Red Hot Mutha'

It was a year ago on Father's day that I found out. I had dashed in to Happy Harry's to buy a pregnancy test for the upteenth time and it had lost all of its mystery. A bottom-of-the-line pregnancy test and a diet sprite. I had long stopped paying extra for the ones that promised early or more accurate results. Sometimes, against my intellect, I'd buy multi-packs of the piss sticks and use them one right after another just to be sure. I remember peeing on the stick and seeing the faint line appear. I could imagine myself as an old-time cartoon character with my eyes bulging out of my head at the sight of it. Only it wasn't funny, and I sobbed, head in hands and still on the toilet.
I was never maternal. I've always adored children but I never considered myself mom-material. You'd find me out, taking the long way home on my Harley, dancing in a cage at E.N. in D.C., getting a tattoo, drinking a little too much. That was me. I never wanted to be a mom because I never wanted to wait up for someone at night. I did not know how to change a diaper or what to do about colic. I had myself to worry about, and that was fine with me.
Something changed all of the sudden. Perhaps it was the combined effect of seeing so many of my friends having children of their own. I've never been one to follow the crowd, but kids really did say the darndest things! And how fricking adorable they look in their little dresses and tiny shoes! They actually make green Doc Martens in toddlers sizes! My husband and I did some soul-searching and we thought, let's give it a go. I mean we were thirty for chrisakes!
Didn't take me long that time. I got a kitten the day I took my first pregnancy test. I brought the kitten home in a copier paper box, presented it to Steve, and said, "Well, I guess you'll have to empty the cat boxes from now on." He did not get it at first, then a worried wave of understanding crossed his face and he left the room, right in the middle of petting the new kitten. Of course, I told everyone. People at work presented me with cards and tiny baby gifts. I looked at websites with cool clothes for punk babies and bought a diaper bag at Hot Topic. My family was excited and already planning visits to Disney World. I had never been so nervous in my entire life.
I remember the day we went for the ultrasound. Steve had to call to get directions, because although I had gotten directions (twice) I kept forgetting them as soon as I hung up the phone. I was so nervous I could not stop shaking the entire time in the waiting room and I almost pissed myself. When it was my turn, I got on the table and waited to see the first pictures of my baby. The placenta was there, full and perfect. I heard the tech say to herself, "But where's the baby?", and I lost it. The doctor was on the phone. Something about miscarrage. Blighted ovum. I was numb when I got into the car, Pink Floyd was on the radio and it was raining softly now. For the first time ever, I felt like a mother.
I won't go into all the details after that, like how on the very day I came back to work some well-meaning person asked me to decorate the principal's office for her newborn granddaughter, or how the news was suddenly filled with stories of mothers killing their own children. I will not talk about the other pregnant women at work, who compaired their bellies everyday, or the women I overheard in Walmart yelling at their three kids while they tiredly rubbed their swollen bellies. I can't describe the silent horror that I went through, sometimes waking at night and sitting in the dark hallway outside the bedroom trying to determine if I was just dreaming or not. I'm not going to pretend that my story is unique or uncommon. But my world, my small lingering sense of spirituality, my sanity, all of it was rocked. Changed, gone, transmutated, whatever.
So several months later, when I peed on that little stick on Father's Day, I cried. I didn't tell anyone, even after an ultrasound revealed a perfect tiny heart. I waited a long time to decorate the nursery and avoided baby websites. But when I held him, all blinking eyes and gangly legs and arms against my chest on that wonderful day, I knew I would have had it all happen over and over and over again.

I love him more than life.

And he just woke up from his nap, so I've got to go.

So I get Baby V all suited up, fed, diaper changed and I drive the 30 minutes or so to Costco in White Marsh. I get him out of the car, struggle to put on that damned Infantino thing so that he can ride on the front of me like some high-tech kangaroo and manuver myself to the super size carts which only seem to have three working wheels. I drop my wallet twice trying to get the membership card out of it to show to the door person who I know is just there to scare away any potential terrorists who want to purchase styrafoam cups in bulk. I go to where the baby formula and diapers are (near the pet supplies!) and discover they're out of The Jumbo Box of Pampers Cruisers Size 3, so I have to settle for Huggies, which I don't like. Trying to lift a jumbo size box of diapers while having a baby strapped to you is no small feat, but we do it anyway. I grab a box of formula, six bottles to a pack and lug them to the cart. To this I add a tub boasting gallons of baby detergent, which is way too expensive if you ask me, but I really don't want to be responsible for an infant outbreak of eczema. As I try to push the cart one-handedly, I almost topple a display of shampoo. I've got to drive the cart with one hand because baby V has recently discovered his toes and I don't trust the Infantino to hold him if I let go all the way. What's a few velcro straps going to do? He's really trying to get at his feet. I'm feeling quite smug as I've found the line with the fewest people. The guy in front of me only has a dozen fold-up tables on his pallet and it's not Saturday so there are'nt mass quantities of people here trying to feed their families off the free samples of meatballs and powerbars. I finally get my turn, hauling all the stuff onto the belt and dropping the Amex card in the process. Baby V is still going for his toes, slightly knocking me off balance, but I grab the edge of the register and manage to get the card to the woman behind it. The cashier graciously lets me know that the credit card isn't mine. I say I know, it's my husband's. I wipe the slobber from under V's chin. (Is it possible for him to be teething at four months?) I wait while a manager is shouted for from behind a counter somewhere. "You can't use the card. See, it says on the back here that it's non-transferable." Non-transferable. She says it to me like I'm three, not thirty-three. I explained that I've used it before. Three times. "That's because you just got by. It's the credit card company's rule, not ours. They might not get paid." I look at the total. It's somewhere near nintey dollars. I imagine American Express going belly-up, laying off employees by the hundreds. "It was that woman at Costco. The one who used her husband's card to buy the baby formula. She did us in." I'd be hated by thousands of hard-working Americans for forcing a credit card company to go under. Whatever. I pulled a Chief Joseph and declined to fight it, mostly because baby V was starting to get antsy.
In the future, I will go to the cashier who looks the most sleepy and the least caffienated. I guess that's how most things work: (hold your ears baby V!) if you don't get caught you just might get by.

It's never any good when you get a call early in the morning, especially on thanksgiving when your several hundred miles from home. Even though he was sick and nearly eighty, I still couldn't believe it was my grandfather. I expected them to say that he was in the hospital. I mean, it was Thanksgiving. Who dies on a holiday? But I guess it was like him to get out of a holiday, after all.
I drove past the old house and saw the rubber strap he used to fasten the gate to the fence. He always thought the dogs would escape if the strap wasn't secured. Come to think of it, my old black lab might have, once or twice. I guess the new people never saw any reason to take off the strap, even though I'm sure the rubber was cracked by now and they didn't even own a dog.
He took us to the fair, the three of us grandchildren. We were young then and it didn't bother us a bit to dress alike. We got there early in the morning; the cows were still asleep and the horses were wearing blankets. He waved to a man by the stables, and by the time he had finished chatting with him, Pop had a grin and six free packs of Wonder Bread Hot Dog Rolls. They had worked at The Point together, way back when he could lay bricks straighter than nobody's business. I have some of his tools, labeled "Lee" in large yellow letters. When he worked the night shift, my grandmother would take a huge, light-blue bowl of ice cream up the steps to him every evening. He would eat it in the dark, lit by the dim glow of some television show. I never knew him to gain weight or sweat, as he had developed an uncanny ability to avoid both. We were all amazed that on a certain nintey degree day in Disney World, the man was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved shirt and that he actually shouted out loud on Space Mountain. He was having fun.
He was gruff sometimes, and was known to talk while holding a cigar in the corner of his mouth. He didn't like to go out to dinner. Most celebrities, politicians and public figures annoyed him. But when he told his stories, stories of his brother and him playing some trick, or the time he snuck out of the barracks in the army, his clear blue eyes would light up. There's one picture of him in my wedding album of such an ungaurded moment, his eyes caught in a laugh. Had he'd met my son, I would have had the chance to see him like this one more time.
I keep expecting him to show up sometime. After all, he never got to see my new house and I'm sure there's something that could be just a bit more safe with a little tweaking. When I visit my grandmother I expect to find him tinkering with some project in the backyard. I don't remember that in the end he never really got off the chair anymore. I'm no longer seeing the swollen ankles and witnessing his refusal to admit he could no longer drive.
I got my stubbornness from him.