Tessie D

When we first moved to Dublin, before Momma and Daddy bought the land with Granddaddy’s money and we moved into the trailer house, we lived in a one-bedroom apartment across the street from the Dairy Queen. Momma hadn’t started working yet and Daddy wasn’t getting any disability from the VA. I don’t know how we were making it. We moved late in the school year so I started just two weeks before summer vacation. Momma took me and Annie to the dollar store to buy some new school clothes, so that we’d feel special on our first day. I was so excited to start school. Growing up on an Army base with other military brats meant that I was used to being in a new school, and all of my classmates were “new kids.” There wasn’t an already established social hierarchy based on whose family had lived there the longest, whose grandparents were best friends in middle school, and whose mother was the elementary school gym teacher so you could bully anyone you wanted knowing that if she would lie to her mother and say that you’d called her a “butt face” and then her mother would pull you aside and corner you in her tiny, windowless office in the corner of the gym and scream at you about what an ugly little girl with an disgusting mouth you were. 

Knowing all of this now, knowing how important having “good Christian values” were in this community, people still surprised me. Their judgment, their ridicule. They’ll say that pain during childbirth is ordained by God somehow — atonement for the Garden of Eden. If we’re poor and don’t have insurance, we suffer even more. They just say all that to justify being hateful and ugly to us during our doctor’s appointments and letting us suffer when the baby comes. 

I hated going to my doctor’s appointments. Every Monday, the poor, pregnant girls in the county went to the Community Health Clinic behind the Piggly Wiggly. They don’t schedule appointments, so it is first-come-first-serve with whatever doctor was on-call that week, so we lined up at 9:00 am so that we could put our names down at the top of the sign-in sheet as soon as the doors opened knowing that the doctor wouldn’t be seeing us until after lunch. But, if we waited until noon to come in, we wouldn’t be out until after 4:00 and then the whole day is spent.

The community health clinic’s waiting room is a square room painted a dull beige with hard-backed chairs lined up in two rows in the center and along the three walls facing the glass partitioned check-in station where the nurses would look over their glasses and down their noses at us. The sun shone through the unshaded windows and the air conditioner clambered in the ceiling above us, trying to keep up. The waiting room didn’t have a water fountain or a television. None of the pastel paintings on the walls that they had at the clinic across the street where the women with insurance saw the (same) obstetrician all the other days of the week—by appointment only. We got a laminated “Patients’ Bill of Rights” poster and a picture of a young, black pregnant woman cradling her baby bump the printed warning: “Your baby is depending on you to stop smoking and avoid alcohol.” 

I always tried to snag a corner chair so that I could prop my back and head against the wall and put my feet up in the chair next to me. A few women had to bring their other children with them to the appointments, so the older kids kept the toddlers and preschoolers occupied by playing hide-and-go-seek, crouching down and hidden behind their mothers’ legs and running around in circles until the receptionist yelled out through the small glass window, “Sit down. Stop runnin’.” 

We sat still in the overheated, cramped waiting room, watching our ankles swell — rows of sandals’ straps cutting into our feet as gravity pulled and fluids pooled. A first timer always arrived at the clinic at noon, not knowing that arriving on time meant she was late and wouldn’t be seen for another three hours.

But, there were no other options or escape: We were trapped. There wouldn’t be any birth plans, water births, or vanity ultrasounds. We wouldn’t know the sex until the baby came, and we’d each be induced on Friday during our 39^th week so that the doctor on call wouldn’t be bothered on the weekends. 

Once in the doctor’s office, we’d answer the same questions every month and then later, every week: “Yes, this is the father. No, I don’t want my tubes tied after the delivery. Yes, I understand that I can’t keep popping out kids and that it’s not the people of Texas’ responsibility to take care of my mistakes. Yes, I understood that I wouldn’t get an epidural because it cost $500 extra and that the pain would help me remember for next time.”

They wanted me to feel bad. To feel ashamed and humiliated. Every moment of those nine months was designed to remind me how far I’d fallen. Even now, with her here, I’m supposed to feel ashamed and embarrassed every time I go out. People see her and then see me, and I watch their faces shift as they do the math in their heads. 

But, what is the point of all that shame and embarrassment? It didn’t change anything except make me hate myself and everyone else. And I’ve spent too much time wasting away. Feeling sorry for myself. The shame, exhaustion, the loneliness a weight, pulling me down. Pulling me into the dirt slowly. Waiting for the day when I could just lay down and let someone mound the dirt over me. I can’t live the rest of my life walking around, wasting away in this field. What good does all of that regret do me now? 

I’ve got to accept it and move forward. I’ve got to make something of myself. All of them with their judgment and scorn, looking down on me my whole life like I was trash. Thinking that I proved them right all along, having a baby right out of high school. 

The worst thing that could’ve happened has happened. And, I’m still here. 

They can think they’re better than me and my family, but I’ll know that they’re not. I know all their little secrets, too. Funny, I hear a lot in the field when people think I’m not listening. When they think I’m so beneath them that they don’t need to show any sort of discretion. I know all about them. Their secret affairs, their daughters’ abortions, and their sons’ quick elopements. Their gambling addictions and how they sell dime bags at the high school. The vodka in their sweet tea and their grandfathers who asks his granddaughters to sit on his lap when nobody is home. People share plenty when they think you’re invisible. 

And, still, they judge me because mine was out in the open, out there for everyone to see. 

I don’t have any use for it anymore. The embarrassment, the shame. I’ve been out in this field for months, my penance. I thought that somehow my experience was profound, tragic even. But nothing is tragic about my circumstances. The world is entirely indifferent to my suffering and my remorse. Time moves on. The seasons come and go. The sun has risen in the same spot on the  horizon all my life. Always in the same place. I’ve seen the storms roll in, the winds tear across the pasture, the lightening cutting across the sky and thunder booming over head. Seasons, months, days all pass. I have changed, but nothing else has. Time has moved on.  

I have wondered if my situation had been different would I be so unhappy? If I had just had a baby on my own — without having to answer for it every day in the small, insignificant ways that slowly pull you apart — would I have been so miserable? 

I don’t think so. 

She’s just so lovely. Her little arms reaching for me when I come home in the evenings. When we go to sleep at night and I can curl my body around her, protecting her warm little body. In those moments, I forget what I’m supposed to feel so bad about. What I did that was so wrong if this is what came of it. 

If I could live in that moment forever, I think I’d be happy.