Little Monkey’s D-Day
Today is D-Day, June 6…in numerology, six is the number of balance—6/6. Tomorrow, my oldest daughter will turn 13, and there is so much complexity wrapped in this event. I have the sweetest and most beautiful and talented daughter. It’s like the universe gifted her exponentially to compensate for everything it would do to her in her thirteen years. Some of it is my fault…the consequence of my lack of healing or understanding before I became a parent, from my conditioning and insecurity and adherence to social constructs that are borne reflections of my own upbringing, but none the less…being a good parent has always been my responsibility, and I have to try really hard to not be too hard on myself…the irony. I know.
My daughter could have had two possible due dates. Sean and I had started doing natural family planning. I got off the pill in the summer of 2012, which was a godsend. I hadn’t realized until I had the perspective of hindsight just how jacked birth control made my hormones. I was also still…we’ll just say fucked up from unresolved adolescent trauma I didn’t even know that I had because at that time, I thought every unfortunate thing, every lack of success, every hiccup in my life was my fault. I wore an invisibility cloak of guilt and shame that I had no clue how to remove, but looking back, it’s obvious now.
The reality was I wasn’t that bad. I’ve always tried to be a good person, and I’ve always bore the responsibility of things that weren’t even mine to carry, which has its roots in adolescence. I know I’m not alone in this…this is the plight of millennials of my generation. (I’m an “elder millennial”…technically a xennial…I played Atari and used a rotary phone at my grandmother’s house…I learned to type on a typewriter…and later an Apple IGS desktop…I remember DOS for crying out loud…I rode the crest of the technological revolution without even knowing I was doing it. I was seven when I played my first Mario Brothers game on the Nintendo…I was there when Mario Brothers came out. I remember the cartoon show…and Fridays were my favorite day because that’s the day they’d show Link and Zelda on TV after school, and I loved that show. I thought Link was cute and liked the way he adored Zelda despite being a somewhat bumbling superhero. Obviously, I also see the toxicity of a man pursuing a woman who has no interest in him whatsoever as well as his constant hedging for a kiss from her.)
She could have been conceived in September 15 or 17, though, I am confident it was the 17th. I remember that day too vividly—I wore a white Gap-brand babydoll dress with green leafy patterns that I got thrift from a local shop called Herthas, which I still have (maybe I’ll wear it tomorrow) and went to an HOA meeting because I remember the way some guy in my neighborhood kept making eyes at me as I sat up there with the other board members because I’d been cajoled into being the secretary on the board. I was 29. I found out I was pregnant right before what would’ve been the one-year anniversary of Sean’s and my wedding—October 8.
…I actually remember how all of my babies spare the last one were created…my son was the only one where I orgasmed, and my middle daughter was made while I leaned over the bathroom counter. The other one was created in April of 2017…the circumstances of which I don’t recall other than I ovulated early because we were like, “For God’s sake…let’s not have a baby born around December or January, so naturally she was due in January but delivered early on the winter solstice because I was so high-risk having lost our son at 33 weeks the day after Christmas in 2014.
For 2012, we’d booked a one-year anniversary trip to Savannah, Georgia. I’d gone the year previously in April while Sean was on deployment to Kandahar to meet up with my best friend who drove down from Charlottesville. We had a wonderful time. Sean booked a B&B, which meant a lot to me considering one of my love languages is a man who can plan…taking the time to plan a date or something special has always been one of the most significant signs of love and affection to me…and since I’d planned our entire honeymoon to Italy without any assistance (which is also why when we went to Italy, we did a vineyard tour and a cooking class and didn’t go to any Ferrari dealerships…this is why you get involved, men), I’d impressed how much it would mean to me for him to be involved. Thank God, he got the memo. (I included Pompeii on our Italy trip because of all the history lessons from school, Pompeii was by far the one that stood out the most…nature has always been a wild source of fascination to me, and Pompeii and the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and the preservation of that culture took first place. I remember on the train from Rome to Pompeii Sean grumbling about why we had to do that. He was so taken by Pompeii, the way he told people about it when we got back, you’d think he built it. But he would get excited about the discoveries I helped him make…he was evangelical about grilled corn, for example.)
On the way, we stopped in Atlanta for the Taste of Atlanta festival where I’d gotten us VIP tasting tickets, so we could enjoy the wine and meet Next Food Network Star chef Emily Ellen (I wore a yellow dress with pink polka dots, which I also still have). But now I was pregnant. Because I ran like a Swiss clock, I took a pregnancy test before work one morning ahead of our trip, and the thing popped positive. I was terrified.
I texted Sean that “we need to talk”. I was about to pull out onto Three Knotch Road from where we lived when he called me, apprehension in his tone. I told him I was pregnant. He said, “Oh thank God.”
Thank God? Thank God? This was a disaster! I wasn’t ready to be pregnant. Was the man insane? “I thought you were going to tell me that you were going to leave me,” he said.
Leave you? Why would I leave you? Hell, if anything, I was scared he might leave me for all of the bullshit shenanigans I’d pulled any time my unresolved inner chaos manifested externally. I always said he was the good one, and I was the disaster. Of course, I realize that it’s probably not the way anyone wants to find out they’re expecting their first child… “we need to talk”. Good lord, Amy. But I was freaking out. This was a massive change.
Early pregnancies may not stick, so I waited to see what would happen. I remember we went to eat at Carrabbas, which I believe is when I had my last sip of wine before it was confirmed…this is happening. (Interestingly, Carrabbas was what I ate at the hospital right before we lost our son a little over two years later.) Obviously, Sean would be indulging the VIP wine at Taste of Atlanta. I quickly adapted to not being able to drink and got on board as a mommy to be.
That was a rocky pregnancy—the Sandy Hook shooting happened in the winter of 2012. I sat at my desk at work processing the horror those parents were enduring and sympathizing. I felt sick. At the same time, I saw on Facebook where another mom named Amy lost her two-year-old daughter when the ungrounded swing set fell on her. This was around December. Sean and I were still identifying as conservative, and being in the South and raised to admire the artistry of guns while also believing they’re needed for at-home protection, Sean spent the duration of the week after our first pregnant Christmas looking for an automatic rifle because the fear-mongering was suggesting Obama would make them unavailable, which I personally agreed would’ve been a damn good thing if he did. Sean would ultimately get a gun and then promptly sell it, which irked me. That week of neglect and fear for absolutely nothing.
We were still figuring it out. We loved each other. We chose each other. We were made for each other. I would have dreams that terrified me…dreams of us splitting up, and in my dreams, I was always wanting to keep Sean. I couldn’t lose him. The one time we split up in 2009 was brief…my dreams wouldn’t let me let him go, and so we stayed together, but that’s how I knew he was the one person I wanted to be with. Knowing was easy. Making it work…well, it took effort and choice. Our communication hadn’t quite matured, and I didn’t know how to articulate my feelings—I feel ignored. I feel abandoned. I feel neglected. Those words didn’t come out. It came out as, “Why is this (gun) such a big deal to you? Why do you need one of those things?”
Time marched on, and the baby grew easily and healthily. I ran during my lunch hour. I’d go to the gym at the university I worked at and would change into running clothes and jog for two miles on the sidewalk that ran the length of Old Shell Road down to Foreman Road and back. I eventually would go to the pool in the late spring, which I felt was a service to the students—this is what happens to your body when you get pregnant, ladies. I’d sometimes walk over to the café across the street, taking the sidewalk on University to Old Shell for a smoothie, which I’d enjoy on the way back. I stayed active. The pregnancy was healthy.
I carried to term. One of her possible due dates was D-Day—the other was the eighth. She arrived on the seventh. I went into labor on D-Day. The day before, that afternoon and evening I did three things—I went on a jog with my friend on Old Shell Road heading toward Spring Hill. I went home, I had sex, and I got a foot massage. When I woke up on D-Day, I just knew something was happening. I got up early, tidied the entire house, which included climbing on a ladder to make sure some of the stagnant décor was just so, and then I went to work.
I was the Assistant Director for Research Compliance because it makes absolute sense that a woman with a creative writing masters be over the biohazard safety program and export controls. I was teaching safety to a group of new medical students when my contractions started to go nuts. I’d already started to have contractions, and as per usual, had no idea what to do (at this point, I still thought cesarean deliveries were vanity options that moms who didn’t want to wreck their hoohas took—I was clueless).
I called the doctor and asked when I should go in if I was in labor. It was when the contractions got closer together. Heard. I’d called Sean who worked an hour away at Keesler AFB in Biloxi and told him the time was nigh but not to come home yet (he would eventually drive back home at massively excessive speeds despite me telling him do not speed). As the contractions rapidly progressed from 10-minutes apart to minutes apart wherein I was rating the pain as OMG and WTF on my little piece of paper while I finished the lesson for the new med students, I decided it was time.
I left work early, went home, took a cursory shower where I shaved to the best of my abilities because I thought that was a necessary step, and then sat on the dining table, my feet on the bench, waiting for Sean to get home, so we could go to the hospital.
God love that man…he was so excited when he got home. He burst into the kitchen from the garage and said, “Monkey! We’re going to have a baby!” Freaking fantastic. I was in so much pain from the contractions, I thought I was going to pass out. He asked if he had time for a shower, I said, “Are you out of your mind? No.”
He got his bag, and we loaded up into our blacked-out Jeep Grand Cherokee and headed toward Providence Hospital. I called my best friend from the Jeep. He took a photo of me at the traffic light while he drove. He said to try to look happy and like I wasn’t in so much pain, which is on par with when I was in my first trimester, tired as hell, and he told me to “get my second wind” while we looked for safer vehicles than my ’95 Wrangler, which had neither suspension or air conditioning (we felt my eggs were better off not scrambled since one had fertilized…which reminds me…when someone asked how I liked my eggs, my response was always unfertilized…though I would have my first-ever eggs over easy at a B&B in Chattanooga on our baby-moon in January of 2013 (poached is officially my favorite preparation, if I’m being honest, by the way)).
When I got to the hospital, it was established that while I was contracting, I wasn’t yet dilated. I wouldn’t dilate at all. But I wasn’t even finished effacing, the step before dilation—and no, I am 43, and I still have no clue what the full process involved is…I just know that some young nurse said that they’d probably send me home until I was further along. I think she thought I was dramatizing the pain and the contractions, but as soon as they put me on the monitor, they were like, “Oh, shit, yeah, this is not a drill.”
My baby was ready to make her debut even if my body wasn’t. I would contract until the evening. Sean’s sister and brother-in-law and parents as well as mine would come before I got the epidural. When the nurse asked what was my “birthing plan” (what the fuck is a “birthing plan”? Have the baby is the plan.), I responded that “I want the epidural”. That was my plan. Drug me up. I haven’t had so much as a Tylenol in nine months. Drug me.
I remember pushing with all of my strength against the arms of the bed. I was trying to break it because I was in so much pain. You’re not supposed to push down there when you’re in labor until it’s go-time, so I just used my hands and arms to press against the bed frame. They wouldn’t let me get the epidural until the baby calmed down. Sean sat beside me, and I squeezed his hand. Tightly. But Sean sitting beside me helped my body stabilize, and it helped her stabilize enough, so that thank God, I could get the epidural. I’d been in labor for over 12 hours if you counted those early contractions spaced out by an hour that started when I woke up…for God’s sake, someone do something.
The epidural immediately assuaged the pain. I felt nothing. I felt great. That night while Sean slept beside me, I got the University of Phoenix work done on my laptop. The next morning, they came in and told me I was going to L&D for a cesarean at 7:30 A.M. I’m sorry, a what?
I’d never had surgery…barring four cesareans and my hysterectomy, I have still never had surgery. Like, no broken bones or medical maladies (unless you count the I&D on my hand, which I suppose we do), so suddenly realizing I was about to have major surgery was a bit of a shock. They gave me some kind of medication, which I promptly threw back up. They explained that I wasn’t yet dilated, and my contractions were too powerful and close together to give the baby’s heartbeat time to come back up. This was happening.
Oh God.
I was in the OR shortly after 7 A.M. They put up a partition. My arms were stretched out in a T-shape. Sean donned PPE over his clothes for hygiene. All I felt were tugs and pulls as the procedure began. I asked Sean, “What does it look like?”
He fanned away my question, feeling queasy, which I suppose makes sense. I can’t stand the sight of blood or cuts or anything like that, so I really have no idea what he saw. I know you can watch these things on TV, but the inner workings of the human body, what it looks like when a baby emerges from a human being naturally or via cesarean have never been things I’ve endeavored to watch. I have virgin eyes.
Eventually, we would hear the baby cry, and at 7:12 AM, I would give birth to a 6 lb 13 oz 21” little monkey…which was her nickname…and her initials. I was Sean’s monkey, and she’d been our “little monkey”. It was easy to remember her delivery stats…her weight was the year and the month of her birth…the minutes were a numerical inversion of her length, and her birth hour was the day of her delivery—6/7.
I so very much wanted to give that child the sun, moon, and stars. She was beautiful. When I saw her, her little mouth was moving—she was perfect…she was already ready to eat. Sean would hold her first. He would spend time with her first. I had her when they cleaned the baby before they gave her to her mommy. It felt like a long time before I got to hold her, even though it was only about 20-something minutes if I remember correctly.
Sean and I got to meet her first. I feel teary remembering the first moments I got to hold my precious little monkey. The nurse showed me how to latch her onto my breast, and she did—she did a great job. And just like that…we were parents.
And for the first six years of that angel’s life, I feel like we did a good job. The first year was challenging with Sean and me and our need to learn better communication skills, but our love for our daughter was infinite. She was a priority. Sean really started to bond with her when she became more animated and did more than eat, sleep, and poop. Since I nursed her, I was responsible for the feedings at night. Neither of us were particularly delightful to be around when we were tired, so I judged if only one of us was perpetually exhausted—me, it would be better.
At around six months, we started to supplement formula. I had a night class I taught a couple of days a week, and I couldn’t pump enough to provide milk for my mom to have when she watched her during the day at her Avon store near the university (I’d go nurse her during my lunch hours at my mom’s behest) and for Sean to have for her in the evenings. I’d sometimes get off work and go to Pour Baby for a glass of cava. I had zero time to myself until after she went to sleep each night, so I would steal time wherever I could get it. I could be conflating time, but any personal time I had was largely stolen. I was past exhausted. This would ultimately create challenges, but I have always been more than just a mother. Internally, I just couldn’t be just a mother. I wanted to be a writer. I was writing—I was writing marketing content, which was how I could afford to take all three months of my FMLA with her when I had her. That was important to me. Though I was desperately overwhelmed, her care and safety and being with family were priorities.
Seven years ago, as her sixth birthday grew near, our family was both complete and in danger. Sean had been one chemo away from beating the Hodgkin’s disease—which means it was basically in remission, when he was diagnosed with refractory anaplastic large cell lymphoma, a rare and aggressive non-Hodgkin’s disease that emerged as a mutation on the 34th protein—the same one as the HL, because of the hexavalent chromium exposure he’d suffered at the 403rd at Keesler AFB. He was in the hospital. We’d learned of the new cancer on June 4.
Thus in the midst of advocating for Sean, learning that the survival of this new cancer was terrifyingly lower than that of the HL, and moving toward what would ultimately be tragedy, I was also designing a birthday invitation for my precious little kindergarten graduate and planning a pool party at the university for her. The forecast was 100% rain. I told her to pray. I said if it was meant to be a sunny day, then it would be. As anxious as I was not knowing the plan for the birthday party and if I should create a back-up plan, I also knew that if the universe didn’t want the birthday party to happen, it would be for a good reason. There might be a reason the universe doesn’t want a bunch of toddlers, children, and babies swimming.
But the forecast changed. It was a bright, beautiful, and perfect sunny day. It was so important to me that her birthday be perfect. I carried the responsibility of making it just so for her because I felt like she’d suffered enough with her darling daddy—she was such a daddy’s girl…he did that because my own dad and I weren’t close, and Sean knew how hurtful that was for me…how negatively it had impacted me that he was invalidating and treated my career like a hobby or an option, always suggesting roles that would make me blow my brains out (you could be president of the university. Yeah. I could also do cocaine and commit suicide…which would be preferable to being president of the university for someone who just wants to have the time and freedom to write fucking books.). It hurt. It hurt because I let it, but Sean loved me so much he wanted to make sure that I didn’t witness my own daughter growing up in the same circumstances, and he also loved our precious daughter to the moon and back, teaching her how to do things on cars…he dreamed of that…of teaching her to change tires and one day ride motorcycles and just…all the things.
It was important that the party go according to plan because Sean was in the hospital, and it wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fair, so one thing had to go right, and by the grace, it was her birthday party.
My MIL and I—along with all of my daughters, went to Sam’s Club the morning of the party, got all of the snacks, food, and cupcakes, and then went to the pool, somehow making it on time. We’d finish setting up while the party got underway, but it was perfect. And I feel like so many people showed up out of love and compassion for our sweet family…it was there way of helping us during a time of chaos, confusion, and fear. I was and will always be grateful.
For the next six years of that angel’s life, chaos would ensue. I would date a bastard who treated her the way my dad treated me until I curbed that bitch on May 5, 2024. Because he was the opposite of Sean, he was and is the opposite of a real man, his fragile ego wouldn’t be able to accept it was over-over and I wasn’t chasing after him because he was abusive in literally every way a person can be—emotionally, psychologically, verbally, financially, physically, and sexually—he smear campaigned me and group stalked me with flying monkeys, which made me incredibly paranoid. I slipped in my ability to take care of my children. I was as hypervigilant as I was after Sean died in the fall of 2024.
The attention I had to give to just ensuring basic safety and to get my mind back on track, the trauma—healing from my own adolescent trauma…it was six years of clawing my way out of the gates of Hell. I fought against a tidal wave of energy that we now see as being the end of the patriarchy (burn faster)…I learned just how disrespected and undervalued women are in our culture, and along the way, my daughter only felt my abandonment, which was never my intention, but parenting three children alone is something no one should do, though, I know many married mothers and single mothers do it.
But I will say this—one thing I have for my daughter is unconditional love, and now, seven years later, I have dispensed with the fears I carried—and I have dispensed with the belief that everything is my responsibility. I know my daughter will be okay. She has love. She feels loved and valued and prioritized. I know she will figure it out. I know her dad and brother are watching over her, and I know that as battle-worn as I am…I can wait for her to understand…and I can be there for her as she grows up. And I can forgive her anything. Because I also can finally forgive myself for the ways I failed her, for the ways my trauma emerged, for dating the devil incarnate, for all of the things that I wish I’d done better.
It will get better, and it will be okay. Miracles happen. I should know. Tomorrow, one of mine turns 13. Happy birthday, little monkey.