We stuck to a schedule like gospel, but breastfeeding didn’t come easily to me. Not enough people talk about how tough it is, so hear it from me: it’s okay if it doesn’t come naturally to you either. There’s enough pressure keeping this perfect little creature alive. Just do the best you can, whatever your best is. For me, breastfeeding was a time to pray over her and connect with her. You can do that while you’re giving your baby a bottle, too.
Carol Vanderslice, my old Sunday school teacher, came to help me. I sometimes measured my mothering skills by how much she smiled while looking at me. I loved having her there. Eric and I were fortunate to have help and be there for every first. Those first months, there was so much magic happening in our home that I had a beautiful distraction from my parents and their drama. In August, my mother discovered that my father had betrayed their marriage, just as she and I thought things were turning around for them. She had just told me what a nice time they had together on their anniversary, and she thought maybe they had turned a corner. I thought so, too. When she confronted him, my dad began calling me, and I would not pick up. One time he called while I was in my closet, looking to see what I could fit into. Maxwell was in the bassinet next to me. I watched the phone ring until it mercifully stopped. I sighed. A minute later, Eric was there.
“Jessica, your dad’s here,” he said. No, he’s not, I thought. He just called. He is far, far away.
“What do you mean ‘Your dad’s here?’ ” I said. “What’s he gonna say to me?” He had called from out front. I still thought I could hide. I looked at my baby. “Okay, Maxwell, it’s you and me, kid.”
But suddenly my dad was there, spouting in full denial mode. After all those times he’d flirted with the idea of rescuing himself, he couldn’t do it. “I’m not with anybody else,” he said. “I love your mother.”
My anxiety made me freeze. I turned words over and over in my mind, trying to find just the right ones to express my pain.
He said he didn’t want to hurt me, and that’s when Eric stepped in. He said something like, “Each time you deny your own truth, something intense happens. You have to listen to the signs and take care of it yourself. Jess has no extra energy to give to you right now.” I could tell that got through to my dad. It was the type of thing he might have counseled someone back in Richardson.
My parents filed for divorce that August. Dad moved on quickly, and maybe he’d planned it so long that he had a running start ahead of my mother. He tends to have conversations with himself for so long, and then he suddenly talks about something as if we’re all supposed to be up to speed. He starts in the middle, and it can make people—well, my mom—feel lost. So, I admit, I took care of my mother. In many ways, she had lost her best friend. She was twenty when she got married. She was the youngest child, and he gave her the world. She’s said that he didn’t just give her identity, Joe Simpson was her identity. He took her out of her comfort zone. He helped her be adventurous, to see the world. Her everything had become nothing.
My mom had a hard time with Ashlee and me even seeing our father, and I was incapable of not telling my mother when I’d spent time with Dad. So, for a long time, this daddy’s girl stopped seeing him. I told him I loved him, but it was easier this way. Strong Ashlee was the one who stepped up, refusing to limit herself. She and our father formed a new relationship. I am proud of her.
Sadly, this is when I had to fire my father, one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. The worst part was that I had do it five times because he would not accept it. Too often I was circling back to people, only to find that Dad had made some move without telling me. People agreed to bad terms, thinking that was what I had demanded when, really, I had no idea. It left a lot of hurt feelings I didn’t know existed, and I knew I had to make the move to go forward with ownership of my own career.
I did one thing to make sure my dad knew I loved him. His father had always sat in a big leather recliner. My grandfather loved that chair, and I loved to sit by it and tickle his toes to make him laugh. Dad always wanted one, but my mom’s interior-designer instincts wouldn’t allow it. “I am not putting a leather recliner in our house,” she’d say. I bought him one. Now he could do what he wanted.
While I chose to see my mother over my father, I also felt the lightest barrier forming between her and me. It was self-protection. She was hurting, and someone who’s read as many self-help books as I have knows, hurt people hurt people. She would say something cutting to me, and I would later turn it over in my head like a puzzle. It took me a long time to realize that when she did that, it was because she didn’t like herself in that moment. She didn’t want to make me cry, she only wanted to take me to the same dark place where she was.
But that took a while for me to figure out. In the meantime, I focused on my little family of three. Creating my own family within that loss was a beautiful thing. And I was about to be blessed again.
24
Let’s Go Dancing in the Light
October 2012
Of course, I turned my Weight Watchers meetings into parties. They sent me this great mentor, Liz Josefsberg, to make the plan for me, and I shared it with all my girlfriends. There was something celebratory about our weekly weigh-ins, not punishing. I was on fire, losing three and half pounds a week, and on a serious health kick.
And yet, I felt off. We had our normal gathering for Halloween, and I felt so nauseous. I had given up breastfeeding, thinking it would make me feel better, but now I felt awful. I flashed on a recent time when Eric and I had made love, and how we looked at each other and I said, “I think we just made a baby.” But no, Maxwell was only four months old . . .
I went to the downstairs bathroom, where I still had my stash of pregnancy tests.
Pregnant.
Eric was upstairs in our bedroom and Maxwell was napping. Again, I raced up the steps, but this time I wasn’t screaming because the only thing bigger than a mom’s need to yell is her baby’s need to sleep. I was shaking when I showed Eric the test. Of course, we were thrilled, but it was such a shock. Again, I got pregnant on a month where the egg had to cross over to my left fallopian tube.
Immediately, I went into mom-of-two mode. “Well, this house is too small,” I said. “Where are we gonna put this baby?” It was heartbreaking to realize we had to leave our house, because it was so special. The place where I’d found my forever. But my real forever was Eric, Maxwell, and now this little person, who I was suddenly very worried about. I knew I had to see the specialist right away again to rule out a tubal pregnancy. She was shocked that my eggs had pulled off this trick a second time.
“I think it was some really powerful sex,” I said. “Eric must have meditated right before.”
We delayed our wedding a second time, this time tabling the whole plan. Our only concern, once we knew our next child was healthy, was focusing on Maxwell. We wanted to spend as much alone time with Maxwell before she had to share our attention with another baby in the house. When we told friends, some people—okay, a lot of people—were like, “Oh my gosh, are you gonna do this? Back to back?”
“Well, we don’t have a choice, you know,” I’d answer. “We’re gonna do this and they’re gonna be best friends.” When we found out we were having a boy, we were thrilled. We already had that perfect name, Ace Knute.