in the desert of madness and I needed a drink of water.
Living water.
Lord, please don’t let me act a fool with Liz today. I know that she means well. Show me how to love her.
There wasn’t long to contemplate that thought. Dr. Thomson entered the room with a big grin. His booming voice filled the room with Caribbean notes that reminded me of the preacher who’d presided over Dana’s island wedding. The good doctor shook the Queen’s hand. “Morning, Grandma. Nice to meet you.”
Queen Liz didn’t look very happy to have been so easily identified as a grandmother. Most people took her to be my aunt or friend. Though she was obviously disturbed by his greeting, Liz gave him her best smile just as well. “Hello, Doctor.”
Before I could explain about Lily’s problem (and my problem, all fifteen, no forty, pounds of it), the doctor picked up my daughter and cradled her as though she were his own grandchild. “Fussing, are we? No sleep for your mother? That means less milk for you, young lady, which is no good. No good a’tal.”
Lily promptly smiled and fell asleep as she always did with our doctor, who’d raised nine children of his own. Sometimes I wanted to ask him how much he charged for house calls. At least maybe I could take a nap. At present, my spare thirty-minute block of the day was spent doing workout DVDs. It had worked this week though, so I couldn’t complain.
“Coughing?”
“No.”
“Just crying then?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“Before feeding or after?” Lily whined once. He bounced her one good time and she went quiet again. Amazing. He should bottle that for Ryan.
“After.”
Dr. Thomson nodded, then looked over his glasses at me. “Have you lost weight?”
My mother-in-law beamed. “Doesn’t she look good?” She gave me an affirming look.
The doctor gave a disapproving one. “Tracey, now is not the time for dieting. I told you that. Trust me, the weight will stabilize after the first year of nursing. Right now, though, you are building your daughter’s brain. Your body is holding on to fat reserves so that it can make milk. Your daughter doesn’t have colic, honey. She just doesn’t like the skim version of her food.”
Words escaped me. I just sat there, blinking. Could this be true? Had my dieting turned Lily’s stomach? Sure, I tried to avoid nursing her after I worked out because some of the books said it soured the milk, but surely I wasn’t starving the kid. I mean, look at me!
My mother-in-law recovered much faster than I. “So what you’re saying is that perhaps it’s time to switch to formula so that both mother and baby can get what they need? It’s the only sensible solution based on what you’ve just said.”
Dr. Thomson peered over his glasses. “It is not the only sensible solution, Grandma. It’s not even a solution that I want to consider at this point. I realize that in our generation, breast-feeding was frowned upon, but my goal for all the mothers in this practice is to breast-feed as long as possible. For a year, at least.”
Liz looked faint. “A year? Why, that’s downright…strange. The baby will be walking by then. Talking, practically. It’s gone on too long as it is. And the way it makes Tracey eat, Lily’s brain will be too big for her head with all that fat milk. It may even make her fat, too—”
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave now.” The doctor turned sleeping Lily away, as if hearing such things would crush her psyche. “Words are medicine, too, and I’m afraid you’ve come equipped with poison today. Your daughter-in-law is courageous and smart. She and her husband asked me to support them in the decision to breast-feed. I can’t do that with you here confusing things. And for the record, Tracey is not big. You’re just very…petite.” The look on his face said the rest—that Queen Liz could stand to gain a few pounds and a better attitude.
It would have been easy to gloat as my mother-in-law huffed toward the door, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. She was Ryan’s mother, even if I never would be able to accept her as mine. She gave birth to my husband. That meant something. It had to. “Please stay, Queen,” I said, before I realized it. My friend Rochelle would have been proud of me. Dana would have thought me gone soft. Maybe so. It’d be fitting. The rest of me had congealed into a Jell-O sculpture, so why not my heart, too? Wasn’t that what God wanted of me, anyway?
My mother-in-law wiped the corner of her eye and sat down.
I bit my lip. Usually there’s no stopping the Queen’s dramatic exits. My husband came by that honestly. “Thank you for your support, Doctor. And don’t worry about protecting me.” I took Liz’s hand. “You know how mothers and daughters are. She just wants what’s best for me. Ryan and I are determined to continue nursing through this first year. Don’t worry.”
My doctor bowed low toward the Queen before giving Lily back to me. “It’s not Ryan that I’m worried about, Tracey. It’s you. So many strong women come through this practice changed by motherhood into insecure little girls. I never thought that you’d be one of them. Your mother-in-law may be a queen, but so are you. You’ve just got to learn how to rule your own roost.” With those wise words, a big hug and a menu plan for nursing mothers, Dr. Thomson left Queen Liz, Lily and I alone in the room.
As we left, I realized that my mother-in-law was still holding my hand. Tight.
I closed my eyes for a quick prayer. We weren’t alone at all.
Chapter Three
W e had a fight in the car on the way over. A pretty bad one. Almost as bad as the blowup with Ryan’s software business earlier in the week. He assured me that everything was okay, while he tried to retrieve files one of his key employees had deleted. He whispered words like “solvent” and “litigation” when he thought I wasn’t listening.
“Look, we’re here now, okay? Let’s just try and get through this. Dre wants me to step up and do some things in the church, but it seems like the harder I try to serve God, the more whack things get. I don’t even know what we’re fighting about.”
I blinked back tears. “Me either. Not really. I think we’re both just tired. All this stuff with your business has had you on edge. Some lawyer keeps leaving messages, by the way. Something about the articles of incorporation.”
Ryan gripped both sides of his head as if trying to hold it on his neck. “Yeah, whatever. Look, I don’t want to think about any of that right now, much less talk about it. Let’s just go in here and see what the Lord has to say to us.”
Sounded like a plan to me.
For once, Ryan didn’t pop up out of the car and move inside the church at lightning speed. Whatever was going on with him, helping the pastor seemed to have him dreading going inside as much as I usually did. Today, though, I was trying to get a move on. A few minutes more and someone might take my back-corner seat. And that would be totally unacceptable.
I gave Ryan a little nudge as I grabbed the last of Lily’s things. “Come on or somebody might get our seats. And you know I won’t know how to function then. You might look up and see me in the balcony.”
Ryan
