The pediatrician diagnosed him with reflux, which meant I had to cut all dairy, wheat, and spices from my diet, and nurse more frequently to quiet his stomach. I did all of that, gladly, but even so, when I hold him he clings to me like any minute I might put him down and run away.
Sometimes I feel like running away.
He’s relentless and colicky and needs a new diaper every five minutes.
He has no interest whatsoever in how I am feeling.
He’s terrible company, to be perfectly honest.
And yet, I love the little monster so much I think I am going to fucking die.
How do people survive this? I’d retroactively apologize to every new parent I ever met for not understanding their suffering. But I’m too tired to even think straight.
I had no idea how thoroughly it overtakes you.
I get a call from my dad one day, who offers to come by and watch Micah for a couple of hours. I take him up on it, gladly. I’d give the baby to a dancing monkey if it offered to let me take a shower alone for five minutes.
As soon as Dad walks in, I hand Micah over and try to disappear before he realizes I’m gone. I march straight to the bathroom, where I turn up the music and wash my hair for the first time in three days.
It’s exhausting, doing this on my own. There’s no denying it. Even with Holly and Mom’s help, I’m stretched to my breaking point every single day. I guess it’s something to be proud of that I haven’t actually broken.
I stand under the hot shower spray and run a hand over my body. To check if it’s still there underneath all the baby puke I just washed off.
It’s different now than it was before the pregnancy, in ways I can’t quite put my finger on. My breasts are bigger, for sure. My stomach hasn’t quite regained its previous elasticity, and probably never will. For a week or two after the birth, my vagina felt like the site of a minor apocalypse. But there’s something else, too.
Another living being grew inside this body. I fed and nurtured him, and delivered him out into the world. And he depends on me now. That doesn’t freak me out as much as I thought it would.
I sit down in the bathtub, water still running over me, and remember the pain of birthing him. The way Tony kneeled in front of me and witnessed that. The way he stayed with me, focused and sure, and caught Micah in his hands.
My father was on a business trip the day I was born. Tony isn’t even Micah’s dad, and there he was, steady in the face of what was surely more of me than he ever intended to see.
I’ve wanted so much to share these first weeks of motherhood with him—all the tiny absurdities and surprises. But he hasn’t contacted me since he left the hospital that day. And although I’ve picked up the phone a thousand times, I haven’t called him, either. Because he was right. I needed to do this on my own. To learn it on my own.
To know that I could.
And honestly, I haven’t been able to figure out what comes next. I don’t know what to do with the fact that despite my best intentions, I fell in love with him. I let him fall in love with me. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.
I’ve been single my entire adult life by choice. I never wanted the responsibility of someone else’s heart on my hands. I wanted freedom and options—and I’m still proud of that. That I forged my own path. That I didn’t let myself be pressured to do what women are told they’re supposed to do—to settle down and lose themselves in other people.
I did want to be a mother, and I hoped I’d be able to do that in a way that felt right to me. That felt powerful. It happened sooner than I expected, though, and maybe I wasn’t ready. I was already off balance when Tony came into the picture.
I needed this time to pull myself back together. I don’t know what to do with the fact that Tony understood that.
It took this full six weeks for me to even begin to feel like I know what I’m doing. Every morning Micah wakes up and gets to work humbling me like it’s his full-time job. But somehow, I manage to keep us both afloat. I shove a boob in the tyrant’s face, and we put in another day together. And each night, as he falls asleep in my arms, this rabid animal love sinks a little deeper. It cracks me open a little wider.
For some reason, I keep showing up for that. It’s not the pink, gentle mother-love of diaper commercials and old TV shows. But it’s what I have to give him, and so far, he seems to be devouring it with some gusto. And I seem to be okay with dispensing it, disorienting as it is.
I’m not sure what that means. I just know that things are changing. That I’m changing. And maybe that is interesting, in its way. Learning how to be with Micah, how to love him in the steady fashion he needs…it’s new. But it’s possible that I like it. That I could even be good at it one day, if I wanted to be.
I turn the shower handle and pause. Micah is crying in the next room—that escalating, shivery wail he works up to when he’s hungry. I shut off the radio and quickly throw on some clothes, and when I come out, Dad is pacing the floor, soothing Micah against his shoulder.
“He started crying and I wasn’t sure what to do.”
I detach Micah gently and go to the rocking chair. “You did fine, Dad. He’s just ravenous all the time.”
“Yeah, well.” He smiles his charming smile, and then looks away, embarrassed when I cover up with a light blanket so I can nurse.
“I’m not too good with babies.” He takes a seat on the floor opposite me as Micah settles down to eat with a shivery sigh. “Guess you are, though.”
“Do you think so?” I look up at him, wrinkling my brow. “I was pretty scared I was going to suck at it.”
“Beth.” He shakes his head. “I don’t think you’ve ever been bad at anything you really set your mind to.”
I huff out a laugh. “Field hockey? That was pretty grim in high school.”
“Didn’t you once score a goal against your own team?” He chuckles.
“During a championship game, yeah. I got a permanent spot on the bench after that.”
“Wish I’d seen it.”
I nod, watching him. Micah shifts on my chest. “You never came to any of my games, I don’t think.”
I’m expecting him to challenge that, to defend himself somehow. But he doesn’t say anything. He just nods and returns my gaze.
“I’m sorry, Beth.”
I tilt my head at him. “Are you?”
He links his hands and looks out the window, into the blue sky outside. “I was too busy running from your mother to be the kind of father I should have been.”
I go still and watch him very carefully. “Why, Dad? I mean, I think I know, but can you tell me your version? How you see it?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. She wanted something I couldn’t give her? A traditional life, I guess. House in the suburbs, dinner at five. I couldn’t do it.”
I pause for a long time before I ask him the next question. “Did you love her?”
He looks straight into my eyes. “Yes.”
It makes it worse to hear him say that, somehow. It makes it closer to what’s happening with Tony, to what I fear is the inevitable conclusion of whatever it is we have together.
“But it takes more than that,” he goes on. “It takes wanting the same things. It takes a certain amount of trust and friendship, which we never could establish with me being gone so much. And it takes some goddamn effort, to be honest. Which I didn’t put in, honey. I don’t know why. I just didn’t do it.”
“Dad…”
“And you bore the brunt of that, because it meant I wasn’t around for you.” His eyes go to Micah, nestled on me in the rocking chair. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
My eyes fill with tears. “You were a good father, Dad. And when you weren’t, well, I had Mom there, too.”
He nods and presses his steepled hands to his mouth. “She’s a good woman.”
“Yes,” I agree. “She is.”
“I’m glad she’s happy now.”
I no
d. “And you? Are you happy?”
Dad smiles and stretches out his legs, lean and muscled from thousands of hours of training. “I’m good, Beth, yeah. I make it work, you know what I mean? I have the life I want.”
He rises and comes over to the chair to kiss me on the top of my head. “Especially since it has you two beauties in it.”
I look up at him, Micah in my arms, and smile.
—
In the evening, Holly comes over with a casserole and a tin of cookies. I put Micah to bed in his crib and make us some tea.
“You doing okay, Mama?” Holly sits beside me on the couch.
And I immediately burst into tears. “Stupid postpartum hormones,” I tell her.
She smirks. “Right.”
“I don’t know what to do, Holly.”
“I think you do, actually,” she says.
“What if I fuck it up?”
“You might.”
I snort. “Thanks a lot.”
“Tony might, too, though. That’s the risk you take.”
“What if I get bored? What if I feel crowded? What if I want to sleep with someone else?”
She shakes her head at me. “You might, Beth. I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you it wasn’t going to happen, but it could. It could happen to Ray and me, too, you know. You don’t get any guarantees.”
“I don’t know if I can give him what he wants.”
Holly leans forward. “What is it that you think he wants?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. A home. A family.”
“Have you actually asked him and that’s what he said? Because from where I’m sitting, he already has that. I don’t think he needs you to give it to him.”
I make a face. I don’t know what to say to that.
“Why don’t you just…text him?” she asks. “Invite him up. Let him meet the baby.”
I drink my tea, staring across the room at nothing. Holly waits beside me, silent. After a few moments, she takes my hand.
I made a choice to be single, yes. An active choice. But it wasn’t because I wasn’t capable of maintaining a long-term relationship. I’ve had full, deep connections with Holly and my mother, and I’ve stayed around through good times and bad because I love them. Because I’ve chosen to, and it is worth it.
I know full well how to love my son, how to stick with him.
I know I can choose to love like that with a partner, if I want to.
I didn’t want to before, and that worked for me just fine. I enjoyed the men I dated, and I enjoyed the freedom I had. I could have gone on like that forever if I hadn’t met Tony.
But he came into my life as irrevocably as Micah did. And what I wanted—it changed.
Which is okay.
It’s okay for me to change now, if I want to. I’m capable of that. I’m strong enough for that. It was a good life before—a legitimate, healthy, honest life.
And now it is different.
I’m in love with Tony.
Even if I don’t exactly know what I’m doing. Even if, being with him, I’d have to keep making the active choice to stay where I am. And to go deeper.
It could be that I’ve been looking at it the wrong way. That I’ve been focusing exclusively on what I could lose by being in a relationship.
Freedom, independence, space.
But maybe, like Holly says, we don’t need to have a relationship that looks like that. Maybe we could do it in a way that felt right to both of us.
One thing is certain. I’m not going to know unless I talk about it with him.
Holly is right. I haven’t asked Tony what he wants. I’ve just assumed, and maybe those assumptions have been based on fear.
Fear that I was like my dad and wouldn’t fit with any sort of romantic relationship.
But even my dad understands that it might have been different for him and Mom if they’d wanted the same things.
I know that, like Dad did, I could make a good life for myself without Tony. But maybe I could make a good life for myself with him, too.
And maybe I want to try.
I take out my phone with my free hand and text him.
Would you like to come meet Micah?
Beside me, Holly smiles.
Chapter 19
Tony
Beth opens the door with Micah in her arms. He has a full head of dark hair and huge brown eyes. She is smaller, obviously, although no less striking. Her hair is down. The heat from her apartment pours out into the winter day, and it’s difficult to breathe suddenly.
“Tony,” she says.
And for a moment I just stand there, my breath fogging the air. I stand there on the precipice of what we could be—everything that I want right in front of me, that I might not be able to have.
There’s something to be said for owning up to it, though. For going for it anyway.
Beth opens the door wider to let me in, and ushers me inside. The cold closes off behind us and I shrug out of my coat and lay it over the back of a chair.
“Can I hold him?” I ask her, and she lifts Micah into my arms.
He’s wearing a black onesie with a Misfits logo on the front. I sit down on the couch and prop him up on my legs, and run my hands over his hair, his tiny hands and feet. When I smile at him, he smiles back, showing me his gums.
“I forgot how small they are at this age,” I say.
I look up at her. Standing in the winter sunlight shining through the window. She’s watching us, holding the flowers I brought against her chest. She breathes out once, raggedly, and my heart drops out from under me.
And then she’s beside me, pressing her forehead to my shoulder. Her hair falls over my bare arm, her lips whisper over my skin.
“Tony,” she says again.
I turn carefully with Micah in my arms and gather her to me. I kiss the side of her hair.
“Please tell me you’re ready, Beth.”
She makes a sound against my chest and takes my hand. “I’m ready to talk about it.”
“That’s something.” Her palm is warm in mine. She pulls back and sits beside me, inches away, and I know with total certainty that this is exactly where I want to be.
“Can we just, I don’t know, talk through what it would look like? If we…if we were together. If we decided to do this.”
“Sure,” I say. “Yeah.” Micah kicks his little legs toward my stomach. He smells like Beth, like a sweeter and softer version of her. His hot heartbeat rockets into me.
“I don’t want to be a Stepford wife, okay? Washing your socks and shit like that.”
I chuckle at that image. “You do look good in a pearl necklace.”
She snorts.
“I know you didn’t want a relationship, Beth. I know it wasn’t what you had in mind for yourself.”
“No,” she agrees. “It wasn’t. But here we are.”
“Yeah. Here we are.”
“I don’t want to move,” she says. “Okay? I mean, maybe I’ll buy a house someday, but I want to stay up here. I don’t want to live in the city.”
“All right.” I nod. “I do want to stay in the city, though. Near the girls. But we could visit each other.”
She looks at me. “You’d be okay with us being apart like that?”
“Sure.”
“I guess I pictured you wanting something more…traditional.”
I shrug. “I’m not sure how we’d do it any other way. I registered for some classes last week—woodworking. Making furniture, maybe for the store someday. I have a business to run. And Ray and I just booked a cruise to Alaska, did he tell you that?”
Her eyes light up. “Seriously?”
Micah snorts indignantly at being squeezed between us. I adjust him on my stomach so that he’s more comfortable, and pat his little back. “Ray suggested it, for the anniversary of Mom dying. It was something she always wanted to do.”
Her hand tightens in mine. “That’s…that’s really nice, Tony.”
“So,
honestly,” I say, “I’m not going to have a lot of time for you, Beth. I’m going to need my own space. My independence, you know what I mean? I don’t want to be smothered by this relationship.”
She narrows her eyes, and then shakes her head. “Whatever, you jerk.”
I laugh gently, so as not to wobble Micah, who’s slumping on my stomach.
Beth looks at me. “Are you sure you want to take all this on?”
I roll my eyes at her. “Pretty sure I’ve made that clear, yeah.”
“I love you,” she says. “I love you, Tony.”
I close my eyes and let those words move through me. I feel her warm and steady hand. Her soft inhalations beside me. Her son in my arms, his eyelids drooping.
“We can do this,” I tell her. “It can be whatever we want it to be.”
She looks into my eyes. “Don’t propose to me on a tour boat, okay? I’m happy for Ray and Holly, but…it’s not really my thing.”
I laugh quietly. “I was married once already. It didn’t turn out so good.”
“So we just…” She holds my gaze. “We just take it one day at a time?”
I nod. “That’s all I want. One day at a time with you.”
She looks down at her baby, now snoring quietly between us.
“I bored him to sleep,” I say. “See what you have to look forward to?”
She takes my face in her hands and kisses me. With the same purpose and passion she brings to everything she does. With the same total honestly I loved from the first moment I met her. Then she lifts Micah and carries him to his crib.
When she returns, she’s taking off her shirt. “Get over here.”
I’m already rising before she’s even finished speaking.
I’m rising, and meeting Beth where she is.
To all you real-life heroines who forge your own path, and to the partners who (wisely) love you
Acknowledgments
Heartfelt thanks to my editor, Shauna Summers, for giving me this wonderful opportunity, for embracing another unconventional story, and for challenging me to deepen it. Gina Wachtel and Matt Schwartz, associate publishers at Penguin Random House, thank you for your generous support. Thanks also to Amy Brosey and Pam Feinstein for diligent and thorough production editing and copyediting, and to Lynn Andreozzi for a beautiful cover. Thank you to Erica Seyfried, Ashleigh Heaton, and Alex Coumbis for marketing and publicity, and to Heidi Lily, Sarah Murphy, and Carrie Pestritto for your careful assistance. Thank you to Melissa Johnson for Spanish language support. And big thanks to my agent, Becca Stumpf of Prospect Agency, for your keen insight and guidance.
Just Give Me a Reason Page 17
