Mommies Behaving Badly

by Roz Bailey

Genres: Women's Fiction

Synopsis

In her witty, wry, insightful new novel, Roz Bailey follows the adventures of one woman who's discovering a new state--and a whole new state of mind. . . Some signs are hard to ignore. . . When Ruby Dixon's car is stolen--again--on the day her husband is offered a job in Portland, Oregon, the message seems clear. It's time to give up stressful New York living in favor of bucolic bliss in the Great Northwest. Others you don't see until it's too late. . . Now Ruby, Jack, and their three children have a palatial house in a peaceful burb, and everything's perfect. Except that Ruby can't get a decent haircut, can't seem to crack her neighbors' shells. . .and Jack is constantly away on business. If it wasn't for her new friend Ariel, another transplanted New Yorker who's earned the ire of the local PTA, Ruby would be about ready to cry uncle. And some guide you right where you need to be But if life is dependable for one thing, it's unexpected turns, leaving Ruby and her children in a far from familiar place. Their new situation is beyond terrifying. . .But it's also somehow exhilarating. Because Ruby is about to find out just what can happen when there are no compromises, no safety nets, and no rules to follow but your own. . . Roz Bailey went to college in New York City and never looked back. She spent the better part of her twenties searching for a fine romance, both at work as an editor and after hours in Manhattan. She's a huge fan of cities and hopes to one day return to a lifestyle full of museums and theaters, far from the land of minivans and drive-through windows. She currently lives with her husband and two children in the Pacific Northwest, where she has taken up walking in the rain and teaching art literacy. She is immersed in a study of slackers and can be found doing research in local coffee shops while working on her latte addiction, one day at a time.

Release date: September 1, 2007

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 385

Sample

So far it had been an odd business lunch, as difficult to maneuver as my favorite Manolo Blahnik heels, the slender ones with the delicate ivy leaves trailing up the ankle straps—shoes of a goddess—which, I’d discovered this morning as I tried to put them on, now were adorned with miniature pine cones that had been glued to the toe strap. Undoubtedly the work of six-year-old Scout, who’d face her mother’s wrath just as soon as I got her home from school today.

Forced to adopt Shoe Plan B, I dangled my boring black pumps under the table in one of New York’s four-star dining rooms, relieved to have my friend and agent Morgan O’Malley beside me to interpret the musings of the graying stuffed shirt who’d been beating around the bush throughout the meal. Morgan had warned me that Oscar Stollen, president of the most powerful romance publishing company in the world, liked to throw his weight around. I just hoped he was prepared to position that bulk beneath his cavernous suit into a book deal and offer me a big, fat brand-new contract.

“Bring us a round of caramel machiatos,” Oscar ordered the white-jacketed waiter, then sat back in his thoughtful posture, index finger to square chin.

I suspected that his insistence on ordering for everyone at the table was just the beginning of Oscar’s power trip. Oscar had been ordering for us since the waiter snapped a white linen napkin into my lap. I couldn’t remember what was in a caramel machiato, but then I’d used up my quota of questions during the lunch, daring to ask what was in the foie gras, what were pancetta, carbonara, gruyére—and what, remind me, was the difference between radicchio and arugula? Cocking an eyebrow at Morgan, I relaxed and settled in for a caramel mucky-mucky. Oscar was a windbag, but I was well aware of the silver lining here: I was being served free food, and so far no one had spilled a drink, asked me to cut their meat or initiated a snarling slap fight. Having been a single parent this last week with my husband out of town, I didn’t mind sucking up to Oscar in return for some culinary pampering.

Morgan’s mouth curled in half a frown, her message: “I’m behaving for the moment, waiting on his offer.”

His offer. If only it was that simple.

If we’d been able to lunch with my editor, Lindsay McCorkle, we would have covered business in the first ten minutes, tasted each other’s entrees and shared child-rearing updates. By this part of the lunch we’d have our shoes off under the table as we doubled over laughing about office politics and anecdotes. Unfortunately, Lindsay had told Morgan that “the big guy” wanted to handle this negotiation himself, much to Morgan’s dismay.

“Oscar’s such an odd duck,” she’d told me over the phone. “It’s just going to cast a pall over what could be a fun occasion.”

We’d already suffered through Oscar’s high ick-factor menu of potted suckling pig, sea urchin that reminded me of my ninth-grade biology dissection and foie gras that brought to mind my twenty-month-old’s favorite picture book about a fluffy duckling looking for its mama. (“Mama! Mama!” I would quack, much to his wide-eyed delight. “Are you my Mama?”) Dylan would be crushed to discover his mommy had allowed bad men to keep the fluffy duckling in captivity, then kill it so that she could consume its fatty liver. But here I was, trying to make a book deal, not wanting to offend the lunch host.

In for a penny, in for a pound…or a few pounds, actually. So much for my diet. I could forget about the skinny, sexy black sparkle dress I wanted to wear to my husband’s company Christmas party this month. But Oscar was insistent, and I didn’t want to say no to the man who was going to offer me the big bucks. I fantasized at how high this next advance might be. Six figures? S-s-s-seven? That was crazy talk, an unheard-of advance for a series romance writer like me.

But a girl could dream.

For the past decade I had written approximately three romance novels each year, earning a reasonable income that barely faltered with the birth of my three children. My friends couldn’t imagine how I did it. My mother worried that I’d sold my intellectual soul for steady money. My neighbors didn’t have a clue that I was actually working holed up in the basement room in our bedroom community of Bayside, Queens. And the other moms at school assumed that I couldn’t be doing anything, since I appeared at dismissal each afternoon in jeans and a down jacket, instead of pulling up outside the school door in a huge Suburban wearing a Dior suit and cashmere coat with a cell phone pressed to my ear. They tried to rope me into the PTA, the first-grade show, volunteer playground duty and box-top snipping, but I fended them off, content to hole up with a cup of herbal tea at my computer and click out my five to seven pages a day.

I enjoyed weaving the stories of my near-perfect people, teasing my characters through their crises and wrapping things up with a neat, heartwarming Ruby Dixon ending. But lately, I’d started craving more of a creative stretch, wishing for a chance to write something that actually made a statement. What that statement would be, I wasn’t quite sure, but one night in a fit of inspiration I launched into the proposal for what my agent called “a big book,” a longer, more candid story that pressed beyond the pat romance formula. My new story was about a hot-shot business executive, Janna Pearson, who suddenly gets a flash of the ruthless bitch she’s become. She has a breakdown, which zeros out her career but leads her to rediscover the things that stir her soul…like making chocolates. Add in a dozen of the juiciest sex scenes I’d ever written, scenes that would make my husband wince, and there you have it. Entitled Chocolate in the Morning, the proposal was now being shopped around to various publishers, including Hearts and Flowers Romance, where my editor Lindsay told me she’d read it but had been pressed to keep mum on her response so that Oscar could “handle it.”

Funny, but Oscar hadn’t mentioned Chocolate in the Morning yet.

As Oscar and Morgan chatted about the firing of some publishing giant I didn’t know, I straightened the napkin on my lap and wondered if I could get away with wearing these, my favorite black pants, to Jack’s event. Since I’d turned thirty, I’d decided that black was the new everything. It hid a wealth of stains and it looked pretty good against my gold-brown hair that was now highlighted to cover the gray sprouting around my part. Black ruled, and these pants were the king. The woven black knit was wrinkle-proof and so comfortable and slimming, and the beauty of black pants was that you could dress them up or down. I plucked at a dark thread on the outer seam of my thigh and felt a tickle as the seam gave way slightly.

A hole. I’d just picked my favorite black pants open, revealing pasty thigh underneath.

Fortunately, neither Oscar nor Morgan seemed to notice, however I would need to devise a tactful means of escape once lunch was over. Perhaps I could keep my purse pressed to my thigh as I walked, like a vapid handbag model. Or maybe it would look more natural to throw myself into the arms of one of the smarmy faux-French waiters and ask him to deliver me to the cloak room, s’il vous plait? After all, I was a romance writer; I might as well live up to that slinky satin reputation.

With my palm pressed over the tear near my thigh, I suddenly woke up to the conversation as Morgan made her move.

“Shall we get down to business?” she asked, her almond-shaped, unpolished fingernails gripping the table inches away from the untouched coffee drink placed before her. Morgan is a straight-up java girl, which she would have told Oscar had he bothered to ask before he ordered the cups placed before us, their mounded whipped cream drizzled with caramel sauce. I felt glad that my agent would be negotiating without whipped cream on her upper lip. I, however, wouldn’t mind a dive into decadent dairy splendor.

“It’s time to negotiate Ruby’s new contract,” Morgan said, rubbing her hands together like a gleeful miser. “And I’m so glad you’ve stepped in, since you’ve got the authority to toss us the big bucks. What say you, Oscar?”

“We’re very happy with the way Ruby’s books have been performing for Hearts and Flowers,” he conceded.

Morgan nodded profusely. “Yes, yes, yes. She does very well for you.” I always got a charge out of the way Morgan swung a deal, rubbing her hands together and repeating words for emphasis, fast as a rapid-fire machine gun. “Looking over her last royalty statements, I’d say that upping her advance by ten thousand is a no-brainer. You could even double it and probably still have the books earn out. No problem. Not a problem at all.”

I tried to suppress a grin as my brain made quick calculations. Although I never excelled in math, it was clear that Morgan was pushing for me to get thirty thousand dollars a book. At three books a year, that would be ninety grand, but what if I wrote faster, signed up to write four a year?

Despite Oscar’s dull presence and his sweaty upper lip, I was beginning to feel all hearts and flowers for Hearts and Flowers, Inc.

“Thirty is doable,” Oscar said tentatively.

Thirty. My heart be still. I was tempted to jump up on the table and perform a victory dance, but I didn’t want to spill our caramel coffees.

Oscar paused a moment to drain the white china cup, replace it on the saucer and push it away. “But then there’s the issue of the new manuscript. What’s it called? Cocoa for Breakfast?”

“Chocolate in the Morning,” I supplied, my pulse quickening at the thought of even more money and a shot at something I could sink my teeth into.

“The chocolate book. Thank you.” Oscar nodded. “I think you know the policy of Hearts and Flowers when it comes to sharing our authors with other publishers. We don’t like it. Our feeling is, we’ve put money, promotion, support behind your books and your name, and it’s not fair to allow a competitor to cash in on the Ruby Dixon name, a franchise in which we’ve invested so heavily.”

Morgan was nodding rapidly. “Got it. So we’ll let you have Chocolate.” Her fingertips slipped away from the linen edge of the table as she sat back and grinned. “For a big, fat advance, of course. Lindsay told me she loved it.”

Oscar pressed his lips together and blew his cheeks full of air. Unless he was auditioning to be the Stay-Puft Marshmallow spokesman, the expression didn’t strike me as a good sign. “I hear that it’s quite the read,” he said, “but unfortunately, not for us.”

My heart stopped beating.

Had there been an ambulance available, I believe the paramedic would have pronounced me clinically dead—no heartbeat, no pulse, no breath. Just stunned and blue-lipped.

Fortunately Morgan jolted me back to life with her telltale candor. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” my agent said with her melodic New York brassiness. “Haven’t you heard the buzz about Chocolate? That manuscript has been generating more chatter than The Da Vinci Code.” A stretch, I know, but you gotta love Morgan for defending me.

“Popularity with editors is nice, but it doesn’t guarantee a bestseller,” he argued, “and this chocolate story doesn’t fit into our publishing program. It doesn’t speak to our market.”

“Okay,” Morgan said. “If you’re sure you don’t want to publish it, we’ll take it elsewhere. Ellen Engle at Mission Books is in love with it, and Simon and—”

“It’s not that simple,” Oscar interrupted. “We don’t want Chocolate to be published. Not by us or any of our competitors.”

One of Morgan’s brows arched as she murmured a restrained: “Remember the Stones’s song, Oscar? You can’t always get what you want.”

“I never liked that song.” He leaned over the table for emphasis. “And I know how to get what I want, Ms. O’Malley. When people don’t cooperate, I fire them.”

Morgan shot me a cross look. “Aren’t we lucky that we don’t work for Oscar?”

I shrugged, in a near panic, wanting to remind her that, while I might not be on the full-time payroll, Hearts and Flowers was my bread and butter. They paid for my life: everything from lattes to my son’s Pull-Ups, to my daughters’ juice boxes to my car and its ridiculously high-priced New York insurance. I needed them.

Morgan leaned over the table, as if ready to share a secret with Oscar. “This is Ruby Dixon we’re talking about.” Morgan pressed her finger onto the white linen tablecloth, jabbing the point home. “A strong track record, a broad fan base. She’s never missed a deadline and we know she outsells every other romance published in her month.”

“We’re delighted to have Ruby Dixon on our list. We’d like to keep her. Writing short romances.”

“She needs to grow,” Morgan said. “Show us that you want to grow with her.”

“Financial growth is a very good thing,” Oscar said, “but Hearts and Flowers has a very specific market.”

Morgan was shaking her head, frowning in dismay. “I think you’re making a mistake here—”

“We know our readers; we can’t take the chance of putting them off with this chocolate book and—”

“So Chocolate is off the table,” Morgan said.

My eyes did laterals as they kept interrupting each other. This was juicier than I’d expected. Hard to believe it was all over me.

“Let’s focus on the other deal,” Morgan said.

“You seem to be missing the point,” Oscar said, drawing himself back so that he could fold his hands in a little pile on the table. His fingers were small and pudgy. Putty fingers. “Unless you take Chocolate off the market, there is no other deal.”

“What?” Morgan’s voice snapped. “That’s insanity!”

“It’s done all the time,” he said. “If you want to continue publishing with Hearts and Flowers, you must give us an exclusive on the Ruby Dixon name.”

“You can’t own her,” Morgan said. “It’s her real name!”

“It is,” I added, as if this needed verification.

“We don’t buy the person,” Oscar said in a deadly low rasp reminiscent of a serial killer in a film, “only the name.”

“Not this name,” Morgan hissed. I saw my short, sweet writing career flash before my eyes as she tossed her napkin onto the table and stood up. “This writer is not for sale.”

Oscar’s body was stiff as a statue except for his eyes, brown shiny marbles that followed Morgan as she rose from the table. The man was cold, like one of those frosty December mornings that stings the lungs.

“Ruby…” She turned to me, her dark eyes earnest. “I can’t in good conscience advise you to accept this deal with the Devil, not just for the big bucks.”

In a flash I was beside her with less aplomb, my napkin tumbling onto the top of my sensible black pumps, my favorite black pants gaping open to reveal a silver dollar of pasty thigh. Inspired by Morgan’s line “This writer is not for sale!” I wanted to toss off my own powerful protest, something with the passion of “Make Love, Not War” or “We Shall Overcome!” Unfortunately, the best I could do was, “I’m outta here.” I picked up the fallen napkin, snatched the torn seams of my pants together and started to exit behind Morgan.

Halfway across the dining room, I paused and turned back, noticing Oscar’s stone figure slumped in the chair. “But thank you for the lunch,” I called cheerfully.

My career might be over, my livelihood dashed, but really, is that any excuse for bad manners?

“I can’t believe you thanked him for lunch,” Morgan said later as we recapped the contract debacle over the phone. I was plugged into the headset of my cell, edging the car home from the Long Island Railroad station amid the usual bumper-to-bumper flow of Queens traffic. Our little attached row house was less than a mile from the station, and yet it took fifteen minutes to get home amid the traffic, lights, pedestrians, and four-way stops that most New Yorkers took as a competitive signal to bear down and floor it.

Morgan was still at the office, thinking out strategies over a cup of orange-twist tea. “Oscar Stollen is a raving lunatic control freak, trying to make you his indentured servant,” she said, “and you thank him for a slab of suckling pig?”

“People just aren’t polite anymore,” I said. “Manners may be the only thing that separates us from other species in the animal kingdom. Thanking him was a show of my behavior, not his.” I had to remember that Morgan’s kids were older, in college. TJ was off at Penn majoring in biology, and Clare was studying at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan while working part time for a furniture designer and hating it—“but at least she’s working!” Morgan always said. Morgan didn’t need quiet mommy time anymore, hence our luncheon with Oscar was not a break but business as usual for her.

“Well, honey, I’m just sorry I didn’t see that one coming. I’ve always known Hearts and Flowers to ask for exclusives, but I never heard of them demanding them. Creating their own socialist publishing empire. It’s like those think tank deals where you sign away all your creative thoughts. Remember Penelope Glitzman?”

“Penelope…” She was a former romance editor who’d left the company to work for a book packager, a sort of book-idea think tank where a prerequisite to employment was to sign your brain away. The packager paid Penelope top dollar, but also demanded that she sign over her ideas in an agreement stating that all concepts generated while employed there were the creative property of the packager. The book packager banged out half a dozen bestselling series while Penelope was in its employ. When one spun off to a TV series, Penelope moved out to Los Angeles to become its executive producer. Until the book packager filed a law suit, claiming to own Penelope’s work on the series. Her ideas were their “creative properties.” Pretty appalling. My situation was a little different, of course, but close enough to scrape the paint off my toes.

“You’re right about this,” I told Morgan. “No question about it. I can’t sign my creative life away to Hearts and Flowers, no matter how big the advance is. I just got a little mesmerized back there by visions of dollar signs dancing in my head.”

“Those dollar signs are a very real concern for all of us.” Along with her share of woes, Morgan had a hefty mortgage on her Manhattan condo and some whopping credit card bills to pay down. Nine or ten years ago her husband, Jacob, a successful litigator, had flown to Chicago to ride with his biker buddies to a rally in South Dakota, never to return. Apparently Jacob, now Jocko to his biker buddies, was trying his hand at rustling cattle and taming a wild little redhead in Wyoming. When I met Morgan at a romance writers’ convention, talk of Jocko the Urban Cowboy was all the rage. Of course, I didn’t hear any of it, being out of the loop, more focused on my writing than on agent/editor scuttlebutt. So when I wrangled a meeting with Morgan and, by way of small talk, asked: “Are you married?” she laughed till there were tears in her eyes and told me I was refreshing.

Although he was the father of her kids, who were in junior high when their dad left, Morgan had never talked about Jocko much. She still didn’t mention him much, aside from the occasional shorthand barbs in e-mail, things like “What do I know, he always hated redheads.” and “Maybe there’s some Brokeback lawyer thing going on.” Along with the appropriate joke: “What do cowboy hats and hemorrhoids have in common? They’re both worn by assholes!”

Since Jacob’s desertion I’d seen Morgan through two minor surgeries. She’d eaten her way up to a size 14 then dieted down to a ten, given up smoking and thrown herself into her career, which had meant a boost for mine. She’d become a great agent and a better friend. She helped me maintain my sanity when the kids and husband tore it to shreds, I helped restrain her from hiring a hit man to go after Jocko.

So in light of our relationship, I knew it would kill us both to have that jumbo, megacontract snatched away.

“We both need the income,” I said, thinking aloud. “Not to be a downer, but even if Chocolate sells, I’ve got to keep writing romances.”

“Of course, of course, and why wouldn’t you? You’re so good at it, and it earns you a nice chunk of change. Don’t you worry about Oscar. We’ll get you a contract for more romances. Trust me, honey, trust me. This will work out over the next few months. If Oscar wants you that much, another publisher will want you more.”

“It would feel strange not to be writing for Hearts and Flowers, not to be working with Lindsay.”

“I know, I know. But in the meantime, you still owe them one romance, and you’ve got Chocolate to write.” We had already decided that Chocolate would be a stronger sell if Morgan could dangle the complete manuscript before the noses of a few editors, and so my work was cut out for me. “If I put my mind to it, I’ll bet I can get you a fat offer to ease your worries. Once Chocolate is a hit, Oscar will come crawling back to us, whimpering like a suckling pig.”

Christmas…ouch. Without a new contract, I’d have to think twice about getting Jack that new set of golf clubs he’d been dropping hints about. Of course, there’d be no cutting back on toys for the kids, or holiday trimmings, but I’d learned that the things that mattered most to the girls, like decorating cookies or reading Christmas stories under the tree, cost very little. In fact, without a new contract I’d have plenty of time to be the perfect Christmas mom. I’d delay delivery of my last book in the contract and spend my time decking the halls, organizing caroling parties, decorating cookies, building the gingerbread house the girls had been pining over…

“Of course, this is all the more reason to get Chocolate written, quick as the wind,” Morgan said, rattling my vision of an idyllic Christmas. “How fast can you get it finished? That would help me sell it, to have a complete manuscript.”

I tried to do a mental calculation of my calendar as I vacillated between turning right onto Northern Boulevard to pick up the girls from after school or heading straight home to the relative quiet of the house with just the sitter and Dylan. It was only four thirty and I could probably squeeze in another hour or so of work, but the December days were getting shorter and the sudden invasion of night in the afternoon always filled me with a haunting desperation to retrieve my children and see them safely tucked away at home. Funny, on a July night I could work until seven without guilt, but encroaching winter somehow tugged on my maternal instincts. I turned right, toward after-school care.

“Are you there?” Morgan asked. “Can you hear me?”

“Just dodging traffic.”

“So finish Chocolate ASAP. Put Oscar’s last book on the back burner, okay? We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“Got it. Bye!” As I hung up I realized that someone would have to tell my editor, Lindsay, our side of the story, and I wasn’t sure about sharing any of this with Jack until things got settled. We’d connected briefly after the big lunch. I’d stood ducking the wind in a storefront above the tracks of Penn Station to get cell phone service. But I’d downplayed the meeting with Oscar, and Jack seemed to forget all about it, caught up in the office politics at Corstar Headquarters, in Dallas where CJ and Hank and Desiree were bemoaning the fact that they’d been passed over for promotion and the big bosses had seen fit to recruit a division manager from outside the company, hiring a woman named Terry Anne, aka Tiger.

“What do you think about Tiger?” Jack had asked. “Sound like trouble to you?”

“Be glad you’re not part of the Dallas office,” I’d told him. “Where there’s a Tiger, there’s bound to be prey.”

Of course, I hadn’t met any of these people, though I enjoyed following their trials and victories vicariously through Jack, similar to reading a soap opera summary at the end of the week—all plot, no emotion. And for now, the Dallas drama would keep Jack distracted from my lack of a new contract. Despite my rising contribution to our household income, my husband had always worried that one day the bottom would drop out of my chosen career, and I didn’t want to give him any inkling that his worries might be coming true. Besides, things were tense at Corstar Corporation, where Jack had recently been given a promotion to management at the New York affiliate TV station, along with stock options that might, one day, knock us into the upper class if all went well. But getting kicked upstairs had given Jack an eyeful of the inner workings of Corstar, and firsthand knowledge of the sordid underbelly had been keeping him awake at night ever since. Promotion—good; underbelly—bad. I figured my news could wait until it turned into good news. That was me, the Can Do! Girl, Little Miss Silver Lining all the way.

“Hi, Ms. Nancy,” I said as the petite woman opened the door of her home.

“Becca doesn’t drink her milk,” she said glumly. “I don’t like to waste it. You tell her, next time, she drink it.”

How’s that for an end-of-day greeting? I thought as my smile froze on my face. “I don’t force her to drink it at home,” I said. “Maybe her tastes will change, but until then…”

“She need milk for strong bones and teeth,” Ms. Nancy said wisely. I wondered if her parents had forced her to drink milk when she was a kid. Wait, milk in China? No, but rice—she’d told me about that, how her parents had warned her that each grain of rice left in her dish would be a pockmark on the face of her future husband. Amazing the twisted way we raise our young.

“I didn’t ask for milk,” Becca said, looking up from the table as we swept into the kids’ playroom—a converted sunporch. Ms. Nancy ran a tight ship, the toys taken from their bins one at a time and all homework completed before play could commence. I loved her for that, for instituting the discipline that I never could seem to enforce in my own home. “Mom, you said I don’t have to eat something if it’s going to make me sick, and I said I didn’t want it.” That was my eldest daughter, eight going on eighteen.

I rubbed Becca’s shoulder. “You know I’m okay with that.”

But Ms. Nancy was shaking her head in disapproval. “All my children drink their milk.”

Not wanting to take on Ms. Nancy, who, I admit, sometimes frightened me, I asked about homework, and Becca assured me it was all done, except for her reading, which she insisted on doing with me every night. A child of ritual, Becca valued our reading time, and sometimes, as I dozed off to the sound of her mellifluous voice, I worried that she didn’t know how to read in her own head. Then again, Jack said I worried too much about Becca.

When she was born, Jack had been so smitten with her that he’d immediately wanted to get going on creating a second child so that Becca would never have to be alone. I worried that Becca subconsciously longed for those days when she was the only one—the object of all our affections. A first child leaves an indelible blueprint on a family, the entire pregnancy experience, when a mother is so hyperaware of movement inside her, careful and vigilant about diet, weight, exercise. I’d been taking prenatal vitamins before I even conceived Rebecca, though with the other two I remembered vitamins every other day or so. Jack came along to the doctor’s office for checkups, marveled at the little alien bouncing on the ultrasound monitor and even read the parenting magazines in the office. Jack left work early to attend Lamaze classes with me and we read each other the more inspired passages from What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

And then, the big-deal day, those first twinges of discomfort, similar to the onset of a menstrual period. The rudeness of the nurses when they learned I’d come to the hospital without being dilated enough, the walk back to the parking lot to get my coat, an interminable journey that took years off my life, I swear, as people looked on in horror, mothers pulling their children away when I had to lean against a cement pillar, and breathe with tears rolling down my cheeks.

“This sucks!” Jack said as he helped me back along the crosswalk to the hospital.

“Take me back upstairs,” I sobbed. “I think my water broke.”

A few contractions later, I was being eased into the dignified stage of labor and delivery, toted along on a gurney and an epidural of pain candy. Aaaah, the beauty of the epidural, the chance to give birth, to enjoy it and not hate the little dumpling whom you’ve been planning and prepping for so intently for nine months.

Our first daughter was born with a shriek of annoyance, a very clean baby, which she maintained through life, never drooling, rarely spitting up. I remember the smart set of her rosebud lips as the nurse placed her in my arms. Becca’s steely-gray eyes stared up at me, and although the childbirth info claimed that babies could not focus because of the silver nitrate drops put in their eyes, our Becca was quite focused, her stern gaze demanding answers. Who are you? she asked as she stared carefully at Jack and me. What am I doing here? How did I land with the two of you as parents? Do you really know what you’re doing?

Of course, we didn’t.

But we did our best to fake it. I will never forget the high anxiety in the car as Jack and I drove our first baby home. I kept turning to the back to check on her, sure that her silence meant she was sleeping, but Rebecca was awake and alert, eyes open as the world flew past her windows and the grill of a truck loomed in the back window, which she faced. “I can’t believe we’re taking a baby home,” I said to Jack.

He turned toward me, looking as if he’d never met me before. “What do you think is going through her head? I mean, what’s she thinking?”

“Rosy, warm thoughts, I’m sure,” I said. If I was correct, those rosy thoughts faded the minute Jack pulled into a parking spot across the street from our house. Becca started fussing and crying, her little head twitching and writhing in her car seat like an imprisoned nonagenarian. By the time we crossed the threshold, she was in a howling jag that didn’t stop for four months except for the occasional break to nurse or pass out from exhaustion.

“I read that the average newborn sleeps sixteen to eighteen hours a day,” Jack said. “Becca seems to be crying more than she sleeps. What’s up with that?”

“Is it colic?” my mother asked me one day when I was pacing the floor with the baby, reducing her bloody-murder shriek to a disappointed howl.

“The pediatrician said that colic only occurs in twenty percent of babies,” I answered. “Not that it would matter, as there’s no real treatment for colic, anyway.” Short of earplugs for the parents. And I mean those heavy-duty earphone types that you see the crew wearing at Monster Truck events. Although our baby Becca would nap in the morning and come alive with flirty eyes and cooing in the afternoon, she shriveled into a wailing wench by the dinner hour, crying and shrieking inconsolably until well after midnight.

“What’s her problem?” Jack asked me one night, genuinely concerned over our baby’s discomfort.

I just shrugged, feeling inadequate because I didn’t have an answer. I had researched the proper dimensions of crib bars and the most stimulating mobile colors for infant brain development (black and white), but I’d never anticipated having a baby who was less than content and blissed out. Jack signed us up for a newsletter that would teach us about the stages of development Becca was going through, and we studied it like budding behaviorists, sure that the answer to our inadequacies would be explained in the cheerful articles on gross motor skills and cognitive development. “Soon your baby will be grasping at things,” we were assured, even as another writer extolled the benefits of “tummy time for your baby.” Based on Jack’s reading we had Becca tested for gastroesophageal reflux, baby heartburn. Negative, of course. I knew it couldn’t be that easy.

By three months, Becca had taught us a few things. We learned that she didn’t like being too hot, that she hated being wrapped tight in a blanket, that she didn’t want to be cradled in our arms like a baby. I realized she cried less on days that she got out more than once, so I made it a habit to take her to the grocery store or the bank with me, to walk her in the stroller even on the coldest of days. But I still kept her out of restaurants during the witching hour—dinner-time. Jack was the first to figure out that Becca didn’t like staring up at the ceiling and devised a new baby hold that only he could manage, holding her face out with her bottom cupped in one hand, her back and neck supported by the other. Similar to the Popemobile or the Batmobile, Jack had devised the perfect touring vehicle for Becca, all in his hands.

By four months, the steady hours of shrieking faded away, and Jack was smitten by her all over again. Her googly eyes and generous smile had erased all memory of nights spent cringing from her howling cries, walking her around and around the living room, trying to dance her around to Hootie and the Blowfish. Becca became the light of his life, the reason to slip under the covers naked with me to try and make a sibling for her.

Recently I’d thought that the misery Becca had experienced those first few months had made her especially empathetic to other people. She tended to reach out to kids left out of the group and suffered when she saw news stories of famine in Africa or areas destroyed by natural disasters. When terrorists struck the World Trade Center, two of Becca’s classmates lost their fathers in the North Tower. One of the men didn’t even work in the building but was visiting for an early-morning conference. Devastation was all around us, but I couldn’t turn my focus from these little children, six years old. While other classmates had pulled away, Becca had wanted playdates and tried to organize games to distract the two.

That was when her insomnia began.

She worried that Jack would go to work and never come home, like Lydia and Andrew’s dads. She worried that one of Jack’s flights to Dallas would crash into a building. Mostly, I think, she was haunted by the knowledge that the world is not always a safe place, and as her mother, although I could promise that Jack and I would do everything to keep her safe, I couldn’t guarantee that bad things wouldn’t happen to her. In fact, I knew she’d have her share of heartbreak.

And so, we often lay together in her bed, Becca staring at the cracked plaster ceiling while I fought sleep, trying to save myself for a short conversation and a crime show with Jack.

 

“I’m just say. . .