“The next day I got the call. ‘Jessica, can you come into the doctor’s office tonight?’ I was just heading out the door for work, but she said, ‘Jessica, you need to come in now please’.”
‘His skull looked as thin as a piece of paper. We were given the option to terminate at 7 months pregnant. He’s not dead yet.’
‘I like daddy better than you! He always plays with me!’ Soul crushing, right? All the things I do for you go unnoticed, but I’ll do them for you anyway.’
“I’m the one tidying up the toys while you are wrestled with. I make sure all your appointments are up to date, even when I forget my own. I’m the one up till 3 a.m. making the LEGO house you asked for. Hiding Christmas presents.”
‘I started to get that pit in my stomach, telling me there was a problem. I went to his room. He was laying on his tummy. I patted his butt, thinking he was still sleeping. He didn’t respond.’
“It was like watching a movie. I wasn’t there. I was watching this poor mom kneeling by her baby boy praying and crying, trying to bring him back. I remember standing in the living room with the cops. Thinking, ‘They’ll save him. They have to save him. They can do it.’”
‘It never fails that when I get home, relaxed and full from a great dinner, the kids in bed, and the wife says, ‘Baby will you do me a favor?’
“I already know what’s coming – Without fail, every night.”
‘I am the person who listens to you cry as you’re begging your mother to take another breath.’
“To my kids, please understand when I’m strict and paranoid wanting to track your every movement, it’s because I know a child didn’t make it home to their family that day.”
‘I remember this guy said I had a ‘tight rig.’ I never ate much, I glorified my thinness. I was valued. I was funny, I felt pretty.’
“I met a guy, we fell in love and wanted babies. 3 kids, 2 vaginals, 1 cesarean, postpartum depression, antidepressant weight gain, and life later, this is my rig. I hated it. I would say it was broken. It’s not the person I valued anymore.”
‘This is me, hosting our very first Thanksgiving. I’m cooking in A SKIRT AND HEELS. I’m smiling, even though my marriage was falling apart.’
“So, you’d think I’d look at this picture, look at her all smiley and hiding and ignorant, and I’d be embarrassed. Or maybe sad for what she went through, or even angry, at my husband or my mom, or the world or God, but I don’t feel any of that.”
‘A 4-pound bundle of goodness was placed in my arms. By a stranger. In the middle of my street. Just before 10 p.m.’
“As the effects of cocaine crippled his central nervous system, we fought. We walked and bounced and rocked, and walked more. And here’s the thing… he will never remember me.”
‘I was sitting next to a grandmother of 3 children. ‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘kids these days have no idea what real values are, and they’re certainly not going to learn them from their parents.’
“‘What does that mean?’ I asked her curiously.”
‘If I could sit down beside the 25-year-old me. The one sobbing and screaming uncontrollably on the floor the day my Mom died, I would have a lot of things to tell her.’
“I would sit right beside the younger me who is screaming, ‘Why her??’ and ‘Where are YOU?? How did you just disappear??’ and ‘How am I going to survive this without you??'”
