Happily Even After

I was doing it again, letting my mind wander in church of all places. Ryan took my hand and gave me a smile. Very nice. Now if I could just concentrate and stop making menus and to-do lists in the margin of my bulletin, I’d be making progress. I didn’t know why, but ever since I’d had Lily, some of my most creative moments had happened in church. Usually, though, I was holding Lily, so I didn’t get to write any of it down until I got home. Right there, as the choir was finishing, I thought of a concept for the logo for CurlyDivas.com, a site for black women with natural hair. I was enjoying that project a lot, even picking up a few tips for my own tresses.

Today I was wearing my half-ro in twists, set off by a middle part and sporting the copper highlights that my former hairdresser was kind enough to come to my home and put in. I’d tried to make appointments with her several times, but something always came up with the baby. And as much as Queen Liz wanted everyone to think that she was the perfect grandmother, outside of church and other public events, she didn’t want to fool with Lily at all. When I asked her to babysit so that I could get my hair done, she suggested I call a friend or switch Lily to formula so that she could be sure that she’d sleep most of the time.

I got that my choice—our choice—to breast-feed made things a little unconventional for everyone. That was why I pumped my milk, too, so that the Queen didn’t have to worry. It didn’t matter, though. If I could just make it through the first year, things would get better. They had to. The good thing was, I was never, never doing this again. Ryan would have to play catch with someone else’s son, because another baby in this body just wasn’t happening. As soon as I was fertile again, I was going to—

“Here.” Lily dangled from my mother-in-law’s arms like a little golden dishrag. Her face was red from crying. Was I so into my thoughts that I hadn’t heard my own child? The music was loud, but still….

She felt warm against me, pushing her face into my shirt. For all the hard times, there were good ones, too. I loved my baby in a way I hadn’t known it was possible to love anyone. Tapping my foot to the music, I cradled Lily in the crook of my arm and pulled a blanket up over her. My nursing shirt was like some sort of James Bond contraption and with one flip of a button, all the goodies were flowing and totally out of view.

“’Lizbeth? Is that child pulling out her breast-asssissss? Lord have mercy. I do believe that I have seen it all.” One of my mother-in-law’s friends, Miss Bea, looked as though she was about to faint. She grabbed a mortuary fan from the back of the pew in front of her and started fanning so hard that I had to close my right eye.

I should have closed the left one, too.

Maybe then I wouldn’t have seen the Queen’s face coming at me like some sort of eighties 3–D movie. She wasn’t smiling. She didn’t even scream, which was what I expected from the look of her. What she did do was something new, something inexplicably terrifying.

She whispered.

And not to me.

“Son, get your wife up from here and take her to the nursing room. Now.”

Ryan, who’d obviously been doing some daydreaming of his own, looked confused for a moment himself. “What, Mom? Tracey nurses Lily in here every Sunday. What’s the big deal?”

Miss Bea started to wail. The organ faltered and someone missed the entrance to the chorus of the song. The Queen took the fan and tried to comfort her friend, still speaking with the vicious whisper that made me want to look behind me to see if there was a sniper in the church balcony, waiting to take me out at any moment.

There wasn’t. I peeked.

“Now, Bea, calm down. I told you. The girl has no mother, no home training. Don’t you get yourself all upset now. I’m going to take care of this, if I have to drag her out of here myself.” She turned and stared at me with the coldest look I’d ever gotten from her (and that’s quite a collection).

Lily burped while her grandmother pushed up the sleeves on her mint-green suit. She meant that thing, as Dana would say. She was going to try to drag me out of here. I had to pray then, because the first thing that came to my mind in that moment was the almost forty pounds separating myself and the good Queen. Every ounce would come in handy if she tried to put her hands on me. Every ounce.

You are in church. That is your mother-in-law. Get up and go—

I was thinking it. I was praying it. But I guess I took too long about it, because the next thing I knew, Lily and I were up on our feet and a diaper bag was shoved onto my shoulder. My husband took my hand and led me out of the pew, providing a clenched smile to the two hundred or so people in our vicinity. This was past embarrassing, it was humiliating. Despite my resolve, a tear tickled my nostril as I stepped onto the carpet covering the aisle.

Ryan walked close behind me as though he had a gun to my back. I thought to myself that it seemed as though his mother had a gun to his. A loud sniff escaped when the pastor’s wife waved and I tried to smile. Ryan’s phone vibrated in his pocket, but he didn’t stop for that, either. He pushed me along with purpose, even when I paused and tried to turn to him and speak, to say that this was insane and that we should just sit in the back of the church together and try to talk some sense into his mother later, there came a gentle pressure of his arm across my shoulders.

His words, hot on my neck, let me know that sitting in the back wasn’t going to happen. “Keep moving, Tracey. For goodness’ sake, just keep moving.”

For goodness’ sake, Ryan? Or for your sake?

Either way, I kept going. Smiling and crying like some sort of Miss Mom USA without her Prozac, I stumbled out of the only place I felt God in my life anymore and into the cold empty hall. Once the doors closed behind us, I turned to my husband and gave him a look worthy of the Queen herself.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Ryan said in a voice too loud for a church hallway but much quieter than his usual tone in such situations. He pointed down the hall at the door I’d passed so many times, but never gone inside. “Come on. You’re going to have to go in there.”

More tugging and pushing. Him trying to take the baby, me taking her back. Him trying to take the diaper bag, me taking it back. Him throwing his head back as if he wanted to scream, me doing the same. Like a bad zit on prom night, things were coming to a head and this wasn’t the place for the mess.

Though we’d both dug in our heels, mine were a little too cute to endure for the long haul. Just as my wedges started to wobble, Ryan took my hand and kissed it before steadying me. “Baby, please. Can you just come on? I need to get back in the service. Pastor asked me to do something special today and I’m going to miss it. I know Mom is out of line. I do. It’s just not the time to deal with it.” He led me down the hall, toward the door I didn’t want to enter.

I followed, thankful that in the midst of the whole mess, Lily had somehow managed to fall asleep. Must be nice. “You always say that, Ryan. ‘I know Mom shouldn’t have said that. I know that hurt you. I’ll talk to her. It’s just not the right time.’ You know what I’m starting to think? It’ll never be the right time. I think you know that your mother will never accept me and you don’t really care. Well, I do—”

“Get over it.” Ryan folded his arms, rolled his eyes and pointed to the door. “You’ve got to go in there, so just do it and be done with it.”

I looked deeply into my husband’s eyes, wondering if he really saw me standing here, if he heard me breathing. It was me, wasn’t it? Tracey Blackman, business owner, graphic designer, new mother, his wife? I’d never had to wonder who I was before, but since marrying him, bearing his child, I found myself searching for identity more than ever. And my husband had just told me to get over it.

Mother Redding, the wife of the former pastor, who also happened to be the mother of the current one, stopped to smile at me on her way into the sanctuary. Liz (the only person people seemed to call Mrs. Blackman these days) said the former first lady was mean, but she’d never been anything but nice to me. I looked for her every week just to see what she was wearing. This morning she wore a bright orange suit with flames going down the back of her skirt. Fire climbed her shoes, too. As she reached the door, she gave me a wink, then straightened her shoulders and went inside the sanctuary. Her son’s booming voice burst through the door as she opened it.

My eyes looked back and forth from the door I’d come out of to the door it seemed I had no choice but to go into. Now I was going somewhere else, somewhere new, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I stared at the mahogany door once more and took a deep breath while reading the words engraved on the brass plate.

The Cry Room.

I remembered again why I’d never wanted to go inside previously. Who would want to spend a church service in a place with that name? Though I’d never been inside, I’d deduced that this was a place for mothers to take their crying babies. Did I mention that Lily wasn’t crying? I was the one about to burst into tears. At the beginning of my pregnancy, I’d enjoyed the way people had offered me a seat or given me special privileges, but even that had gotten old. Being escorted out of church and into a special room by my husband and mother-in-law was just too much.

This wasn’t the first time I’d gotten this kind of reaction to feeding my hungry baby, of course. I’d nursed Lily in hot cars, bathroom stalls and guest bedrooms. Church had been the only place in my life where all of the pieces of me—Christian, wife and mother—could exist at once. And now, even at church there was a special place for me to go, away from my husband, who seemed to be slipping from me by the second, from the pleading look in his tired eyes.

Maybe this wasn’t such a bad thing, this forbidding door in front of me. Maybe it was time for me to find my own place, both in our marriage and in our church. I attempted to square my shoulders like that flaming-hot church mother had done, but I was too weighed down by the diaper bag on my shoulder and the baby in my arms. Instead of standing straight, I almost fell over. Again.

My husband sighed, but reached out to support me again. “What are you doing, Tracey? You’re going to drop the baby on the floor. Look, I’ve got to get back in there before Mom comes back out here and makes a scene, okay? It’s not a big deal to go in the Cry Room. Almost every church in Illinois has one of these now. There’s a window in there where you can see everything. And who knows, maybe you’ll make some friends here. It might be good for you.”

I took a deep breath. “Maybe I should just take Lily to the nursery and stay in the service with you. Maybe she’ll make some friends in there.”

Ryan lifted an eyebrow. “Don’t try to be funny, okay? You know Lily hates it in there. After the diaper rash and the screaming last time, we agreed that she’d stay with you. Since Mom is acting so crazy about you feeding her in the church, I guess that means we’ll be apart until you stop nursing, but don’t turn this into a big fight. Not now.”

Until I stop nursing? What was that supposed to mean?

He pulled back from me as if he’d touched something not so nice and straightened his tie, a silk one Rochelle had hand-painted and sent as a gift for his birthday. Right now, I wanted to wring Ryan’s neck with it and get in my car and drive the two hours back home to Leverhill, where Rochelle, Dana and my other friends from the Sassy Sistahood e-mail group still lived. My heart went back there for me, back to my old church where they let mothers feed their babies under a blanket and people knew how to say hello. Where—

“Tracey!”

As my husband raised his voice to the tone he used with his insubordinate employees, a baby on the other side of the door let out a piercing scream. My husband folded his arms and made an I-told-you-so face.

“See? There’s a reason for this. If that child was in the service, no one could hear and then the mother would have to get up and try to get out from between all those people—”

The door to the Cry Room jerked open and a woman I’d seen many times before stormed out with her crying child. Tears were streaming down her face, too. “Excuse me,” she said as she pushed past us.

I watched in amazement, first at the dark room revealed when she opened the door, and second at her exit from the one place that was supposed to be for crying. She wobbled on her high heels across the foyer to the nursery. I gasped in disbelief.

The door opened again and a smiling face appeared, a deacon’s wife whose name I couldn’t remember. Sister Hawkins, maybe? That sounded right. She ran the Mother-to-Mother ministry and had very definite ideas about what being a mother meant. Running my graphic-design firm, In His Image, from home and putting Lily in part-time day care did not fit with her concept of motherhood. Probably the only reason Mrs. Hawkins (that was her name!) still spoke to me was because I nursed Lily instead of giving her formula. She’d never say that, but it was the only thing she’d discussed in our brief conversations.

Ryan formed a tight smile as the woman stepped forward with one hand behind her to buffer the sound as the door closed. He narrowed his eyes at me a little, just enough that only I would notice. “Sorry about the noise. It’s our first time. It’s a little bit of an adjustment.”

Sister Hawkins leaned forward, speaking only to my husband and barely above a whisper. “We really like to keep it quiet here so that everyone can hear and the other babies stay peaceful. That baby—” she pointed down the hall toward the path that the mother who’d left had taken “—he wouldn’t take his bottle. Not much we could do to help with that….” She paused to quiver at the idea.

“Anyway, Brother Ryan, your wife and daughter are more than welcome to join us. We’ve been wondering why she hasn’t come in before now. I know that I sent her an invitation.” She smiled wide, revealing the gold front tooth that had surprised me the first time I saw it. Now it just made me want to giggle. There were a lot of things we could do to hide our pasts, but some things just told the tale for us. The light hit the gold tooth from all angles. My husband blinked as if someone had just taken his picture. I was too mad to laugh.

I forced my mouth shut when Ryan squeezed my hand. I hadn’t realized it’d been hanging open. I don’t know which thing stunned me more: Sister Hawkins’s gold tooth or the fact that babies couldn’t cry in the cry room. What was the point of the place then? I decided to ask. “So it’s not really a cry room, is it? It’s a place for moms to nurse their babies?”

The woman turned to me. “Yes, that’s it exactly. They’re called Nursing Mothers’ Rooms at some churches, but the Cry Room was what the building committee chose. I know it seems different at first, but it’s church policy. With Brother Ryan advancing in favor with the pastor and the other men, you don’t want to be disobedient and hold him back, right?” She patted my arm, then held it tight.

Feeling like a homesick kid on the first day of school, I gently pulled away. “I do want to follow the policy, but the church I grew up in doesn’t make the mothers leave the sanctuary to feed their babies. Our pastor wanted all the families to stay together—”

Ryan frowned. “He’s not your pastor anymore. And that’s not your church. This is. Now go on in, hon. I’ve got to get back.” He brought down his tone for Sister Hawkins’s sake and gave her a polite nod as well, but not before whispering, “I’m sorry,” out of the corner of his mouth.

I dropped my head. I was sorry, too. Once again, I was proving his mother right. That look on my husband’s face had said it all. Though he loved me, his mother seemed convinced that I would never be quite right for the job of being his wife or running his house. I’d heard her whisper it to him more times than either he or I would admit. Queen’s doubts had always made me feel bad, but this morning I wondered if she wasn’t right. I couldn’t help thinking too that Dana had told me not to marry Ryan. At the time, I’d thought she was jealous, since they’d gone out a few times. But now…

The woman’s hand gripped my arm again, and before I knew it, the dim room enveloped me and the door shut behind me. Lily wiggled awake in my arms. I could imagine her blinking to adjust to the darkness the way she did in her crib at home. She knew she was somewhere different, somewhere that seemed far away. I smiled down at her, hoping that she could see me.

That’s right, honey. They’ve put us out of the church of all things.

Chapter Four

“T he changing table is over there. There’s a rocking chair and baby swing in the corner. There are footstools under most of the chairs to use when you’re nursing. There are some nursing pillows over there,” the deacon’s wife said, pointing to a stack of pillows and blankets in the corner. “If the baby falls asleep, you can walk her down to the nursery and put her in one of the cribs. They’ll call you if she wakes up and starts to cry. The number will flash right out there.”

Sister Hawkins pointed toward the panel of glass running across the front of the room. Beyond it was my new church family, milling about and shaking hands. High above their heads was a black square with blinking red numbers, each one assigned to a different child when they signed in to their classes. I saw a woman duck through the crowd and rush out the side door.

I pushed Lily upright and over my shoulder to keep from showing my disappointment. The woman who’d run out had a three- or four-year-old, so this separation thing wasn’t as temporary as Sister Hawkins made it seem. What if Lily felt the same way about the toddlers’ class as she did the nursery? Would I be stuck in here for the next five years? Maybe I had it all wrong. I hoped so. “It’s very nice. All of it. I was just wondering, though…How long do I have to stay in here?”

Sister Hawkins gave me her signature look of disapproval. Her children probably knew it well. “It’s not a prison sentence, dear. It’s an honor. Being a mother is a beautiful thing. It’s a pity more young women don’t realize that. Again, we ask that you use the Cry Room as long as you’re breast-feeding your baby or whenever your child is crying during the service and not in the nursery. You’ll like it so much, though, you won’t want to leave. I’ve been in here seven years myself, ever since they built the new church.”

“Yeah, this is her own personal pulpit,” someone whispered, followed by a few giggles.

“Hush,” the woman said in the sharpest, sweetest tone I’d ever heard. “Here, honey, sit down.” She offered me a seat between her and another woman, who was the head of the Planning to Homeschool group or the Mothers of Many ministry, one of those women that I found both amazing and intimidating. I considered taking the seat she suggested to try to get to know that woman better. Rainy Styles was her name. I was sure about that. Ryan and I had been reading up on home-schooling and all other aspects of child rearing and I had a ton of questions to ask.

Still, I wasn’t ready to spend my first Sunday that close to Sister Hawkins’s scrutiny. Instead, I smiled at both of them and took a seat on the end of the back row in case Lily started crying and I needed to make a quick exit like that other woman had done. “Thanks, but I’ll sit here for now.”

The deacon’s wife looked a little insulted before fixing her smile, so much like my husband’s a few minutes earlier, firmly in place. The church mask, my old roommate used to call it as we set out on Sunday mornings. She’d tug at her cheeks and forehead, determined to leave all fakeness behind. I had no name for the false Sunday smiles, but I hated them. Church for me was a place to be vulnerable, not a place to cover up and be perfect. There was the rest of the week for that.

Attending the church that Ryan had grown up in, the church where his mother still attended, gave me plenty of opportunities to need Jesus. My old friends had wondered how things would go with me coming to a church where Ryan had a past and I didn’t, but Rochelle had said it best: “Go where your husband goes. God will go with you.”

I had amened the sentiment then, but sometimes now I wondered if God had gotten lost in the move. My mother-in-law didn’t just attend this church. From the way she’d had me kicked out of the sanctuary this morning with my husband’s approval, it seemed as if Liz just about ran the place. Now she’d have a whole team of women trying to whip me into a suitable wife.

Sister Hawkins attempted to whisper to someone about me. She didn’t do very well with it. She needed to take hissing lessons the Queen. “They’re talking about making her husband a minister, but I don’t see how it’s going to work with her acting a fool like that. Talking about her old pastor and such. Doesn’t she know how things work around here?”

Evidently I didn’t know much of anything at all.

The only light in the room came through the glass in front of us, so it was hard to make out who she’d been speaking to, but I knew that the speaker was the woman who’d escorted me in. My jailer. The pastor wanted to make my husband a minister? Surely this lady was confused, or at least I thought so at first, but after recounting Ryan’s nervousness this morning, I quickly realized she might be right. Gossips like that might get the details confused, but they generally got the big things right. Ryan was being considered for something. Why hadn’t Ryan told me anything? Maybe he had….

I’ve got to get back inside….

Hmm…

Dana’s husband, Adrian, was a minister now, though at the Messianic fellowship they attended, it wasn’t necessarily called that. Rochelle’s husband, Shan, was a deacon at his church, too. Still, my friends were real. Honest. Did I have to become some kind of Christian robot in order for my husband to become a leader?

I hugged my baby closer and shut my eyes before they stung with tears. Maybe Sister Hawkins was right. Though I felt I had a point, the sanctuary wasn’t the place to prove it. I should have just come into the Cry Room like I’d been asked and talked to Ryan about it at home. The thing was, we didn’t talk at home. Ryan barely talked to me at all, and when he did, that stupid cell phone seemed attached to the side of his head, or his BlackBerry, laptop or some other piece of equipment was in front of his face.

Lily pushed forward with her feet, digging her heels and toes into the cup of pudding that had once been my abdominals. I’d almost laughed when the woman mentioned nursing pillows. I didn’t need any—I was one. Though I’d stood up at my wedding almost two years ago with a stomach flat enough to cook on, giving birth to a ten-pound baby had stretched me into some kind of rag doll. Body parts had left their original positions and shifted to new locations. Where my six-pack had once lived, there was now an empty Hefty bag, hanging over with just a little bit of trash in it. Or at least that’s the way my husband described it right after the birth. I laughed with him then, but it wasn’t funny anymore. Nothing was, especially not this room.

Lord, I love being a mother, but does this mean I have to stop being a woman? A person?

A pregnant woman on the other side of the glass paused in front of us, checking her hair. She smiled at herself in what she must have thought, as I once did, was a mirror. I bit my lip remembering how my own face had stared back at me from that glass when I was pregnant. I’d finger-combed my little Afro and kissed my lips together thinking how cute I was, just like this woman was doing now. I wondered if she knew what awaited her on the other side of the glass, a life of watching other people worship through a window, of running out of God’s presence when your number blinked red. I wondered if she had any idea what this new motherhood was all about. I certainly didn’t.

“She’s missing the corners,” the woman next to me whispered. “I love when they use it for a mirror, but I always want to turn up the lights real quick and wave so that she can see there’s, like, thirty women in here watching her check her lipstick. We used to have fun in here, but that was before…”