“He won’t stop screaming,” she shrieks. “I can’t take it anymore. Why won’t he just stop?” Why today, of all days, does she need to pull this shit? I’m fighting the pain of not being with my daughter on her birthday today and she’s fighting the pain of being with our son.
Every part of me wants to ask her how old she is and why the hell she’s crying over a crying baby, especially a baby that is ours, but that she rarely has to take care of. Except, every minute longer I spend in this marriage with her, I continue to see she has no clue how old she is or why she’s acting the way she is. Yeah, this is hard. Yeah, a baby can push a sane person through the fine line between sanity and insanity, but as adults, we hold it together. We have to. “He’s in pain, T. He needs more meds.”
“I can’t stand listening to him cry,” she says, as her voice calms from the cries she was emitting earlier.
“Are you safe?” I ask her. It’s so cold, blunt, and to the goddamn truth, but Jesus, she hasn’t acted like this before and I’m scared for both of us—mostly her. It’s like something cracked within her, and she’s shattering from the inside out.
“Am I safe?” she asks, pulling herself up by the windowsill. “Am I fucking safe?” Her question forms into laughter, and the lack of response is sadly answering my question. She’s shaking, her knees are bowed in toward one another and her skin is becoming paler by the second. Her eyes are bulging with tiny red veins and her chest is heaving harder and faster than it should. I can only assume she’s having a panic attack since I’m not sure what else could be happening.
“What’s your doctor’s number, T?”
“You’re not calling my goddamn doctor,” she says pleadingly, through weak breaths.
“I’ll call 9-1-1 if I have to. You’re clearly in trouble right now, and God, I would do just about anything to help you, but you won’t even help yourself by telling me what the hell is going on.”
“Don’t threaten me, AJ,” she warns.
“Babe, this isn’t a threat.” I manage to calm Gavin down for a minute, so I place him in his crib and flip the mobile on to quiet him down. With my own shallow breaths not doing much to keep me composed, I force myself to relax for Gavin’s sake.
I turn toward Tori, looking in her eyes, realizing she doesn’t look like the woman I know, and she hasn’t for quite some time. Through thick and thin. Through thick and thin. Closing the space between us, I wrap my arms around her and squeeze tightly. I don’t say a word; I just hold her.
“I’m not okay,” she whispers.
“I know, babe.”
“I’m not okay in the way that I shouldn’t be here tonight,” she says.
“What do you mean?” I can’t panic right now. I must stay calm, for her. For Gavin.
“I want to hurt myself,” she continues in a whisper.
Her words hit me like a bolt of lightning. Hurt herself? She’s never spoken like this. “Tell me why. What happened in the past week to make you snap?” I should be reacting to her words quicker than I am but dammit to fucking hell, I want to know what happened.
“I broke. I’ve been barely holding it together for months. When I saw you holding Gavin in the hospital, you looked like your world was ending, like you’d give up one of your limbs to make him feel better. You looked the way I should have felt, and I felt nothing, AJ. Nothing. What mother doesn’t feel anything? I feel fucking nothing! Nothing!” She starts to cry, and the tears barrel down her cheeks again. Is that what this is? She doesn’t feel like she’s good enough to be his mother?
“Why, Tori? Why do you feel this way? What’s making you think this?”
“I don’t know how to love him. No one has ever loved me the way I’m supposed to love him.”
“I love you, T. Your parents love you, so that’s not true,” I tell her. I still have a firm grip on her shoulders, hoping my words are doing something to calm her irrational thoughts.
“Those people are not my parents, AJ.”
“What?” I’m not sure my response came out in anything more than my breath, but suddenly the wind has been sucked from my lungs, and I’m not sure how I even form a sound. Of course they are her parents. Her dad walked her down the damn aisle at our wedding. Her mother cried happy tears that day. Tori speaks to her parents several times a week. Is she telling me a story or is she trying to come clean? I don’t know what to believe.
“Just because they look like parents, doesn’t mean they’re mine,” she snarls.
“So then, who are your parents?”