Songs from Jacob.

Cold dark mornings sometimes bring rather melancholy singing from the karaoke man. Jacob goes down to the kitchen first to start the coffee and feed the cat while I find clothes and rouse the children. When I arrived into the now brightly lit and yummy smelling room he was softly clinking plates and singing a song by Creed. Because it's one of those days.

    The day reminds me of you
    The night hides your truth
    The earth is a voice
    Speaking to you
    Take all this pride
    And leave it behind
    Because one day it ends
    One day we die
    Believe what you will
    That is your right
    But I choose to win
    So I choose to fight
    To fight

Not a particularly good or bad day, just somewhere in between.

Chapstick and cheap dreams.

When I was seven years old my mother did something completely reckless and insane. She handed me the Avon Christmas catalogue and told me to pick something out.

So! Beautiful! They should...have sent...a poet!

I picked out a white plastic Frosty the snowman ring. When you clicked it open the head swung away on a hinge to reveal cherry-flavored chapstick. I loved that thing, I wound up scraping out the last of the chapstick with my fingernail and my mom showed me how to smoosh the contents of another chapstick tube into the empty hole. Oooh! Refillable. I wore it so proudly you would have thought it was from Tiffany & Co.

It was the start of a twenty-eight year love affair with chapstick, and catalogues too. Go figure.

I gave up the snowman ring for the infinitely cooler Maybelline kissing potion in the glass tube with the rollerball applicator within a few years, and the Sears Wishbook and Speigel catalogue held my interest far longer than Avon ever could. Now as an adult I have settled on Labello chapsticks and eleventy hundred different shiny lip glosses but will spend a large portion of each day looking for a tube, or applying the stuff liberally. A full-fledged addict, without shame.

On Sunday evening I asked Jake if he had a tube on him, or if he could go and buy some for me, or remember to even bring some from home.

No, Bridget.

What? Why not?

You have a problem.

It's chapstick, Jake.

Exactly. I've eaten so much of it I'm soon to be know as the Wax Preacher.

So don't eat it.

But then I can't kiss you.

Oh. Point taken.

So you'll cut out the chapstick?

Sure, I can do that. (she says hesitantly.)

But then that sort of blows the whole dream I have had for years of tucking my chapstick and my cellphone in my pocket, jumping into my 1971 VW camper bus and hitting the highway.

Because now I have no chapstick, but more importantly, I don't own a 1971 VW camper bus. It's just one of those silly dreams. An escape, like having a tropical destination poster on the wall in your office. You look at it or think about it and your brain takes a mini-vacation. Or at least it's something to shoot for.

Something a little more exciting than driving to the drugstore in your 1971 VW camper bus and buying a dozen of your favorite chapsticks and going somewhere in disguise to apply them. Over and over again.

Because that, well, that's a really dumb dream.

Good things like Bailey.

My older sister Bailey is here. She flew in on Sunday and took over from PJ, who was drowning in the responsibilities that we had heaped on him.

Bailey is the oldest girl, and I am the youngest. Growing up we hated each other. I hated her because she got to do everything first, and she had independence. She hated me because I got the most attention. When she was supposed to babysit me she'd lock me in the closet and go out with her friends.

When we grew into adults and had our own children something changed and we found a common thread together. She has three teenagers who have just newly reached the independent stage and she's reveling in her own freedom once again. She jumped at the chance to fly out here and take care of us. And boy do I appreciate her doing it.

Last night she asked me if I needed anything. We had just finished dinner and I was helping as much as she would let me.

No, I'm okay, thanks, Bay.

You should really have some tea and sit down, Bridget.

I'm fine. I feel pretty good.

You should listen to me. You may be a grown up and all but you're still small enough to lock in the closet.

I could hear Jacob trying, but he failed miserably and broke out in a sob of laughter and it was the best sound in the whole world.

Now there's an old song I loved.

Bridget, you're in recovery. I need you to wake up for me now. Bridget? Come, on honey. Wake up. Please wake up now for us.

No...just go away. Please. Go away. God, just leave me the fuck alone.
The literal sweetheart. All 95 pounds of her. They don't listen to her anyways.

Where have I been? Who cares.

Saturday lunchtime I discovered pain that I think I would have traded for death. I don't have an actual normal pain threshold so it has to be exquisite before it even registers. I thought I had pulled something in my upper back from all the throwing up, I was crampy and miserable, the coughing was so incessant. But I wasn't worried. Overall, I was feeling better for once. Then I almost hit the kitchen floor at fifty miles an hour while getting the milk out of the fridge, taking a terrifyingly moment before fainting to register the confusion and fear on Jacob's face when he caught me on the way down and we realized this wasn't good. Our dream? Subsequently destroyed.

We were pregnant but we're not anymore. It was ectopic. Which explains why my levels weren't going up the way they were supposed to. The pain was from the tube rupturing, which nearly killed me. I had surgery on Saturday afternoon. We were given a 25% chance of successfully conceiving after this. Oh yay. Bring it on, God. Just bring it. The gloves are off now.

Twenty five percent. Because four previous surgeries and my 'advanced maternal' age (My age. Last time I checked thirty-five wasn't all that old.) are putting me in a club I don't want to be in.

I didn't want to listen to my doctor's mellow voice on Sunday speaking in such a cold light. And so I ripped out the hearing aids and threw them at the wall. The doctor flinched. Jacob didn't say a word, he just put them in his pocket. They're still there.

I didn't want to wake up and see Claus sitting there on Monday reading his notes, because he knows, oh, he knows, Bridget is going down now. I wouldn't speak to him at all. So he just kept me company, every day for around an hour and a half. I watched him read, feeling slightly like Linda Blair in the Exorcist. I was waiting to flip upside down and smash into the ceiling. I wished I could have. Just to make him leave.

I didn't want to open my eyes today and see Jacob sitting in the damn chair, with his hands tearing at his hair, only to have him look up at me in surprise and see the anguish written on his face, drawn in a grief stricken finality. I thought I had seen every emotion he had inside, but I missed the one labelled "rock bottom".

He brought me home. He's taking some time off. Time he can't afford to be off. His workload triples. He hasn't smiled. He hasn't raised his eyes to meet anyone else's, only mine, Ruth's, Henry's. He speaks in one word answers to everyone but us. Jacob has shut down. This was over before we had a chance to appreciate it and somehow that should make it easier but it doesn't. Or maybe I jinxed myself with my legendary superstition by writing about it here. I said I wasn't happy. I said I was scared.

What I wouldn't give to take it all back.

He said maybe he had asked for too much. My heart is broken again. I want to give Jacob everything and what came so easily before suddenly seems to be an insurmountable task. I tried to console him, the deaf leading the blind, I don't know what I'm doing. I tried to talk to him about the future and maybe later on, in a year or two or whenever he was ready we could try again and he cut me off.

No, we're done trying, Bridget.

Twenty-five is still hopeful, Jacob. Where's your famous hope? Where's your faith?

Don't talk to me about faith today. Not today. I can only see what's in front of me and that's you, Bridge, and I'm so thankful just for you.

We don't have to accept this. We'll get another opinion.

He stood in front of me and held my shoulders, digging his fingers in until it hurt and he spoke to me with red eyes, teeth gritted, the face of someone in the grasp of an unimaginable sadness, and an understandable rage.

No, we won't. Do you know how close I came to losing you? I can't go through that ever again. I had forgotten how sick you used to be, and I can't do this ever again. You weren't strong enough and I pressured you. We didn't get enough sleep. And then you almost died right in front of my eyes. I can't lose you, Bridget. I just found you.

Oh God. His voice. It broke again and it's the worst sound in the world. Hoarse. Out of control.

You know something? I don't think we can talk about this right now, Jacob.

I had to shut off. I'm too drained, too shellshocked, and now scared because his hands hurt where they embedded into my skin. He shook me then, hard enough to make tears come out.

Bridge, we can't talk about it anymore ever! I have everything in the world and it's more than enough and I wouldn't give it up now for a baby. Let's focus on the four of us, and just getting you better, and living life. Okay? Please? Because I can't live without you.

He let go. And that was that. No talking, no negotiating, no nothing. We knew the risks and we took them and we lost and now I'm angry that I was reckless, thumbing my nose at the odds in the first place. I'm not the person to look toward when you want a miracle and yet we did it anyways and once again we've been pushed back into our place by fate or bad luck or whatever position we were meant to hold by a redundant hand. I'm sure somewhere in there God picked up on my hesitation to have another baby and called me on it.

Slow down, Bridget. You've cashed in enough miracles for now.

Damn everything all to hell.

Jacob becomes emotionally scarred, his heart stitched back together by my shaking hand because he wanted this so badly. And the chances have disappeared in a frightening chain of events that again leave us surrounded by experts and that sickly antiseptic smell that only hospitals have, left consoling each other and wishing we were somewhere else. Unwelcome fixtures in our lives now, these places.

I become physically scarred, the angry red line low on my abdomen right where he used to like to place his left thumb when he was pulling me close to him, now traced by his shaking fingers as a taunting memento because once again he was forced to stand by helplessly while everything went wrong all around him, his only consolation being in the comfort of catching me halfway down while the milk splashed everywhere but he kept my head from hitting the tiles. It's not good enough for him. Once again he wished so ferverently for a happy ending. There's been so few of those. The consolation he finds in me is also where he finds the fault now. And still he loves me unconditionally. He was there for the first time at the right time and he couldn't fix this and now I think he understands his limits as a human being and he resents the hell out of it.

He stayed overnights with me in the hospital (sleeping in a chair). Last night he got up at 3 am and gathered me up in his arms and just held on and within minutes the sobs wracked his entire body and flooded me with a fresh pain. He doesn't think I'm strong enough for this. He's too scared to try again and too angry to talk anymore. He just quietly resigns himself to the blessings he has, leaning heavily on his faith in God now to carry him through this part even though he denies it for some reason known only to him and I don't get it. Again, I'm looking for the absolutes. He's calling it a test.

I don't want any more damn tests! I failed. I fucking failed. Let me be.

And where is the other damn door, the one people always talk about?

Because this door is now closed. Locked. And no one even volunteered a key. And just to make certain, they've started to brick it over. It's a door that we're going to have to walk away from now.

Jacob insists there are other doors that will open, I don't hear him. He's gone back to his whispering. And he doesn't explain. We've found a reluctant comfort in dark times with each other. Sort of like finding yourself adrift in an ocean and being rescued by what turns out to be a ghost ship, you find you weren't really saved after all but you find someone else in a boat that is oddly the same one you were in. So you keep drifting, together. And hoping. Holding on for dear life. I to him, and him to me. Haunted.

Now, if you'll excuse me I'm going to go have a nervous breakdown. But I can't because they're medicating me again. Lucidity comes hard today.

Fine by me.

Permanent markers revisited.

Holy shit.

Jacob came home last night with a tattoo.

Just below the neckline where a t-shirt would fall on the centre of his back.

Angel wings. Symmetrical wings and if you look hard, scrolled within and difficult to discern are all of our initals. Baby included. JTF, BR, RB, HJ and OC. You have to know they are there, that's how well they were incorporated into the design. Mind-blowing.

I'm stunned. He's managed to eschew all forms of body modification all these years. Never had pierced ears. Never a need for anything and now this. Holy wow. It's beautiful.

I have tons of tattoos and am down to five piercings from seven and he's always told me if I had remained plain vanilla I would have been just as beautiful. But I didn't get any of it to be beautiful, I did it to mark days. To remember things, to be different. I did it to prove that I might be sweet and proper but I never forget who lies within. The expressive one. The freak. I think body art is beautiful.

Oh, fuck me, emoting all over the place today I am.

He got it because he is complete now, he said. I can't think of a better reason than that.

5:17 AM

5:17 am on July 13 was when Cole died. They let me in to be with him. I watched him slip through my fingers for the final time and I wanted it so badly I thought God was going to come out of the sky and push me right on through the ground into hell for those thoughts.

And I talked to him. Jittery, random sentences that flew out of my mouth. Everything I ever wanted to say that I didn't get to say because our twenty years together didn't end so well. I asked questions I will never have answers to, again. He wins.

I'm sorry.

You treated me like dirt. What did you expect me to love you with, when I had nothing left?
He's good to me. To the kids. He looks after us.

Why didn't you just let me go?

Why did you have to hurt me?

I hate you.

And I cried. The tears just rolled down my face with great big fat blubbery sobs following and I sat there and watched the clock and I didn't look at him until 5:17. That's when I looked at him and said:

I love you.

And that was the moment he died.

And now every day I wake up at 5:17 am. And I'm one hundred percent convinced that he's haunting me using time as his weapon. Because Cole would do that.

*Ghostwriter.

Hi internet,

This is Jacob. Bridget is still sleeping but she left the window open so I thought I would write for her. Last night I took my wife on a surprise date. First we stopped at the drugstore and bought a ton of cough drops. Then I took her to see Jackass Number Two to cheer her up. She laughed so hard and didn't cough too much. When we came home we had some cake. Bridget loves cake. She was in bed before 9 and is still sleeping now at 7 am so I'm hoping she feels much better today.

Yours truly,
Jacob.

*(What I found when I woke up. I think I'll just leave it as today's entry. TGIF.)

The gauge, it reads empty.

Hell, I can't even cop to being beautiful on the outside at this point, the usual safety net I keep in place because I'm normally a freaking mess on the inside and yet you'd never ever know it.

I did manage to brush my teeth. At 1 pm.

Still. not. showered. Yuck. Bathrobe. It was Cole's and I stole it so it's mine now. It's huge. It's warm.

Hair is a lank disaster. Coughing every ten seconds hard enough to rattle my brain inside my skull and make my whole forehead pound. The chills are starting up again which means the fever won't be far behind.

Jacob has called every five minutes, just to make sure I'm conscious. Reminders to eat every time and I'm not. Reminders to take it easy and I am trying. The fevers scare the fuck out of him, with the baby. I was a shell, sitting and watching kids movies while they cough and cough between medicines and surfing the net aimlessly with nothing to be read through tired, weepy eyes.

The dinner fairy will be here in about an hour and I officially mark the third time in seven years that I have been completely bested by an illness to the point where I couldn't do a thing.

So pretty. I'm hoping he keeps the visuals from Tuesday night in his head, when I felt like a million bucks and looked like it too. And here I spent an entire spring and summer fighting my way through a life I didn't believe could get any more incredible or any more terrible and somehow I did it, and now I'm bested by being pregnant and having the fucking flu. I don't believe myself and I've been reduced at last to hiding in my room pretending I'm writing while the kids watch a movie downstairs and they don't have to see me cry like a baby because I'm so sick and there's no one here right now.

Drama queen indeed.

Radiant Bridget.

No lapdances this post, folks.

Not so much glowing with pregnancy as I am glowing with the heat of a thousand suns. Last night I ran the mother of all fevers, to the point where Jacob woke me out of a sound sleep with medicine to bring it down because he said the bed was so hot he woke up. He made me drink gatorade, stripped off my camisole and pajama pants and sat up with me for hours.

This after he had to do everything anyways, coming home from work with groceries and finding me halfway across our bed, having been sick with the shakes and chills all afternoon. Bless his heart, he got me the rest of the way into bed and got dinner and bedtimes achieved with a flair that only Jacob has. He brought me flowers.

And my mother calls from home and tells me she's on penicillin for the same cold/flu and maybe I should go back to the doctor. I point out I see the doctor once a week.

And the kids are still coughing so much I'm keeping them home again. Well, that and the fact that I'm too sick to walk to school four times today (8k total) so we're in, we're down and we're going to get better or die trying.

Unbreakable.

(Uh-oh, the second half of this became the requisite porn post. I'm not sorry. Very sweetly I will make no apologies.)

Someone is losing his mind.

Jacob has been mostly around for all of two difficult pregnancies and he's forgetting all the rules, which usually begin with:

1) bring deep fried food and orange juice. Cake is a plus, but then again, when is cake not a plus?
2) hold the hair! Who cares how much I'm sick, just don't let it get in my hair.

I'm not a doll (ha), and I don't need to be treated with kid gloves but when I feel really great and I want to do things, I have to talk him into everything, because he thinks I should lounge around swaddled in blankets and have people bring me things all day like a princess would (so where is all the deep fried food I requested? Hello!). He absolutely forbade me to wear my high heels outside anymore (Notice I said outside because oh, he doesn't mind if I wear them indoors). In case I slip or something.

Remember he's stepped in to be there during such very private times you wouldn't believe it. You have to have faith in someone when I felt so comfortable with him from the moment I first met him and he put his arm around me on that hammock and kept me safe through that entire night when I was out of it. It was definitely something bigger than both of us.

God was busy playing matchmaker, and we were slow.

And then through being pregnant with Ruth when he would bring me smoothies and the very first time he stopped by and I didn't answer the door, he came in anyway and sat down on the bathroom floor behind me and pulled my hair back so that I could just keep throwing up even though I tried to wave him away and fight off his arms and when I lay down on the floor because I was too fucking sick to crawl he picked me up and carried me to my bed and kissed my forehead and he sat on a chair in the corner and worked on his university papers, writing with his pen, papers and books balanced on his knees, while I slept and woke up only to be sick, and he would drop everything on the floor.

He got nothing of me then, except my worthless company, and still he took what I had to give him and I loved him for it. The best parts were given to Cole, who would come home from work and get to hold me and make love to me and take what he wanted and still expect me to pour his coffee in between dry heaves. Brutal. Do you know Cole never even called during the day to see how I was? Bitter one, indeed. Broken and fucking bitter.

The second time, with Henry, Jacob signed up for pretty much the same deal as Best Friend, only things were so far downhill from life the first time he was resigned to believe I had signed up to be tortured, that I truly was a masochist, and that my life wasn't turning out at all how it was supposed to. That part was true. This time Jacob had his hands full. He kept a one year old Ruth entertained almost every afternoon, and tried in vain to get her to nap by singing power ballads and Christmas carols to her and in between that he would come in and rub my back while I lay on the tiles, so much sicker the second time around that I wished the floor would just swallow me whole. The drugs barely helped.

And yet I survived, he helped me keep at least a little of my smile, my sweet disposition. And now, this third time around so far it seems a little easier because he's here all the time now. But I'm not always so sweet. Which I continue now to throw in his face daily. For I do not want to be sweet sometimes. I don't want to have any of that. I want to be fucking depraved. You only think I was kidding when I said I would be his whore.

    Are you really as tough as you think
    you blink and you're over the brink
    you bleed but the blood runs pink
    with dirty second hands
    dirty second hands

    You're not quite as tough as you thought
    you bought the American rod
    the very seed that you thought you shot
    with dirty second hands
    dirty second hands


So you should have seen his face last night when I pitched a glorious all-out petulant tantrum because he really wasn't willing to pull out the strobe light (which! he bought! for me!) and crank the stereo up to twelve so we could have a little fun because I was finally feeling right at the right time, a critically choreographed chain of events that might possibly not happen again any time soon. The hell? And I'm so rusty after having spent most of August perfecting a lap dance so mind-blowing he forgot what to say when he answered the phone a full two hours later when I nailed it.

(Psst, Jake. When you pick up the phone, say 'Hello'.)

So now!

Honey! I feel terrific, and I'm so horny right now the balusters are looking promising. I know you'll be sorry if I start ripping apart the banister to get a little action around here.

I could barely get him in the mood for all my trying. And I'm usually frighteningly good at it. I have a way of kissing him that makes him too hard to stand up comfortably and he won't have it much, these days. I've been a mom for a long time but of course it's different this time, this is his baby and he's going to have a hard time reconciling his sex kitten wife with the mother of his children, I can see it. He wants to go the tender route, I want to remain mildly depraved. I like depraved.

Up until we got a positive test he was completely satisfied, albeit a little surprised that he could get a lap dance just by looking at me the right way. Bringing home a strobe light (!) and a better stereo for our bedroom sort of cemented his whole lottery-winner attitude. Possibly the funniest wedding present I've ever seen. He was finally. into. it. Yes.

Freaky is my middle name as much as Rebekah. He knows it and now he's been denying me something I want the past few days and that's..well, that's just not acceptable. He's going to have to get over that right now. Yesterday. Please?

The good news is, I think I've figured him out...almost. He just takes a lot longer to get into it, and it takes him an extra hour or two to start the hair-pulling, desperate, slow, unbearably languid, complete sex that I crave from him. Fine, it just adds a couple more hours to the fun. We have lost entire nights of sleep together over the past few months. It feels so good to be touched by him I can't even believe it. Maybe he's one of those touch-healers by default. I wish it worked on the dry heaves. They interfere with everything that's good.

And I don't think either of us really mind the extra time it takes to visit heaven. I know I don't. There's things to remember about being pregnant. Like if you're able to grow a human being for nine months then you're probably able to handle some serious sex with a capital S. And I really like the part of the night when he forgets to treat me like I will break and has a little fun. A little thorough, hard-edged fun. Yes. More. Please.

Please, Jake.

And he sure enjoys the hell out of his nightly lap dance. I wore out a CD. My favorite one, ten thousand days. I'm hoping I don't wear out iTunes now.

And finally with his consent, after much petulance and sighing took place, I got my wish. Last night I think I reached some sort of limber zenith. He was fucking stunned.

I wore his cowboy hat, pulled very low, I let my hair down, falling in waves to my elbows, coaxed my eyelashes to extreme lengths and after adding a cute new pair of pink boyshort undies that he bought for me and entirely too much candy-pink lipgloss, I wound out on his lap in his office chair with everything I had. I played a song for him, nice and loud, three times. He almost made it through the final chorus on the third go round, before I found myself stark naked, wearing nothing but that cowboy hat and a big smile, my arms wrapped around his strong shoulders, fingers tangled thoroughly in his beautiful blonde hair, discovering his talents. On the receiving end of his generous gifts, only for me. I thought we were going to break the chair. Reluctant my ass. I started out in control and I wound up so not in control. Just the way I like it.

He tries so hard to resist me but it's insurmountable.

I, however, am not.