“It was a stupid mistake,” he said. And I accepted that.
Yes, it’s lame. I look back now, and I see a dozen moments like this one, and I want to go back in time and shake this girl by the shoulders and say, “Wake up! Aspirin? Girl, please!” If this had been a daily or monthly or even yearly occurrence, of course I would have been all over it. I would have insisted that he get help, but on a daily basis, during the years I lived with him, this seemed like an isolated incident. I was pregnant and vulnerable and hopeful and young, so I accepted his word that it would never happen again. He promised me it wouldn’t, and it didn’t, so I didn’t question him any further.
We didn’t mention it the next day—or ever.
My husband was determined to be clean and healthy and fully present for his family. He went on one of those cleanse regimens where you drink psyllium husk smoothies and colloidal silver. We planned to do a home birth in the big bathtub upstairs. We watched educational videos on natural childbirth and circumcision and nursing. How to bathe the baby. How to burp the baby. How to change the baby’s diaper.
We both read What to Expect When You’re Expecting, but there’s really no way you can know what to expect when you see that first ultrasound. We craned into it, fascinated at the murky image of our baby’s body, waiting to catch a glimpse of a hand or little toes. We took home a videotape and watched it over and over.
“Wait! Rewind a little,” I said. “Is that what I think it is?”
“No. Umbilical cord. That’s all.”
We had agreed we didn’t want to be told the baby’s gender, but I was certain I could see a little you-know-what between his legs.
By the beginning of my second trimester, I had a nice little pooch going. I had a dress with BABY printed on it and an arrow pointing down at my belly. He had a shirt that read BABY MAKER on the front and BAM on the back. We had them in every color. He also loved wearing my big baggy maternity sweaters. I didn’t get morning sickness, but I was tired all the time.
“Your body is making a human being,” he reminded me daily.
I said, “I want to listen to all your music and watch all your movies.”
He leaned in and whispered to my tummy, “Your mama’s crazy.”
We bought a scale, and I made him get on first. He weighed 118 pounds. I got on the scale and weighed exactly the same.
“It’s okay,” he said. “All muscle.”
“I’m going to weigh more than you by the end of the week.”
And I did. I packed on several pounds before my next visit to the doctor.
“You need to slow that down,” she said, and I didn’t know how to tell her I was eating healthier than a Tibetan monk. My husband was making sure of that. He was urging me to drink soy milk and get my fruit servings and be a vegetarian again. He noticed every change going on with my body and loved it. He couldn’t stop kissing and touching and whispering to my belly.
When it came time to talk about names, he put me under, and asked me, “What is our baby’s name?”
“Amiir,” I said.
“Amiir?”
“It’s Arabic for ‘Prince.’”
“Amiir,” he whispered to my belly. “Perfect.”
Oh—excuse me? What’s that?
You saw on the Internet that my son’s name was “Boy Gregory”? I hate to be the one to tell you, but a lot of what you see on the Internet is fiction.
When you’re a famous person—or a famous person’s wife or son—you can’t check into a hotel or a hospital under your real name, because tabloid journalists get wind of that. So when my son was born, I was checked into the hospital under the name “Mia Gregory.” When you have a baby in the hospital, until the birth certificate is filled out, there’s an ID on the baby’s bassinet or incubator that says “Boy” or “Girl” followed by the mother’s last name. This is how the “Boy Gregory” thing got started. Someone who had no right to share any information about my family tried to sell a photograph of my son to a tabloid journalist, who saw that label on his incubator and stupidly reported the baby’s name as “Boy Gregory.” To this day, it gets repeated over and over, and it offends and hurts me, because every time I see it, I’m punched in the throat with the betrayal of our privacy on top of the devastating loss of our precious child.