The Between Years

me. It was nothing huge, just an assembly of the important women in my life, which includes all my close girlfriends, mine and Randy's grandmothers and all of our aunts. We played cards, chatted and ate cake. Gifts ranged from clothes, toys and pacifiers to a brand new stroller. Thank God for that miracle. When it ended, I realized that we had been given everything we would need to provide for Kenny.

    But in all of this, I've mentioned nothing of the fear and anxiety that haunted me. The idea of labor scared the living snot out of me. I know how advanced modern medicine is and that women don't die in child birth nearly as much as they used to, but my fear wasn't quelled. Then I worried over if Kenny would be born healthy, or if he would have a stillbirth. This was to say nothing of my fear over the kind of mother I would make. Would I make all the right moves, raise him right? Or would be grow up resenting me? We all set out with the highest hopes and greatest optimism, but we fall short thanks to our own imperfections.

    I wrote Kenny letters while he was in the womb, special little messages from a mother to her baby-to-be. I never meant for anyone to read them, but you never know if they might stumble upon them one day and learn what I was feeling. I still have those letters, but I can't look at them. They're still tucked away in my sock drawer.

    Mostly, I wondered what kind of person Kenny would turn out to be. I wondered what type of personality he would have, who he would marry, where he would travel, what he would do for a living. Randy and I mooned over these things quite often. There were so many questions with answers remaining to be discovered, filling me with boundless excitement. But sometimes we have all our hopes dashed and our wildest dreams are stricken to dust.

CHAPTER 5
    I like my job. Heck, love my job. Though I wouldn't call myself a workaholic, I was reluctant to step away for maternity leave any sooner than I had to. Working with the kids at the college had always been a joy, had always fulfilled me, but when Kenny was born, it also proved to be my Achilles heel.

    I was instructing a basic composition class to teach basic writing skills to first year students. The object is for the students to learn to write in a strong, clean and tight fashion for improved communication in the workplace. In this section, I was teaching the Police Foundations students, which proved considerably easier than teaching the automotives students, but not necessarily as fun. The aspiring cops were more diligent, but lacked the sense of humor of other students. Sometimes I had to be tough on the grades, and I felt bad, but they always caught on.

    Since the class was on Wednesday nights, I was away from Randy, and had to consider separate arrangements for supper. I always slipped out to the Pizza Hut a few blocks from the college and ate a personal pan pizza, a salad and a Diet Coke. Randy usually ate a frozen dinner, or grabbed some take out from the Italian Deli in our neighbourhood. I didn't care for night driving in the winter, what with the lake effect snowstorms in our area, but I sucked it up like everyone else.

    My office is in the Lewis complex of the main building, and my Wednesday night class was in the Tilbe building on the other side of campus. Fortunately, the building was only five minutes walking distance. Still, I have a bad habit of not leaving my office for class until less than five minutes before my class is scheduled to begin, a habit I still suffer from to this day. Some of us never learn. One night I was buried in papers to be graded when I realized I had exactly thirty seconds to make it to class. I rushed out of my office, slammed the door behind me, and scrambled out of the main building as fast as my feet would carry me.

    First, I had to push through the clusters of kids congregated at the door, smoking cigarettes and chattering, to reach the outside. I chugged along the sidewalk like a speed-walker, my arms rotating machine-like about my sides, determined to make my class on time. My foot struck a patch of ice, which scooped me into the air, and before I knew it, I was flat on my back, staring up at the star-studded sky.

    Water gushed between my legs, but I hadn't made enough sense of my situation to know what was happening. I'd expected to crawl back to my feet the moment my ass struck the pavement, dust myself off, and resume my mad dash to class, but I couldn't move. Once my