothers in admitting this was the best part of my labor. And then I slept. And slept. And slept . . .

After the needle I don't remember much in detail. I slept through much of Sunday while my husband, my parents, and my aunt watched over me and my guests chilled in the waiting room. I don't remember anyone asking me if I wanted Pitocin, but some time after the epidural they started giving it to me, to make sure the epidural didn't kill my contractions. I think I woke up around four in the afternoon, hazy and numb but still somewhat conscious, albeit a little loopy. I remember the weird sensation of touching my leg with my hand and feeling it only in my hand, as if I were touching someone else when I clearly wasn't. I remember the nurses having to save one of my legs from falling out of my bed, because I sure as hell couldn't stop it. I remember asking my husband to make sure my urine bag was filling up, because I felt no urge to go and didn't quite know how to deal with it. I'd also lost my voice by this point, having spent all of Saturday and Saturday night breathing through the mucus in my throat. So any talking I did came out as a faint whisper. On the other side of my wall, however, someone was screaming. I remember constantly having to switch from one side to my other, to prevent blood clots, which wasn't easy in my doped state. I also remember the button I was given to send the medicinal reinforcements into my spine, although at the time I wasn't registering that I had a port in my spine. Others were allowed to hand me the button, but only I was allowed to hit the button. Apparently I wasn't hitting it often enough, because nurses kept having to remind me I could hit it whenever I wanted, that it would only allow so many doses in a certain period of time. I couldn't overdose, in other words.

They stopped having to remind me as the afternoon trudged on and my contractions started coming back. I didn't realize it, but I was being blasted with Pitocin to "help" my contractions. My husband told me later I was receiving almost twice as much as it normally took. Eventually I started to feel it. My epidural wore off soon after I woke up. Actually the numbness in my legs stayed, and the pain relief went. No matter how many times I hit that button I could still feel my contractions hard and fast right through my sheer drug curtain. At some point Sunday evening another anesthesiologist came and gave my epidural a booster. It may have helped a little, but I still felt the pain, and little by little I began to lose my resolve. I was probably hitting that button every couple of minutes, but if I was getting any relief I wasn't noticing. The contractions were coming one after another, stronger and stronger, and I was losing the strength to breathe through them. I was crying by the time they were over, and it seemed like no time was passing before they were back. That's how I remember it. My family told me later that I was breathing through the contractions, falling asleep to the depth of snoring as soon as they were over, and then waking up and breathing again.

By nightfall I was also feeling a strong urge to push. Everything down there wanted to push. So I called upon Leah to come and look at me again. This time, about forty-two hours after my water had broken, I was about five and a half centimeters dilated, little more than half of what I needed for my daughter's head (what I'd been told was a rather large one) to pass through my body. I think that's when Leah brought up what I'd already thought up myself: the possibility of a Cesarean section, what I'd previously deemed my worst-case scenario. In that light I wanted nothing more in the world, because a "natural" birth had become a staggering impossibility. We talked it over, and Leah agreed to call the surgeon.

We waited for the on-call surgeon to get to the hospital, as my doctor was unavailable. Another exam by the surgeon confirmed that not only was I less than six centimeters along, my daughter's large, hairy head also seemed to be in the face-up position, which makes for a more difficult birth for everyone involved. Once I heard that news, I was signed up. The doctor offered me a Cesarean, and I happily accepted. For some reason I can not recall I was told I'd be waiting approximately an hour before we could get started. It had apparently been a hectic weekend outside my delivery room as well as inside, and there wasn't an operating room available for us. But shortly after I got probably the biggest break of my life and the nurse came to tell me one was available after all.

From there things moved quickly. I was given an icky solution to drink for stomach control, which I was advised to shoot instead of sip. Good advice. My husband was given his instructions for assisting me. Everyone else was directed to the waiting room. The second anesthesiologist, I think, returned and asked me if I'd had a rough day. I responded by holding up two fingers, because I couldn't talk. He assured me the wait would be over soon and stood by my side as a team of nurses prepped me and moved me onto a portable bed. I was told to keep all hands and feet inside the bed, and away I went to my operating room, just meters away and yet a world apart from the warm, comfy, muted Labor and Delivery room to which I'd gotten so acquainted. The lights were bright white. Actually the light fixtures themselves were a lovely shade of blue over the operating table. This was the only comfort I found in the room until nearly one o'clock. But the light in that room was the brightest white light I've ever seen from such a close source. It was also, I'm sure, the coldest room in the entire hospital. I was moved onto the table and almost immediately my arms were placed on armrests and a tent went up to block my face from my chest. While my belly was prepped with cold antiseptic my friend the anesthesiologist, standing above me and looking down, re-upped my epidural yet again, after telling me exactly what was going to happen in clear, calm, understanding terms. This time I was given a different medication that numbed me from the chest down with a cold wave that traveled the length of my body. I then began to shiver uncontrollably as the medicine took effect, but of course, I still tried to control it, to no avail. I shivered my most violent shivers until they subsided on their own and all I could feel was the pressure from the proceedings going on below my chest. The anesthesiologist joked with me, "This isn't much fun when you can't talk, is it? Just make eye contact with me if you feel any pain." And I actually found it kind of funny, in a ridiculous sort of way.

Somewhere in all this my husband was escorted in, dressed head to toe in green scrubs. He had my glasses, and he wore my wedding ring on his pinky. He was seated on the stool beside my head, and as the surgical team began their work, he put his lips next to my ear and told me how much he loved me, in his own lengthy, wordy, matter-of-fact way. One would think that during all this I'd have no problem staying awake. But after nearly forty-six hours of IVs, blood pressure checks, fetal monitors, contractions, position changes, spinal sedatives, catheters, and Pitocin blitzkreig, I was having a bit of trouble. It was all I could do to keep my eyes open. I even tried to tell my husband to stop talking to me, because his lullabye tones were making my eyes heavy. I knew if I missed my daughter's first cry after all this I'd never forgive myself.

I listened and stared up at the blue-white lights as the surgical team worked, talking about how busy their weekend had been, with Leah standing by to lend a hand as needed, not about to miss this one. My body rocked and shook a little bit as my various baby-hiding parts were moved here and there. I was forewarned when sudden jolts and squeezes would take my breath away. Other than that not much was required of me. At one point Leah got to push down on my belly to help squeeze the baby out. All this seemed to be done fairly quickly, but a vacuum extractor was actually used to get my daughter's large head through the relatively small incision. I didn't find this out until two days later. I certainly didn't realize it at the time. What little juice remained in me was holding my eyelids open. Finally, fifty-one minutes into the morning hours of Monday, April 6, 2009, I heard the song of new life that only a new parent gets to hear. My daughter cried.

There were two baby warmers in the room. My daughter was taken to the one I couldn't see. My husband joined her, and when he'd had a good eyeful and made sure her passages were cleared and her digits were intact, he returned to me with her first photographs on our digital camera. My first impression of her was one of strength. She appeared unfazed by her adventure. She looked huge in the frame of the picture my husband showed me. Her chest stuck out like Superman's, and her cheeks were like balloons. And her head was covered in a mass of curly, black hair. I got my husband to put my glasses on my face so I could get a good look at her when she came my way. And then he brought her to me, wrapped up burrito-style in a dinosaur blanket with the little striped toboggan every baby in America is issued these days. I got to give her a quick kiss on the cheek, the anesthesiologist (I think) snapped a couple of first family portraits, and before I knew it my husband and my daughter were off to the nursery. As for me? My friend the anesthesiologist leaned over me and said, "Now you can close your eyes and have yourself a nap." And I did.

After that, the time passed effortlessly. I woke up wrapped like a warm burrito myself as I was transferred back into my mobile bed and wheeled into recovery. I don't think I've ever been so comfortable. Even the pressurized knee socks I was wearing to keep my legs from clotting weren't uncomfortable. When I got to recovery I was the only patient there. I was one of the first mothers to come in that weekend, and probably the last to deliver. A couple of nurses looked after me and got me started on my post-op meds. I ate some ice chips with assistance. And then my family members were allowed to come in and see me, one by one, first my mother, then my father, then each of my sisters. They'd already met my daughter, along with my aunt, my sister-in-law, her husband, our niece, my sister's boyfriend, and Jordy, the last ones standing after a long weekend for all. They'd slept on couches in the waiting room to be there when she arrived. A couple people had even slept in their cars. Apparently Leah had sneaked them into a secret spot so they could see her as soon as she came out of the operating room with her father. There'd been a midnight rendezvous in the hallway outside the nursery that wouldn't have been possible had it not been one in the morning. They gushed over my daughter's beauty and told me my husband and daughter would be the next to see me. I thought they were coming to me, but then I was taken to my next stop, my beloved Labor and Delivery room where my family waited, including my daughter. All nine pounds and five ounces of her.

To be continued . . .