"If this isn't love" Part VII

Life wasn’t all peaches and cream during Baby Davin’s first couple weeks of life. On the day of his two week checkup, I packed the two of us up and, we left to spend the next six weeks of my maternity leave at my parents’ house…six weeks that were supposed to be exciting and full of new things.  Sadly, that wasn’t the way it turned out.

Everyone knows that newborn babies bring about joy and excitement. Unfortunately, new babies, also, bring on stress and altercations.  And let me tell you, Mr. Marcus and I had our share. It was the week of Christmas and I felt that we should be spending it together as a new family. He felt as if he needed to split his time between his brand spankin new baby boy and his 8 year old baby sister. I just couldn’t understand why he didn’t think that it was important for him to be present at his four week old son’s first Christmas. He couldn’t understand why I didn’t think that it was important that he spend Christmas with his little sister. We even had a huge blow-up about it, in front of my dad. And even though my dad tried to play mediator, and Mr. Marcus may have had one or two valid points, I still felt as if NOTHING was more important than Daddy being with Wifey and Baby for Christmas…not to mention, baby’s first Christmas.

Oh, this wasn’t the only disagreement during those six weeks. It was only one of several. Our perfect partnership was crumbling before my eyes. I began to resent him, and notice that every element that created the foundation of our relationship no longer existed. We weren’t spending time together. We weren’t communicating. We weren’t clicking. It turned complacent…mediocre…bland…everything that I had said would never describe a relationship that I was in. Our growth had just driven up to red light.

I developed this nauseating, gut-wrenching feeling...a feeling that I dreaded. I was beginning to feel as if we weren’t going to make it. Just six months to a year before, everything was perfect. But all the stress and disagreements had gotten to a point where I just couldn’t deal with it any more. We lost the heat that kept our hearts warm. We were, now, sitting on ice. You know…the thin kind.

 It was two nights before the New Year was about to roll in, and I still couldn’t shake that horrible feeling. It wasn’t that I feared us breaking up. I feared that there was a chance he didn’t care. From what I had seen up until that point, he hadn’t really shown me otherwise.

Then, there was phone call. He questioned me: what are you thinking? Why aren’t you saying anything? For the past two weeks, I’ve been the one to say ‘I love you’ first. Why? Is there something you have to tell me? At that point, I couldn’t hide my true feelings. I was calling it quits. I had to tell the man that I loved that it just wasn’t working out. I wanted to tell him how I felt as if I was alone…how I felt as if Davin and I weren’t his first priority…how I felt that if he wasn’t in the mood to be a daddy and boyfriend anymore, then I was more than willing and prepared to do it on my own. I wanted to say all of those things…but, I couldn’t. I barely said a word. I didn’t have to…he knew.

I felt like a failure. I felt like I failed my son, and took away his chance at having a family. I have to tell you, that was the most excruciating pain I had ever felt in my life. On New Years Eve, as the world counted down to the year 2009, I held by baby boy in my arms and cried. Cried, because I wished I was being held by the arms of his father. My son was only four weeks old, but he looked me in my eyes as my tears fell against his blanket, and he seemed to be telling me that everything was going to be ok. Little did I know, my son would have the most honest eyes known to dwell within any human being.