Raising a Hero

Prologue

I had always wanted a family. I knew it was impossible to expect perfect, especially in the day and age where %50 of marriages ended in divorce and too many kids were born out of wedlock or raised to single parents. I was one of those kids.

But I still had my extended family, which gave me enough of a taste to want. I had married aunts and uncles who showed me happiness could exist, love and all. My mom was always shipping me off to help watch kids when her sisters had new babies, or sometimes because she knew she couldn't take care of me, at least at that time. It might sound heartless to outsiders, but it takes a lot of love and humility to recognize when you, yourself, are not up to the task of parenting.

And because of that, I thought I had grown up all right. I studied as much as I could about finding the right man. I did my best in school. That's probably why studying was the only real talent I could lay claim to, but it led me to others. I learned nutrition, basic medical knowledge, and homemaking skills, all with my rather 1950s dream of being a domesticated housewife with a nameless number of children around my feet. I kept myself healthy, took care of what looks God saw fit to bless me with, dated around, and honestly thought I had made a good choice when I got married at twenty to a decent-looking man with a promising computer career.

Then my first baby was born dead.

Ten months of carrying my little hope around, doing up the nursery, dreaming of little hands and little feet, rocking on the porch as I practiced singing lullabies---grey, cold, still, and wrapped in a thin hospital blanket.

Baby blues had nothing on me. I had looked forward to that baby so much, I'd viewed my husband with rosy glasses. I had ignored how long he was on the computer at nights. I had ignored how he couldn't meet my sexual needs while pregnant, because he just 'wasn't attracted' to pregnant me. I had ignored how often I didn't know where he was. I ignored his drying attitude towards me.

My marriage got rocky. Dissatisfaction can do that. And I was determined that it was all because a hole in my heart sucked in any happiness I could have.

So I tried again. Second pregnancy miscarried as soon as I began to hope. Then the third. The fourth was extremely premature and left in a glass jar to float.

"Enough," he said. "I'm done. Lillian, I'm seeing someone."

How he thought the hospital room right after losing my fourth child was the right time to drop this bomb on me, I didn't know.

"And you couldn't divorce me before dating again, why?" I said, my devastation flailing and roaring in the distance like a storm still far away over the ocean, while I stood on the shore, still, motionless, and numb.

"I couldn't just put a baby in you and abandon you, could I?" he said, having the gall to sound offended.

"I'm sure you could have resisted," I said. "There's no way I'm close to your porn girls."

He stiffened at that, his face twitching.

"What?" I asked. "You think I didn't know? Is your new girl a prostitute you called up too?"

"I did no such thing," he snapped.

"I'm deeply amused at how you can sound like the wronged party here when you are the adulterer."

"It wasn't like you were fulfilling any of my needs anyways, obsessed with being fat and pregnant and sick all the time. How am I supposed to be turned on by that? Or by the fact you could hardly do anything around the house?"

I stared. Did he really just say all that? Holy crap, he did.

He seemed to catch himself. "I'm not saying that's all you're good for like some chauvinistic pig, but after a day of work it--it wears on you to come home and be expected to do all the house stuff too."