Day 14

Authors note: We've had some domestic crapola at this house and I nearly left my husband over the course of these last few days. Not much time for writing so I'm having to make up the last two days.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Time marched on. I didn’t see as much of Cynthia Rose as I thought I would. She was dancing more shifts than ever at a new casino, Captain Neptunes, three shows nightly, big old fashioned Vegas style reviews with nudity. Now not only were her breasts silicon, her nose surgically created and her hair color out of a tube at the hairdressers but Cynthia had traded up on large implants, gotten something done to her lips so that they were inflated like two fat hunks of liver hanging on her face. With cheek implants she looked to me like a walking freak, a real life slutty looking Barbie doll.

But she claimed to be happy and was pulling down a disgracefully large salary for being the star of the floor show. She’d even kicked her series of lounge lizard male companions to the door and lived alone now in on the side of town that took serious money. She drove a fancy sports car and had a maid.

Jake had moved on from his fishing captain and moved quite a ways far from us to Key West, Florida. He had saved a little money and was opening a bar there. The pictures he sent made it seem like Key West was a paradise, a beautiful place where the sun always shown and the liquor flowed freely. In another words, most Sodom and Gomorrah to my parents.

I gave my brother and sister not much thought as I moved forward to my new life. They both seemed to be happy with their lot and doing well.

The purchase of my oceanfront condo was completed and I moved in, completely breaking ties with my impoverished student lifestyle. I admit it, I used the money that the Collins has given me to bankroll my new life in Bay St Louis. I put a substantial down payment on the condo, I bought a smart new Japanese compact car brand new off the dealership floor and I supplemented the designer furnishings of the condo with the things I loved. I went out and bought my self a number business of suits for work. Having Emmie had allowed me to start a life I could not have imagined. My new salary wasn’t insignificant either. I lived well and relished every second of it. Even Cynthia Rose was impressed by the new condo in the gated beach community.

I’d bought a two story garden style home and to get to the beach all you had to do was open the rear french doors and step out onto the small patio, step off into the sand steps later, open the white picket fence and there you were, right on a public beach. The interior was magnificent, all done up in neutrals, like sand, light browns with the kitchen having the top of the line stainless steel appliances, hand made Italian tiles throughout the condo. The furniture was a mixture of modern and eclectic and the entire place was designed for easy sweeping out of sand daily. The small patio held planters overflowing with flowers, overstuffed chaise lounges but the thing I loved the most was the exterior shower and closet tucked in behind a small outcropping of the building.

There was nothing I loved more after a long day at the office than coming home, changing into beach clothes going for a long walk or run along the beach. And I swam so much that for the first time in my life I took on a healthy tan.

Settled into my position with Bay St Louis mental health clinic, assigned most women would were dealing with abusive partners or self esteem issues with the occasional lady with substance abuse problems. Practicing in this large private practice was very different than my practicum listening to students from abusive families, with broken hearts from love affairs gone wrong and whiny self absorbed poor little rich kids upset that mommy and daddy had ended their support funds because they’d spent more time partying than studying.

One of the most challenging cases was that of a lady married to a very religious man. I felt twinges of my past coming back to bite me as I listened to her tales of bearing five children in five years and how the husband demanded everything be perfect all of the time. This patient also had rapidly progressing ALS, getting weaker every month, yet unable to see that the way her husband treated her was abusive.

Of all the people I worked with this lady, Lori, was eager to defend her husband at every turn, no matter what he did, no matter how horrible his behavior. I sat there weekly, professionally trained yet slack jawed to hear things like Lori’s recitation of her husband Mark’s trysts with hookers and strippers at the casino because he said she was now unable to satisfy him sexually so he felt perfectly justified stepping outside the bonds of marriage for sex.

Listening to her talk about her husband’s cheating made me very uncomfortable, I squirmed inwardly, knowing I was doing the exact same thing with John Collins, keeping him as my lover on the side while he was married to someone else. But eventually I was able to rationalize away from I was doing.

Most of my other patients I was able to see some forward progress with but not Lori, every week we rehashed old territory and when I asked her if she’d been able to put any of my suggestions into play in her own situation I’d get an excuse from her about how this or that had happened and Mark was too cranky or stressed out for her to possibly stand up him over some small issue. Her husband continued on his whore banging, emotionally abusive, controlling way and she made excuses for him while complaining about him.

Her religion was strict but nothing compared to that which I’d been raised with. At least she was allowed to wear slacks, have her hair styled and wear makeup. But, apparently, her husband was king and she had to kowtow to him, obey what he said and she wasn’t allowed to have an independent thought.

I got to where I dreaded her visits, knowing we were both wasting out time. While I managed to stay detached and cool during my interactions with her inwardly I longed to grasp her bony shoulders and shake her silly, shout ‘wake up, you’re being abused’ but this could never happen. Give me a garden variety drunk, coke head or someone with reactive depression any day off the week over this endlessly frustrating task.

But there were days when I sat back in my small office and smiled a big self satisfied smile, surveying the tasteful prints on the wall, the beautiful wood desk and the overstuffed sofa, seeing my own stamp on this place. I had developed some very expensive tastes. And I’d arrived about a million miles from my Momma and Daddy’s old farmhouse with flea bitten furniture purchased at garage sales and thrift shops. I wished there was some way to show them that I’d done well but once I’d moved from my apartment I made sure there was no way for them to trace me, Ben and Sarah had made it more than obvious by their visit that I would never be welcomed again into our family home.

The nice thing about my condo in its gated community was that for the first time John and I didn’t have to sneak around. He’d come down and spend the night with me in my place or just meet up for a quick stolen few hours. Once the six weeks prohibition against making love after Emmie’s birth had passed we’d resumed our white hot physical relationship and again, I knew Annie had no clue because she’d called me every few weeks to see how I was doing, tell me all about Emmie and nervously ask if I’d changed my mind in acting as a surrogate at the end of six months so that they could have a biological child of their own. I was reassure her that I was planning on giving them another child.

Because we couldn’t take the risk of me getting pregnant before the specified time I forced John to wear rubbers, and this turned out to be one of the few things he and I fought over. He didn’t want to do it, saying to hell with if I got pregnant, he loved me and he was fully prepared to leave Annie and Emmie for me. I tried several times to explain to him that I would break it off if he were foolish enough to do such a thing, that I loved him deeply but I would be no one’s wife or mother.

I’d seen what marriage meant in my own parents marriage, a subjugation to everything your husband wanted. Dealing with my various female patients reinforced that and I knew I could never trust a man enough to live with him as his wife and submit to someone else’s opinions and authorities.

Likewise I felt no desire for kids of my own. During my years in my family I’d diapered a million behinds, fed thousands of bottles and raised many of my younger siblings. I wasn’t about to be sentenced to a lifetime of that type of drudgery. I never had that maternal instinct but being only in my mid twenties I knew I had plenty of time to change my mind.

One thing I was not going to change my mind about, giving John a child of his own blood. He talked about it almost as obsessively as Annie did, except he added that the child being of my blood, the woman he loved, made it doubly sweet.

Five months after Emmie’s birth I was sent to a fertility doctor that Annie had picked out, given a complete physical and a prescription for Clomid. I tried to protest that I’d conceived the first baby quickly and easily without any medical help like fertility drugs. But the doctor was insistent, saying that his clients, John and Annie, wanted no possible problems, they wanted me to conceive next month when I returned for the artificial insemination.

That too should have rung an alarm, like Annie insisting that a midwife deliver me at their home, that the birth certificate be falsified to show that Annie, not I, had given birth to Emmie. But quite frankly I was still so madly insanely in love with John I would have done anything they asked. So I dutifully told the doctor my cycle, we plotted when the next ovulation would be and set up an appointment for the insemination.

So I dutifully started taking the Clomid even if it made me feel very weird, giving me all sorts of side effects, such as hot flashes, foul mood swings and headaches that would leave me struggling to get through my patient load without strangling anyone. I kept telling myself this was just for a month or so, until John’s baby was snuggly growing in my womb.

What Annie didn’t know is that in the days leading up to the ovulation John and I indulged in a sex marathon the likes of which we’d never done. By the time I arrived at the fertility clinic for insemination I felt sure I was already pregnant by him. John had taken me again and again, telling me how turned on he was that he was to be making a baby, that he wanted to knock me up the old fashioned way. I didn’t protest, I just loved him so much that whatever he wanted to do was fine.

The actual insemination procedure was a little weird. Not to mention it was uncomfortable. I remember stripping off from the waist down, laying on the table and putting my feet in the stirrups while we waited for John to produce a sample. The doctor came in and inserted a plastic catheter into my womb, I was already swollen and tender from the huge surge of hormones due to the Clomid so this actually hurt quite a bit, lots of uterine cramping. I lay back draped with a sheet vagina dilated wide with a speculum and with the medical equivalent of a long straw inserted deep within my body. After what seemed like an eternity the doctor returned with the sperm sample and used a long syringe hooked to the catheter to do this bizarre mechanical ejaculation into my womb.

The oddest bit is that Annie followed the doctor in and made sure that he did it, that the sperm came from the sample she’d watched her husband give. During the fifteen minutes they made me lay back with my knees together and pelvis tilted upwards we made uncomfortable small talk. Whatever real friendship I’d had with Annie was strained and odd now and I remember thinking I wondered if she knew that her husband and I were lovers.

Afterwards I spent the night at their home and it was a somber evening with none of the fun and gayety of previous visits. I saw my baby, I saw Emmie but Annie didn’t want me holding her. She was strangely possessive of the baby and so wrapped up in every aspect of her care that she utterly ignored John. I felt sorry for him, no wonder he’d turned to me and I started thinking that perhaps I shouldn’t be giving this perfect looking couple with an imperfect relationship my babies.

John must have picked up on my misgivings because once Annie ran out to get diapers for Emmie he slipped into my bedroom to apologize to me for Annie’s treatment of me. He said sadly that nothing gave her greater joy than being Emmies mother but that she was now jealous and insecure with me because she believed I might try to renege on the deal, keep the baby we were all trying to conceive and try to take Emmie away.

Once I knew what the problem was I chased Annie down that night in the kitchen as she was putting away the baby’s finished bottles and I told her flat out that I wasn’t going to change my mind, that’d I’d long ago concluded that I didn’t want children. Why would I want children when I’d been forced to raise most of my younger siblings. I told her I was doing this surrogacy because I loved them as a family and I wanted Emmie to have a brother or sister, it wasn’t for money, it was for love.

She broke down in tears at the kitchen table and I ended up listening to Annie tell me of her many frustrated attempts to have a baby, the miscarriages, the treatments and how desperately she wanted this but how afraid she was that I would change my mind. I listened to her spill out her own story of a dysfunctional childhood and sexual abuse at a young age.

I just sat and simply listened for a long time, treating Annie like I did my patients, suggesting different ways of looking at things and dealing with the past. I urged her to get therapy for her low self esteem and the host of other issues plaguing her from the past. Many times my emphasis was that I wanted her to be healthy for the sake of Emmie and the planned baby.

By the end of our conversation I’d managed to help her, at least I think I did. We hugged and she told me how much she’d missed my friendship.

But that didn’t stop me from allowing John to climb into my bed and onto me yet again. I was addicted to him. Not only did we make love that night with a passion I’d never felt before but on my way out of town the next day John met me at a local park, we’d pulled to a secluded spot and make love again in the back seat of my car. I rationalized it away again, I was taking the most onerous chore of Annie’s away, I was helping with the conception project but in reality I was as addicted to John worse than any of my substance abuse patients were to their drugs.