I thought, if he asks me one more time if I’m okay, he's going to have to leave the room. I felt like a prized toy. Everyone and anyone was introducing themselves and putting their fingers up my pussy and saying, “She’s nearly there.”
I knew I had to be ten centimeters and what had felt like hours could have only been a few minutes, but I had been around nine for a very long time.
The instructions were clear, but with no time for pain killers. My birth plan was a thing of the distant past, and all I wanted to do was make sure that our baby came out and that the little one was healthy and could function and do all the things that babies are supposed to do.
“What the fuck did I learn in those classes?”
I was trying to distract myself from the pain. Trying to remember how it was all supposed to go down.
“The funny thing is, you said you were thirty two weeks, well according to the scan you’re a little under thirty four weeks,” the nurse said as she came to reassure me.
The difference in weeks, meant that the baby was most likely not going to be premature. This was good news.
“What does that mean?” Logan asked as he held on to my hand. I could tell that he was completely confused. He’d had no interaction with the pregnancy. Sure, we’d talked about it at the hotel, but that was it. This was the real thing and he knew nothing about what was going on.
“It means that it's good news. The later the better,” she reassured him as she patted him on the back.
“Alexa,” he sighed as he kissed me on the forehead. I was holding on to his hand for dear life until I heard the doctor say that I was ready to go.
Ready to push.
Ready to get it all over with and all I could think about was mustering enough strength to do that.
“Yes,” I growled ,wondering if Logan was delusional. This really wasn’t the time to have any type of conversation.
Between the doctor screaming push and Logan kissing me on the forehead I pushed with all the strength that I had in me. I kept on until they told me to stop. I had to get the little one out.
Nothing could hold me back.
The lights that were shining in my eyes didn’t deter me.
Logan was screaming with excitement about seeing our baby’s head and nothing in the world could make this pain go away, apart from the birth of our new baby.
And as I heard it cry, all I could think about was if it was going to be okay and then there was a cry from Logan as he said, “It’s a boy!”
I started to laugh at the irony of a little baby boy coming into my life and, as he kissed me on the lips, this time as the doctor told me that I needed to push one more time for the afterbirth.
Logan cried, “Thank you Alexa. We have a beautiful baby boy.”
I could see through the tears and the smiles that Logan was happy. Truly happy. It had been a while since I had seen that look on his face, but it was worth it. I had given birth to our baby boy together.
Just like I had always wanted.
“Thank you Alexa,” I was choking on tears of joy and. I held her hand and watched as the nurses in the corner of the room with the pediatrician started to look at our baby boy. I could hear him crying in the back room and the louder he cried, I found myself doing exactly the same thing.
“I’m tired,” she whispered so faintly that I worried that something was wrong until the nurse came by my side and said, “She’s had a long day. This is perfectly normal.”
She patted me on the back, congratulating me on the birth of my baby boy.
“I don’t even know why they allowed her on the train in her condition and stage of pregnancy.”
I winked at the nurse, “Alexa’s pretty persuasive when she wants to be.”
The nurse laughed, “I bet she is.”
I let Alexa get some rest as I called the rest of the family to tell them about the delivery of my beautiful bouncing boy. Because he was nearly full term and a heavy seven pounds, we were relieved to hear that he didn’t need to go to the premature unit.
“Baby on campus. Crazy!” I laughed with Alexa as she had woken up from her short nap. She was ready to start breastfeeding and give the little guy a taste of her milk. She explained to me that it wasn’t quite milk yet, but I wasn't paying attention, I was so lost in the moment.
They say with every curse is a blessing.
My Dad was killed by her Dad and somehow standing here holding our baby it made things feel different to how they had before. I’d had so much anger inside of me, hate that I thought was going to rip through my bones. Yet, I was holding my baby thinking about nothing but love.
“To think that you thinking I was cheating on you made you give birth.”
“It did make me give birth. I still had four weeks to go.”
I shook my head, “Why did you get on the train?” She avoided looking at me as she said, “I was so desperate to see you. Looking back, it felt so stupid but it looks like everyone thought I was obese and I just kind of played along with it.”
Wow!
That must be the stupidest thing that I’d ever heard. I sat next to her watching as our baby was sucking on her nipples.
“Mom, Marie, Brian…” she started saying all their names and I knew what was going through her mind.
I kissed her on the cheek and said, “Chill, they all know and they’re on their way.”
She smiled, “I lied about one thing.”
That was when our son looked as if he had given up or he was drunk on milk. She lifted him up and patted him gently.
“Wind. Wind, get it all out.”
Curiosity got the better of me and I asked, “What did you lie about?”
“Oh.”
She was hesitant and I wondered what was on her mind.
“Marie never said to come, she actually just asked me to talk to you. See if I could make you see sense about how you could destroy your life.”
I held out my hands, ignoring what she had said. It was neither here nor there. What difference did it make? I explained to her how I’d feeling: confused, lonely, guilty.
That part she’d never understood, “What did you have to feel guilty about?”
I sighed as I delicately kissed our baby on his head. “If I had gone to get the ice then Dad would still be here today. He would be on the flight like the rest of the family are right now to come and see you and our son.”
There was silence as we were both lost in our thoughts and as I held our baby tight. All I could do was think about protecting him from the world. All the evils would be washed out and he would never have to suffer for who he was, or problems that he’d had in his life like John had done. Maybe there was something from his childhood that made him the way he was. I knew that his Dad treated him the same as a kid and drank too much and gambled the same. Maybe there was a pattern there that could never die and I vowed as I held my little boy to make sure that the only pattern, the only path he’d have in life, would be love. I was filled with it and Alexa too.
“You thought about a name?” she quizzed as she lifted up his blanket and uncovered his little face.
Already she was turning into the protective mom, making sure that he was okay.
“What do you think?”
She nodded, because we were more than just two people who just happened to have a baby. We had been through some shit and I knew no matter what in life we would go through some more. But nothing, nothing could take away how I felt about her and how we both felt about him and his untimely death.
“Richard.”
“Richard,” I kissed her on the cheek. He even looked like the old man with his almond eyes that seemed to shine whenever he opened them slightly. I would make sure that I gave him time. Which Dad did mostly when I was older, but it wasn’t too late. “Welcome to the world, Richard Collins.”
Alexa smiled and said, “Welcome.”
I couldn’t be happier with the way my life had turned out. My Dad was tucked behind bars after the prosecutors dug up his past and represented a case which showed his true nature as an adulterer, a man that had lied to his family while having an affair with another. A man that had gambled most of his wife’s wages. A man that had put his family’s life in danger time and time again.
There was no temporary insanity in his case and he deserved to be locked up for life. As for Marie and Olivia, they welcomed us back into the family once again, but Mom refused to live with them under the same roof.
She said that she wanted to be around family and moved in with my grandparents in Ohio.
What about Logan and I?
Well, we have a little three year old that keeps us on our toes and Logan finally graduated from college, which was great because for one minute, I’d thought that he wouldn’t and he said that Richard, our baby boy, had turned him around and made him see that you couldn’t change the past, you could only see a bright future.
Which is great, because today’s Draft Day and if things don’t work out the way we want them to, then I’m scared he will go back into the darkness and I don’t think I could handle that. Not again.
I’ve got one more year to finish college and I’m still in two minds as to whether to follow my profession through. We close our eyes as the cameras focus on us as we sit in his family’s house.
There has been so much tension built-up to this day and I can only hope that it’s good news. We could really do with some right now. Well, Logan could anyway, because no matter how much he tries to convince me that he is Okay. That he’s happy and content. Whenever it’s his dad’s birthday that is when the darkness returns and I leave him. I let him grief in his own way. The first year was hard, but every year it gets that little bit easier, but he misses him. The same way Marie, Olivia and I do. But with Logan, it’s different. He spent so many years not connecting with his dad and when he finally did, mine took him away from him. That’s something that he can never take back. None of us can, no matter how hard we try.
“This is it,” Logan sighs as he holds my hand, and presses his lips against mine.
“This is it,” I say as if I’m a broken record.
As they call his name and announce that he’s been given the contract to play for the Chicago Bears, I decide that I better just get rid of the burning secret that I promised I would never keep from him ever again.
This time it’s kind of different.
A nice surprise.
Everyone’s jumping up and down and the camera crew are filming us live when I blurt out, “I’m pregnant again!”
Logan stops jumping and the room kind of stops, apart from Richard who’s the only one still jumping up and down.
I’m waiting for a reaction. Something to know that everyone is okay. Instead he holds me in his arms and says, “You forgot the pill again?”
This time, that’s not exactly what happened and he lifts me in the air and I say, “Does it matter? The Wide receiver for the Chicago Bears is going to be a daddy again!”
Once again, the whole room is cheering, “I hope this time it’s a baby girl.”
Logan laughs, “Does it matter?”
Not really, but it would be nice to have one of each in our household.
Logan says, “More importantly I need to get you down the aisle before this one pops out!”
Everyone looks at him, including me because like being parents we had talked about it, but I was an old-fashioned girl hoping that he still felt that way about me. I knew that we were content in our lives, but sometimes a girl needs a bit of reassurance.
So he gets down on one knee, “Will you, Alexa Russell, be my lawful wedded wife.” My eyes are filled with tears. I knew that Logan loved me. Wanted to be in my life forever, but as he proposed with no hesitation, knowing that it wasn’t planned. That was the reassurance I needed that this was real.
The childhood sweethearts that swore to be together without going down the aisle were real - both Logan and I. I didn’t spitting out, “I do.”
As my eyes are full of tears and joy. Then Todd being the comedian rips out the ring out of a can of Coke and says, “Use this!”
He slowly slides it on my finger. I should have been crying at not having a diamond ring. Most girls would want that. All I had ever wanted was right here in this room, apart from the camera crew.
They cheer, and so do our family. They filmed my proposal with a coke can ring on national TV; most women would care but I didn’t, because no one would understand what it would mean to us to get married.
A couple that had the odds against them for so long.
A couple that rose and became stronger in their fight to stay together.
A couple like us.
###The End###