The majority of my third trimester was spent with my mother hiding me from the world and waiting for me to leave. In her defense, she wanted me to stay but could do nothing to help me. So off I went on a bus to Phoenix. Eight and a half months pregnant and on the Greyhound bus to my future. To the man who knocked me up and claimed to love me. To the man who had blown every cent he had made in the almost two months he had been in Phoenix on drugs of the powdered variety.
We lived with his brother and sister in law and two kids for a month and a half. I gave birth to Amanda at a hospital ten miles from their home with no one there but AZ. I won't bore you with the details of my labor except for to say that it was several days long and the very definition of how to scare your kids away from sex. But then, there she was. This tiny little baby. Do you know I had never seen a baby before? I mean, I thought I had but now I realize that all of those babies were well over a year old. And there I sat on a hospital bed holding my daughter. This tiny creature is trying so hard to open her eyes and see her world for the first time. The world that I have given her. You hear people say it all of the time and doubt the validity of their statement, but my entire world changed then. I changed. I stopped being sixteen and became Amanda's Mom. Whatever I thought I felt for AZ was suddenly muted by a love for my daughter that was far more resounding. She was it for me and I had to make things better. But how?
I thought that he had to have been feeling what I was feeling. He had to be going through this emotional change and trying to rearrange his ideas as well. I thought he was going to want to be the best just as I wanted to. I thought wrong. He loved Amanda, I know that he did. Just as I know he loved me. But, for all of the love he had, he couldn't kick that powder habit. Nor could he overcome the guilt he was feeling for his best friend's death. (Having recently lost Veronique, I am now more able to understand that.)
AZ dreamed big, he wanted big, but he couldn't seem to get big. The fact that he was still little was causing him to doubt all that he was and all that he could be.
AZ drank, a lot. Then he combated it by snorting, a lot. Eventually the powder he so loved became something he smoked, a lot. Thus forming the crack habit he still has to this day. We stayed in Phoenix until we couldn't make the bills and he had burned all of his bridges. Then we jumped on another bus and came back to Texas. We went back to the coast and got ourselves another trailer. AZ got a job at a local restaurant and before I knew it, he was disappearing again. Once he was gone for so long that I filed a missing person's report on him. As it turned out he had landed himself in jail the next town over.
AZ could lie and that is exactly what he did to me for the next few years. It started there, on the coast. Lies about everything. Why he was late, why he had disappeared, why we were broke. I believed him, or wanted to. I was ready to leave. I had no idea what I was going to do, but I wasn't happy. My daughter was eight months old and I had nothing even remotely close to stability. But, even as the very thought of leaving was entering my mind, I was pregnant again! How fucking unfair that was! We had literally had sex like one time in MONTHS and that had only been because it was his birthday! Of course I was pregnant. Of course I was trapped again. Of course he was promising me the moon. Of course we moved again.
continued...
Labels: History Lesson
