I refrained from telling Liz that despite our short time together, my mother did teach me something that seemed to have been left out of her own home training: If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.
As the alarm next to my breast pump rang in the bedroom, I hung up with Dana and scrambled down the hall, stopping to smile at myself in the mirror on the wall. If there’s one thing that thirty years as a fat girl had taught me, it was that I had a pretty face.
Such a pretty face.
Ryan was the first guy I dated who didn’t say that. He was more fascinated that my laptop had a Linux partition. Go figure. Now it seemed I was doomed to just a pretty face again. Only, this time, it didn’t look quite so pretty.
Please join the Queen for a breakfast of scones and tea on the veranda….
I wake up then, just as I’m about to drown in my bowl of Raisin Bran. Not a very royal way to die. I sit up in the tub and push the bath tray forward so that I can stand up. Dana always thought it was weird that I could eat breakfast in the tub. What she doesn’t realize is that I could live in there (at least for a weekend). A good stock of food, a stack of books and basket of Dana’s products and Princess Tracey would be good to go.
Today, though, I’ve just got to go. I pushed my reign back a day this week, so as not to encounter the natives. Lily was sleeping on the floor in her carrier. It was her first time in the royal restroom, but I thought she could be trusted.
I got out of the tub, toweled off with my secret thousand-thread-count towel and applied Smooth, my favorite product in my friend’s new product line for mothers. This week’s scent was Mango Mama and I was feeling it from head to toe.
“This number does not define you. God does,” I whispered to myself as I stepped onto the scale, adorned only with my crown and a hopeful smile. My belly looked smaller in the mirror at least. I got up the courage to look down, again having to strain a bit to see over my stomach. Mirrors were deceiving. The numbers, happy ones, blinked back up at me.
159.
Maybe my scale worked after all. I certainly hoped so. Funny how the numbers on this thing appeared so rosy and cheerful all of a sudden. Last Sunday, they looked like something out of a horror movie. I glanced into the steamed-over mirror, and traced the circles under my eyes with the tip of my finger. I should have added a facial, as well. No time now. Despite the good news about my bubble butt and its imminent demise, my face looked like I’d been kicked around the farm a few times.
Then Lily started screaming, like she’d been doing for the past five days. Straight. One more reason that I was just now getting to wear my crown. I didn’t think I’d make it this week at all. We were going to the doctor today to see what was wrong. Of course, that meant another day’s work pushed back. Another all-nighter. I patted my cheek.
A queen has to do what a queen has to do.
Today was supposed to be Ryan’s day to watch the baby so that I could catch up on my site maintenance and start working on the new logo for the church, but with the way Ryan’s been acting lately, I didn’t bother to remind him.
A call to our family physician got us an appointment that I hope will answer some questions. Both Lily and I are going crazy. It would have been nice to have Ryan tag along, but again, I’m not going to bring it up.
One feeding, a diaper explosion and two outfits later, we were on the road, heading to the doctor. Ryan remembered that it was his day to watch Lily, called to apologize and said he’d meet us there.
More than an hour after his call, I tried to stay away from a bunch of sick children in the waiting room. I wasn’t holding my breath waiting for the doctor or Ryan to appear. Ever the optimist, I gave my dear husband a call. “Hey, you anywhere near?” I asked in my neutral, just-checking-in voice.
He answered back with the force of a megaton blast. “No, I’m not anywhere near! I’m working, okay? I would think that you could handle taking the baby to the doctor alone. I wanted to make it, but there’s some stuff going on.”
I’ll say. Our little nuclear family has had another explosion. Man down! Man down!
“No problem,” I said, although there was definitely a problem. My man was losing his mind. Ryan’s business had always been pretty much his life, but now I was worried that it would be the death of him, too.
Something would have to give, but right now I was more concerned with getting Lily well so that she and I could get some sleep. She had to be as tired as I was. Or at least as tired as I knew I was going to be when I looked up and saw my mother-in-law coming into the doctor’s waiting room. And she was smiling.
Oh, Ryan. Why?
For a moment, a millisecond perhaps, the Queen seemed normal and I wondered, not for the first time, if I’d just pegged her wrong. She was wearing her sugar-cookie lip gloss and wheat-colored linen suit. Her open-toed Coach slides matched her bag. She was one hip grandma, to be sure. As I softened toward her, her words rained down on me from where she was standing above us, like a bucket of hail.
“Well, look at you! You’ve lost what, two, three pounds? I can see it in your face. Definitely in the one-fifties again. Good girl.” She patted me like a stable horse before plucking the baby from my arms. A woman chuckled behind us while flipping through a six-year-old issue of Sports Illustrated. Her husband, a little plump himself, looked on in horror while trying and failing to hold in his own stomach. I felt his pain. And mine, too.
“Hello, Liz. You needn’t have come, though I do appreciate it.” Did I appreciate it? Yes, I did. I think. I didn’t like it, necessarily, but I did appreciate it. She was my family. “I know you’re not much for doctors. You don’t have to stay. We can meet for lunch later if you’d like.”
She glared at me at the mention of lunch. “No, thanks, dear. I’m not hungry. I usually fast lunch from the approach of spring through the end of summer. Then I have a big salad for dinner. You should try it. Even when I miss my walks, it keeps the numbers down. Besides, this is what grandmothers are for. I wouldn’t think of leaving.”
I didn’t have to ask which numbers she was referring to. The same digits that had made my morning, of course. Liz would have needed a sedative, though, if she’d seen the numbers that I’d rejoiced at today. Her scale has never gone that high. Ever. Not even when she was pregnant with Ryan. “Doctors didn’t just let you eat for two in my day,” she’d said when I explained that my doctor recommended that I gain at least twenty-five pounds with Lily since I’d been underweight by their chart when I conceived. Now that I’d added another fifteen pounds to that, Liz and Dr. Thomson were last on my list of people to see.
The nurse called us back just the same. “Lily Blackman?”
I tried to take the baby from my mother-in-law, but she was already up and sashaying down the hall with my daughter. She moved like only a former model can. Liz looked very comfortable chatting with the nurse, who was about her same size. Lily was weighed and had her temperature taken and we were led to an examination room. Once inside, Liz whispered to me that the nurse had four children and that perhaps I should talk to her to get some tips.
My throat tightened as I remembered the tips that my friends had tried to give me when Ryan and I had first started dating. “This thing with his mother, how he always talks about her, always calls her on the phone? Don’t you think
