“Yeah, I’m good.” I got up from the table and went in the little guest bathroom. It hurt so bad, and that’s the only thought I had time to have before I was there lifting the toilet lid and trying to keep my robe out of the way. I threw up everything I ate, black-eyed peas, greens, everything.
I went and sat down on the couch away from everybody at the table and watched TV with Demi, who was lying on the floor half-inside her mermaid fin. All those colors and the laughing box and high-pitched tones of whatever she was watching, and things went from sugar to shit in two point five seconds. My head was spinning, and I felt cold and hot like I was getting the flu or something.
JR peeped his head in the living room. “Babe, want me to play your hand?”
I could barely lift my head to say, “Honey, I’m gonna chill out and watch some TV.”
They finished playing cards, we watched the ball drop, and I was struggling to be as normal as I could. Finally, everybody went to bed. Ma stayed downstairs doing the dishes and JR and I went upstairs. We were sitting up with the lights on trying to recap and laugh about the day, but those pains kept coming. I think I was mostly fooling myself, trying not to upset anybody—my whole life I had put myself second, always the one who kept it together for everyone else, never asking for help. But it seemed like JR, Ma, and Pop were on alert anyhow.
Pop yelled up to our bedroom in that deep James Earl Jones voice of his that made everybody listen. He kept it short, sweet, and to the point the way he always did. “Look, Shirley, if you aren’t feeling better in the morning, I don’t care that it is New Year’s Day, I’m taking yo ass to the hospital.”
I told him, “I think I’m fine. I just need to sleep.”
JR asked, “Baby, don’t you just want to go get it checked out?” I told him to go to sleep. He knew if I said I was okay, then there was no arguing with me. I reached over and turned off the light, telling myself I would be fine in the morning.
I couldn’t rest all night. Every fifteen minutes the pain was so bad. Then, every ten minutes. I sat up in the dark and timed them on my phone and realized that just before sunrise they were five minutes apart, like labor pains—but that couldn’t be! It was early New Year’s morning, which put me at my last day of being twenty-one weeks pregnant.
I went to the bathroom, sat on the toilet, and put my cool hands on my tiny tummy. Dakota was sleeping in there like she should be. “Yeah everything is good.” But then the next pain was so intense and a whole minute long, the pain traveling from my uterus all the way to my teeth. Denial is some powerful shit. We inherit that thing of denying our pain. So many of us are told growing up that showing our pain is a sign of weakness. So as Black women we just go around saying, “No, I’m not in pain. I’m okay. It’s gonna be fine.” And I can’t tell you how many times that came out of my mouth during some of the most traumatic stuff I’ve ever been through. I had learned to deal with all levels of pain, emotional pain, physical pain, even labor pains y’all. As Black women we don’t learn to say things like, I’m in pain and I need this and that to happen. Instead we worry about inconveniencing folks.
I stayed in the bathroom so I wouldn’t disturb anybody with my grimacing, and then there was a little watery discharge. That’s what broke my wall of denial. God, what is happening? Please be okay, Dakota.
I stood in the bathroom in my sweatpants and T-shirt, looking in the mirror, deciding what to do next without disturbing the whole house. Everybody was still asleep except JR’s mother. I could hear her clanking around in the kitchen. I sat down on the edge of the bed, eased on a pair of sneakers, and held my voice calm. “JR, babe, I’m gonna have Ma run me to the hospital just to check it out.”
He was half-asleep. “You okay?”
“It’s just the pains, but it’s nothing—probably a stomach bug.”
Why do we do that? Why isn’t it okay to hurt and to scream and holler so that someone will come to the rescue?
I kept my hand on my belly feeling for Dakota, and thanked God that she was stretching her feet against my hand. “I’m good, I’m good. I’ll call you when I get there. Just go back to bed.”
He agreed in his sleep. “Okay, babe.”
I went to the top of the stairs and I could feel discharge trickle down my thigh. I reached in my sweatpants to touch it and saw it was clear, not bloody. I told myself, It’s not dripping down between your legs like it did when your water broke with Demi. It’s just some discharge. This is not labor.
“Come on, Dakota. Let’s go check it out.” I eased myself down the stairs toward Ma in the kitchen when another pain hit. I whisper-yelled from the stairs, “Ma! Can you please take me to the hospital?”
When I got to the bottom of the stairs, Ma was dressed but still had on a head rag and was swirling a pat of butter around in a pan. She looked up like she was seeing things. “Shirley?”
When she saw my sweatpants were wet, she dropped the frying pan. “I’m taking you to the hospital right now. You in labor, girl!” I sat down on the bottom stair. “No ma’am, that can’t be, it’s got to be something else.” But she already had her coat on and mine in hand.
The hospital was thirty minutes away, but like a woman on a mission, Ma was flying through the streets of Broadview Heights and onto the highway to get to Cleveland Clinic’s Hillcrest Hospital. I was curled into myself in the passenger seat, riding pains that were now about three minutes apart. My head was swimming and I had to keep my eyes closed; even the light of day made everything worse. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t breathe. Then I heard sirens and felt the car slowing down. I opened my eyes when Ma rolled her window down for a cop, who said, “Ma’am you know you’re speeding.” Then he saw me and said, “Oh, you are trying to get your daughter to the hospital . . .” Then he yelled, “Go, go, go!”and ran back to his car, and gave us an escort.
When we arrived at the hospital, Ma must have been nervous trying to deal with the situation and didn’t think to pull in front of the emergency room door. After we parked, there was a bridge to cross to get to the entrance, and I just couldn’t. A woman in scrubs saw us struggling and ran a wheelchair across the bridge. It took everything in me to just stay in that chair and not let the pain spill me out of it. That’s when I knew for sure something was so wrong. I prayed, God, please let Dakota be okay.
I could see us getting closer to the doors and I concentrated on the red sign that said “emergency.” Inside it was just a whirlwind of people asking my mother-in-law all of these questions and handling my body. I was in so much pain that the room was spinning, and parts of my body felt numb. They started asking me, “How long have you been in pain?” One minute I could talk, but the next minute, the pain would come and I couldn’t say a word, so I couldn’t explain it to them, but they kept asking questions anyway.
I finally managed to blurt out, “Where is my doctor?”
“She’s on vacation.”
There was a swarm of aqua scrubs and unfamiliar faces, and all of it was too much to register. Then this Black woman came over to me and her serene face stopped the swirl. She introduced herself calmly. “I am Dr. Diane Young.”
I focused on her warm brown eyes as she said, “I’m here to see what’s going on. I’m going to put these sensors on your stomach.” So much was happening I didn’t even realize that they had me in a bed, coat off, shoes off, lying on my back, wet sweatpants off, with a sheet draped over the bottom half of my body.
Unlike everybody else, Dr. Young told me each thing she was about to do before she did it. She was only about ten years older than me, but old enough for me to look at her broad, confident face and feel like I could finally breathe. She reminded me of my cousin Lynette. When I was twelve years old, Lynette—also only ten years older than me—was confident and strong enough to rescue me from our empty apartment and become my guardian.
Dr. Young had that kind of woman-take-control manner. I calmed down and let her put little pieces of tape and sensors on my belly. Her straight bro
wn shoulder-length hair and dark-framed glasses gave her a look of authority. I told her, my voice all scratchy, “I’m just having pains and cramps in my stomach. Not labor pains, but something feels wrong.”
Dr. Young stood there and read the printout with all the little Z’s on it and said with her head tilted and her hand on my hand, “No, honey, these are contractions.” She showed me how sharp and spiky the Z’s were. “You’re lucky your mother-in-law brought you in. These are definitely contractions.”
I grew up one of those Black girls who knew how to get shit done, how to feed myself and my siblings if we were hungry, how to get somebody to come turn on the electricity when my mother didn’t pay the bill. Dr. Young’s words took my whole world and twisted it into something that I couldn’t fix or control.
“Excuse me?” I just busted out crying. “No ma’am, that’s not right.” I started panicking. I was sweating. I was so confused. I knew a woman couldn’t have a baby at just twenty-two weeks.
All of a sudden all of these nurses were coming in and out of the room. I called JR. I was boohooing through the phone. “Honey, please get here quick. Please get here. They said we are about to have Dakota now. She is about to come now.”
He started yelling, “What? What?”
He and Pop must have sped; they got there in no time. When JR saw me, I was hooked up to all of this stuff. I could tell from looking in his eyes that he was trying to be strong and not burst out in tears. I had been given a safe dose of meds to calm the pain of the contractions, but that didn’t mean I was ready for a big conversation. Everybody asked me questions as if I understood what was happening, rather than actually telling me what was happening to my body or to Dakota. I don’t think they understood. I felt so exposed, like they knew something about me and my baby that I didn’t, and no one would tell me what it was.
I didn’t know what to do. This was very different from being forced to be a mother as a little girl and making decisions at eight years old. This wasn’t being twenty-four and planning to have Demi, sitting around watching A Baby Story on TLC. Demi came right on time, without a worry, healthy. That was eight years ago. Here I was being fired at with questions I didn’t know how to answer when I thought I knew what to expect with this pregnancy.
I still couldn’t wrap my mind around this moment. How I went from eating New Year’s dinner with my family, only a little more than halfway through my pregnancy, to lying in the hospital hooked up to machines. How can a baby be born this early? How could she survive that?
JR hadn’t caught up with the reality yet either, and just kept stammering and smoothing his beard with his good hand. Between the intense pain, all the beeping noises, the smell of old peroxide, so many hands and new people and their damned questions, I just lost it. I yelled, “No one is going to touch my body! Get off my damned body! Somebody needs to tell me what is happening!”
Dr. Young cleared the room, pulled up a chair, and held my hand. “Honey, let me explain to you and your husband what’s going on. It’s looking like you are going to have your daughter as a premature birth. She is going to come soon, but we are going to give you a dose of medication that will stop your contractions. We’ll elevate your bottom to try to keep her up there for as many days or hours as we can.”
I heard her, but I didn’t know what it meant to have a premature baby. I asked, “Can she be born that early?” When I look back, it’s a good thing I didn’t know that the youngest preemie ever was born only a few days younger at twenty-one weeks and four days. I was a day away from being twenty-two weeks pregnant with Dakota. If I had known that, I probably would have lost my mind, which, with all of the stress, might have made it likely that I would lose my baby. At the same time, knowing that the youngest preemie ever to survive was now a toddler might have given me some solid ground. You know?
I lay there with my butt propped up, trying to rest. I was asking myself if I’d ever met any people who were born premature. But that train of thought was too much. I started thinking about people I needed to call, like my brothers Darryl and Tokunbo. The three of us grew up trading off who was mothering who. My mind skipped to being eight years old and reaching to catch my little brother running away from me in his diaper, my hands grabbing hold of his chubby arms and him squirming to get loose. I didn’t want to trail off into hard thoughts, but when a woman is having a baby and is hurting and scared, she wants her mama. And I had lost mine a long time ago.
2
Binge
When my mom was around, I could see her do all that was necessary to take care of us and herself. Being addicted didn’t mean that she wasn’t otherwise coherent and in her right frame of mind. I picked up on her good mothering days. If my brother was crying, I knew to ask the questions: Do I need to change his diaper, do I need to feed him, or do I just need to sit next to him and hold him? I couldn’t really identify with everything that was going on with my mother’s disappearances, but it is very strange and a blessing that as such a young kid, I knew what to do.
East Orange, New Jersey, 1992
Eight-year-old girls don’t care nothing about what the rest of the world thinks about their mothers. They just want their mothers. I remember Mom’s thumbs were burned from the friction of the lighter from lighting the pipe. I looked at her cheeks all sunken in from drawing in the smoke. Her body was so frail from the addiction and not eating. She wasn’t but five foot two, so petite like me even without the drugs. To see her sick like that just used to do something to me, make me want her more, because it seemed like she was disappearing into the streets and literally disappearing from right in front of me. My twelve-year-old brother, Darryl, saw her absence as his opportunity for freedom, so he took to the streets right behind her, leaving me to take care of my toddler brother, Tokunbo, whenever Mama and Darryl were in the street hustling, smoking, or doing “what they do” for days on end.
I know I have good memories of my childhood tucked away in my head. I remember my mom’s signature look in the nineties with her crispy perm, hair flattened into a ponytail, turtleneck tucked in, with jeans over her belly button. She wore those tennis shoes called pumpkin seeds in either white or black. I remember her smile would light up a room. I remember that much now, but for a long time the dark moments overpowered the good.
In our studio apartment on Grove Street, I slept in the closet under the clothes on the floor. I pretended like I was in a tent camping with all of the extras in there. I had a little TV that sat on a little plastic crate where I kept my scratch-and-sniff diary that I called Rosie because it smelled like roses.
One morning I woke to get ready to go to school. Dionne Warwick elementary in East Orange was mine, even though I felt kind of lonely and kept to myself most of the time. The daily walk was my routine and even as a little girl, that’s something I needed.
I looked around the room that morning and Mama wasn’t laid out on the sofa bed with Tokunbo. He was asleep in a soiled diaper with his big toddler belly rising and falling. I was confused, standing there. If she wasn’t coming home, why didn’t she take me with her like she usually did? What was I supposed to do about my brother? I just stood there inside my closet door, leaning on the frame.
In my head, I heard my mother’s oldest sister PopaAuntie’s soft-spoken voice that was not as loud and laughing from the gut like the rest of us. “Do what you got to do.” I was just a little girl, but popped into action the way any other woman in my family would have. First order of business was to change Tokunbo’s soggy diaper. Thank God there were diapers in the apartment. I laid him down on the floor and got that task out of the way.
Then I climbed on top of the counter to get the stale box of cereal out of the cabinet. It was the no-frills white box with big black letters from the government, cheaper than Rice Krispies. I checked to make sure there weren’t any roaches. I shook the box around a little and looked inside. If there were roaches, they would come running out, and if they couldn’t, they certainly would when I poure
d the cereal in the bowls.
Now for the milk. Our refrigerator was only five feet tall, not much bigger than me, for our small kitchen. When we had food, it looked like a lot in there, but there wasn’t anything in there but some butter that looked pretty orange, and an open can of government peanut butter. No milk.
I was still all about business. I took our bowls one by one to the sink and put some faucet water in there. Tokunbo with his chubby cheeks and tiny little teeth smiled and ate that cereal up like it was SpaghettiOs or something. He didn’t know the difference between cereal with milk and cereal with water.
I wasn’t supposed to open our door, but I heard a door slam in the hall of our building and thought, Maybe that’s Mama. I ran to the door and listened, but it was just people leaving for work. I heard the eight o’clock Grove Street bus stop and start again on the street; I knew it was about the time I usually left the house for school. I went ahead and put on my clean sweat suit, the swishy kind everybody wore in the nineties. I put my little raggedy tennis shoes on. I got ready just in case.
“I won go?” Tokunbo knew I was getting ready to go to school and was scared I was going to go and leave him there.
“Shirley not gonna leave you Bo Bo.”
Even though I didn’t have friends at Dionne Warwick elementary, I liked my teacher, and school is where I got food and attention. I had my own little wooden desk with my books tucked under and in the pocket. It was that feeling little kids have when something is theirs. Looking back, I know that all of the kids felt that way. We were lonely because we didn’t talk about our mamas who were all on drugs. We were all going through the same thing, and school was our normal place.
The one good thing about being out of school was being able to play with Tokunbo; he was a cute, li’l chunky thing with no clothes on and a saggy diaper, running around the apartment. On the radio, the news went off and the music started. I knew the bell had rung and the day was started at school and I got that lonely feeling in the pit of my stomach, like everybody left the party, like everybody started their day and just left me sitting there.
Mama Bear Page 2
