I know the unfathomable pain of bearing down to push a baby out of my body. I know the blanketed feelings of exhilaration and relief that come as soon as I release the baby and the pain entrenched in every muscle in my uterus. I know that, with the arrival of my new love, I will once again be thrust into the wanting of mothering; wanting full participation that will inevitably be interrupted due to financial responsibilities and work commitments. I also know that, as I relish the magic in the fleeting moments spent caring for her, it won’t last, or at least not in the way I want it to.
Six years prior and with a completely different mindset, I had returned to California from my volunteer assignment in Honduras with the Peace Corps. I needed to do something, as in attend graduate school or get a full-time job. Upon my return, a good friend told me about the teacher shortage in California and that, because I am bilingual, I would be a good candidate for a teaching position. At that time, if you held a bachelor’s degree, you could apply for work as an elementary teacher while attending school to obtain a teaching certification. I took my friend’s suggestion and submitted my resume to the Santa Ana Unified School District on a Wednesday morning. Two days later, on Friday afternoon, I was employed as a first-grade bilingual teacher.
The quickness with which I was hired by the district led me to falsely believe this would always be the case; that as a job seeker I would be received well whenever I applied for work. I could not have been more wrong. This would turn out to be the first and last time that my resume and I would be accepted with such eager enthusiasm.
Throughout my first years as a teacher, I thoroughly enjoyed the engaged curiosity of my students, the creative aspects of instruction and the professional encouragement I received from the principal and my coworkers. At the close of the first semester of my second year of teaching, the students were reading, writing, and speaking English better than when they began the school year. I beamed with joy over the progress the students made throughout the year. The students could feel the pride I felt for them, not solely because of their improved test scores, but because of their continual effort. They worked hard, and they could see the results of their efforts as it reflected in their reading, writing, and speaking abilities.
However, despite moments such as this, I knew teaching wasn’t something I would do for the rest of my life. Although I made notable progress in my first years of teaching, and was a well-regarded employee in previous professional positions, a restlessness lingered. Something was missing. Normally, I accept work positions that are a good fit as far as typical qualifications are concerned. However, no matter how well I carried out my work responsibilities, there continued to be an unnamable element missing; an internal longing that failed to subside, even in the best of professional situations. I knew I wasn’t meant to stay here, nor would this be the last time I would feel this way.
It was near the end of my second year of teaching when I decided I had had enough of living and working in Orange County. As a black woman in Orange County, I felt invisible. Considering I’d lived in the OC off and on for almost ten years and had not been asked out on one date, enough was enough. It didn’t take much for me to decide to relocate to the City of Angels—Los Angeles.
With so much diversity roaming about in LA, there is something, someplace, and someone for everybody. The only catch is, for all the good scenery, museums, weather, dating choices, and dance clubs, you pay dearly in the cost of living. I finished up my second year of teaching in Santa Ana and welcomed summer with a newly rented apartment in Los Angeles. Within a few weeks, I was hired by the Los Angeles Unified School District to continue as a first-grade bilingual teacher in the fall.
Living in LA afforded lots of opportunities for me to spend time with friends and meet new people. In keeping with my “someone for everybody in LA” perspective, that summer I was introduced to the man who would become the father of my three children, the man I would later marry, and the man with whom I would be compelled, through a series of unprecedented dire financial circumstances, to develop and usher in a new foundation for personal growth.
With his hands tucked away in his jeans pockets, he stood tall and quietly on the sidewalk and watched patiently as his childhood friend led my girlfriend and me over to meet him. The party was over and the outside late-night scene had just begun. This was the part of the night when final attempts were made and the excitement of the last romantic possibility was heightened. The three of us made our way through the crowd and stopped in front of him.
From the moment I was introduced to him, I felt an immediate return to love. I was drawn to him in a way that remained unknown. I felt as if I had known him all of my life. In his presence, I was intrigued, interested, and filled with the lightness of swirling butterflies. In the days and weeks that followed our introduction, I wanted to know everything about him. My head was trying to catch up to what was already known by my heart. Whenever we sat a dinner table together, walked through a park, watched the waves at the beach, laughed at silly personal stories, danced to our favorite Reggae music or simply lingered within the tenderness of each other, he attended to my every need with such endearing immediacy that I knew I was already loved.
At the time, the deeper aspects of our connection eluded me. I wasn’t able to fully articulate what it was that so intensely drew me to him and him to me. What I have come to understand is we draw unto ourselves the very people, situations, and circumstances in which we share similar energetic vibrations and subconscious patterns. Of the millions of inhabitants of the LA dating scene, I managed to meet the one man with whom I would not only share an intense enduring love, but who would also mirror my deepest unexamined emotional wounds.
Unbeknownst to me, these unexamined emotional wounds that were buried so deeply within each of us would eventually rise to the surface. They would encompass our marriage, our home, our finances, and our way of perceiving and being in the world. They would also amplify the turmoil in which my most significant catalysts for personal growth would emerge. By the following summer, one year after I met Dennis, I was pregnant with our first child.
The news of “Bridgitte is pregnant” was met with hesitant excitement and spread like a thrilling rumor. First, with my decision to join the Peace Corps, and now, getting pregnant while unmarried, this was the second time I had done something that was unexpected and inconsistent with the normal trajectory of things. My parents were surprised, nervous, concerned, and happy all at once, as was I. However, they quickly became our most fervent supporters. We all agreed, married or not, a baby was indeed worthy of a celebration.
My mother, six of her closest girlfriends, and I planned our baby shower. We wanted to have a celebration that included all of our closest family and friends. By the time the event rolled around, we had more than 150 guests in attendance. For one of the game festivities, my stepfather, Matt, a football fanatic, agreed to create a Super Bowl Squares game that he would adapt for the baby shower. He used a poster board to create a ten-by-ten grid that would offer 100 squares for people to choose from. The rows indicated how many pounds I had gained during the pregnancy. The columns indicated the number of inches it would take to encircle my belly with a tape measure. When the guests were seated, Matt went around to each table, explained the game to everyone, and sold each square for five dollars. After everyone had purchased a square, all 100 squares were filled with names and we had five hundred dollars in the pot! Later that afternoon, during the game, I stood in front of the crowd as my mother pulled the tape measure around my midsection. We revealed the number of pounds I had gained and the circumference of my midsection. We then called the name located on the winning square and yelled, “Layla! You just won two hundred fifty dollars!” Dennis and I split the winnings with Layla, a friend of my mother. She was ecstatic and so were we.
Up until this point I still did not know the sex of the baby. When I had my six-months ultrasound, I requested that the technician write the sex of the baby on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope. A few days after the ultrasound, I gave the envelope to my