11. That's My Mama
Sam wrapped up the production of his current movie about two months after the wedding. By that time, Mercedes was showing and in the studio less, because of restrictions she made for herself in order to ensure that Marvel would be safe and healthy. She was also making certain to spend more time with Sam. For one thing, her hormones made her extremely volatile. She never thought that she would ever be such an emotional thing and being away from Sam for too long became disconcerting. So, she made his business trips with him and any event and even on budgeted time, her sophomore album, 'Is That She?' was completed.
She spent her pregnancy "break" being featured on and performing on different talk shows, entertainment events, and radio programs. "This is how I housewife," she told a reporter who asked her if now that she was going to be a mother, did Sam want her to become a housewife? "I accompany Sam to all of his events and accept invitations to things happening in that city or town – things that deal with my career, only. There is no resentment, hostility or force between the two of us. I don't mind meeting fans and making appearance, and to me, it doesn't matter where I do that at. So why not do it wherever Sam has appointments."
The only thing that Sam really tried to restrict her on was getting on the Internet. She had to for certain networking purposes, and she was always one to respond to, reblog, retweet, and reply to her fans, when she had the chance. But, Sam was worried, because of the hate messages that she pretty frequently received and her upset after seeing them. "Don't stress yourself out that way. It's not good for Marvel," he told her when she began cussing about Sam being shipped with people.
"Look at this photo! This is a photo of you watching that actress dance," she said.
"I was watching the entire scene, because we were filming and I was paying attention to my work. They happened to catch it at an opportune time to exploit the situation."
"Samerina! That's what they call you two. There are stories and sites dedicated to this."
"I have fans that ship me with anybody."
Mercedes was still not pleased. That made her sicker than the messages that she was a fat ugly whore that didn't deserve a hot guy like Sam. Hell, Sam had chased her… she knew she had that good-good and her man wasn't displeased, so why would he go anywhere else? But, she was going to have a baby in a few months and her child would have to eventually be exposed to some of this foolishness… that was something that she had never really thought about before. It bothered the hell out of her.
Upon finding out that they would be having a son, Sam immediately began trying to plan out the nursery. "Star Wars… or Superman?" He asked.
"Why would we name a child Marvel and give him a Superman room? Seems like that would give him a conflict or complex or something," she said.
"You overthink this," he told her. "I'm liking Superman for him. When Bill told Beatrice why he liked Superman, I loved that monologue. That's what this kid will be – something magnificent that will be taught to be meek, but now to squelch his powers."
She laughed, "Then why don't we name him Superman?"
"Could we?" He asked, excitedly. "I thought you'd gotten attached to "Marvel," since we've always called him that, but you're on to something with this Superman thing."
"That was sarcasm, Sam. We aren't naming our baby Superman, or Clark Kent or whatever his Krypton name is that I keep saying wrong."
"So you are attached to "Marvel," then," he mused. "What about X-Men, then? Or, perhaps – the mighty Thor!"
"I like Thor," she said, softly. Sam fist pumped and did a body. The two – in – one praise combo, Mercedes called it in her mind. She simply smiled weakly at him until he calmed down and noticed her mood was odd. "Are you really alright with Thor? Because I'm actually partial to he and Wolverine."
"Sam, you are free to decorate our child's nursery however you wish. That's not the problem."
"My ears are open," he said and sat next to her.
"The problem is that I have no idea how to balance being a mommy and being a successful singer. I've barely been able to be a wife and successful singer, now there's going to be another direction that I'm pulled in. It's overwhelming."
"Mercedes, our son is going to watch you all of his childhood and grow up thinking that you're a superhero. He's gonna be able to tell his friends who are cool enough to be in the know 'my mom is Madison Crowe' and MEAN it. And he's gonna hope to one day have a wife like you to mother his children. He's gonna give speeches at dedications to you about how much of a wonderful mom you were, even though you were a huge superstar. Know how I know? Because I'm gonna be doin' the exact same thing – bragging on you, like I do, now… but even more as the years pass." He kissed her temple, then her belly and said to it, "Marvel, if you make a liar out of me, there's gonna be some consequences and repercussions."
"You are SO crazy!" she squealed and burst into a fit of laughter. Then, she said, "I wanna show you something that upset me earlier, but don't get mad – because now it's funny." Sam stopped smiling and waited for her to search for something on her computer. She pulled it up and passed the laptop to him, giggling.
"This… bitch!" He said, as he looked at a photo manip from when he gave Mercedes flowers after one of her shows to look like she was carrying a tater tot baby.
"They ship you with the slim, sexy women and ship me with tater tots," she said. "I was mad, for about ten seconds, then I thought about how much power and control they allow me to have over their lives, that they take the time to think about me, even in absurd situations, such as having sex with a tater tot and being magically able to reproduce with one. That just killed me. I was crying laughing. Then, I googled Totcedes, Baby, I laughed so hard at the amount of energy I have these girls spending on me that I almost peed on myself."
"This ain't funny," Sam said.
"It'll be funny. Give it time and really think about it, Sam. They spend time out of their lives to do this…" She pulled up a heinous drawing of her actually having sex with a huge tater tot and blurted into a squeal of laughter, kicking her little legs around as she fell backwards onto the bed.
"Nope… not funny," Sam said, staring at the screen, now googling it, himself. It never became funny to him. He got up and left the room after signing off of her computer and setting it down. Mercedes got up and went to check on him. He really seemed upset, and she hadn't expected him to be so angry. She thought that they would have a laugh at the expense of the foolishness of others.
She peeked in to see Sam starting one of his web vids and eavesdropped. "Hey, fans and friends… I don't know how many people have seen this Totcedes crap on the net where really childish, racist, sizeist losers are trying to harp on what they deem to be flaws of my wife, but I just want to say that if I find out that any of my fans are participating in that type of body-shaming and fat-shaming, I'll disown you. I'll send to a personal, official letter of being disowned as one of my fans. And, by the way, ain't nothing wrong with loving tater tots. And there's damned sure nothing wrong with the way that my wife looks or how she treats me. I've had five damned years to get out of this, if it wasn't what I wanted.
The woman that I slapped a ring on as soon as I got the chance, the one that sleeps next to me every night that she isn't in my arms, the one carrying our child – I married her on purpose and I don't have the patience for people saying anything against her. She thinks it's funny, but let me say this – if I get you in my reach, your getting punched in the face. Even if you're a teenage girl… my little sister, Stacey will punch you in the face." Mercedes snickered from her hiding place and Sam looked over. "You're laughing. I'm about to post this sh*t," he told her.
"Sam, you'd BETTER not post that you're going to have a teenage girl punched in the face for what she puts on her blog."
"Should I reword it to 'I hope you get punched'? Or 'you should be punched'?"
"You shouldn't dignify that stuff with a response," she said as she came into the room. He held his arms out to her and she came to sit on his lap. "Besides, the media will take what you said and rip you to shreds."
Sam kissed his woman on the side of the head and told her, "Well, I love you more than anything, so IDGAF," and posted the video. She gasped and he winked at her. "Now, now… maybe it's amusing," he told her.
When Sam finally woke up, Whitney was there, reading a magazine, yet again. "You alright, Daddy? You were cussing in your sleep."
"I was thinking about something absolutely ridiculous that was happening when Mercy was pregnant with Marvel," he said.
Whitney shut her magazine and said, "What was it?"
"It was too stupid to even talk about. Where is Kelsey with your mother?" He asked. "I'm tired of taking naps to wait for her."
"You don't have to take a nap, Daddy. We can sit and talk… Remember when we used to do that?" She asked, knowing he honestly might not. They'd only had a few significant talks since she was a preteen.
"What do you wanna talk about, Whit?" He asked and yawned. Yawning shouldn't be painful, but as he stretched, everything felt tight and tense.
"We can talk about when Mama was pregnant with Marvel," she said. Sam loved talking about Mercedes and that should be some good memories for him.
Mercy was already a couple of months pregnant with Marvel when we got married, but nobody knew it but the two of us, our parents, Puck (because he was always at our place and Quinn figured it out. She was beautiful. Her skin was glowing, she had to change her diet and she was sick a lot, so she got smaller, even though her belly was growing. She got onto pregnancy workouts and spent time each day just rubbing herself with cocoa butter, afraid to get stretch marks and singing to the baby, not wanting to go a day without singing, so her voice would stay nice, since she wasn't sure how frequently she would be able to perform and record.
Her hips stretched and her chest and rump got bigger, so she was constantly trying to make sure she kept herself toning, because she'd lost so much weight, before and she didn't wanna gain it all back. Both of our careers were going really well. Marvel was our first, so we didn't know what to expect and Mercy ended up reading me a lot of pregnancy and parenting books, because she knew I wouldn't take the time to read them, but she wanted me to know everything that she was learning, so that we could work on parenting together, as a unit and not a tag team.
We made photo records and videos of every single thing that there was – check up's, pregnancy time line milestones, and events that we went to. When she was eight months pregnant, she had a pregnancy photo shoot, and must have taken thousands of photos. I was in some of them and some were even nude (tastefully nude, of course, you know). I released a magazine of it, from Borderline comics, and we made a KILLING on it, because no other magazine had photos of her pregnant, like that. I wasn't even initially trying to make money off of our pregnancy photos. I was trying to make her a memento. Of course, the one that I made her had a hardbound cover and was much thicker than the magazines that we pushed out. The things that we did for Marvel became tradition, though.
Both of us agreed that should we ever have any more children, we would be just as excited and eager to do all of the things that we did the first time, with all of you, because technically, it would be the first time, all over again. Each of you would be a new person and gave us new opportunities to do things that we so loved to do when we did them the first time with Marvel. We decided from the moment that we had our first official talk about becoming parents that we would never have favorites or treat any of our children differently than any others… (Whitney scoffed under her breath, but he didn't hear and she didn't point out the lie in that statement, but it wasn't true and she had several examples of why that were now not worth bringing up, anymore… especially considering that he'd forgotten every one of them.)
Of course, we couldn't do it all exactly the same, but we strived for the same milestones – first doctor visit, ultrasound party, writing songs for you, singing songs to you, reading to you, talking to you, me kissing Mercy and the baby hello and good night, scheduling photo shoots and planning out nurseries. We did Thor for Marvel and I mean, I went all out with that nursery. I had my Thor collectible stuff that Marvel wouldn't even be able to use or appreciate in there. It was absolute madness, Whit. (He laughed.) I would come home and try to dash past Mercy, before she saw me bringing something else in. She would ask me to see it, if she caught me and just stare at me with this affectionately annoyed look. She was the most beautiful thing ever, pregnant.
"Mama was the most beautiful woman that I have ever known," Whitney said.
"She still is," Sam said, nodding admirably.
The main difference between Marvel's birth and all of yours was that for the rest of you, Dwight Evans and Marvin Jones were BANNED from being in the room. They kept giving advice that nobody was asking for and trying to give me instructions that got me in trouble with your mom, repeatedly and bothered her so much that she cussed both of them out, more than a few times (and you know Mercy would never do that, otherwise.) Plus, Dad fainted and Marvin laughed at it, while the baby was being born and he turned to look at him on the ground and make commentary, instead of focusing the camera on Mercy. Luckily, he didn't miss Marvel coming out, but when he first looked at him, he says, "Look at the lips on my grandchild. This child will be teased forever for those lips." Mercedes tried to kick him and kicked a nurse instead, then the doctor put Marvin out of the room.
From the start, Mercedes said, "Aww, he looks just like his daddy, and I have no idea what kind of eyes a mother looks at her kid with, but I couldn't tell who the hell he looked like. He looked like a little bundle of perfect stuff and boy did we marvel, but the only trait that was actually noticeable to me were his lips, and he could've gotten big lips from either of us. But, his eyes were green. He looked white, when he was born, but Mercy said that even full black babies sometimes come out looking fair and that he'd most likely darken as he got a little older. He didn't get too dark, though. Even now, he has his seasons where he looks almost white…
"He never actually looks white, Daddy. His skin is a little pale, but you can always see that he's a man of color," she responded.
"He's a biracial man," Sam said.
Marvel surprised us, then a couple of years later, I had to prepare myself for the reality of Mercedes hosting Blaine and Kurt's first child. The four of us went to the meetings together with the doctor and did everything that was instructed to us. I love Kurt and Blaine and after spending two years with my own son, I could think of no greater gift for us to give them than a child of their own.
Mercedes took a break for her pregnancy with Andrew, because of course, Blaine and Kurt wanted to have every moment that they could with the formation of this child. That was the most time that your mother and I spent apart, regularly, because she lived in New York with them, at that time. I was there as much as I could manage, but I by that time, I was spearheaded to direct one of the greatest superhero trilogies EVER, which was based upon a comic book character fighting videogame – it was TRIFECTA. It was DC vs Capcom vs Marvel… and I was lucky as all hell to be selected to do it. I had to focus heavily on it. It pretty much became my new baby, while Mercedes was carrying someone else's baby. It took about seven years to complete the TRIFECTA Trilogy.
Marvel was two, when I started on it, and we bounced the poor boy around. Sometimes, I had him in California, and sometimes he was with your mom and them in New York. We weren't really sure how to make it all work for us, but we ended up making it work, fine. Although, I gotta say, he surely was at his best when the three of us were together, as a family. He surprised us, when he was conceived, but we planned D.C. and you. We were able to map out career trajectory calendars that correlated with and around both of you…which was your mother's doing, of course. I was more like – let's just do whatever is fun and do what we gotta do when we gotta do it, because we have money now and don't have to worry about a lot of details.
That wasn't true, because there were always outside sources of conflict. We're taking D.C. to the doctor when he was little because he had a respiratory problem and we have fifteen cameras outside when we're leaving, which sends him into an attack and we try to get him away from it and get his inhaler to him, and while Mercy's dealing with that, I'm punching the nearest camera man in the face for trying to actually get his camera into my vehicle to take a photo of my kid struggling to breathe.
"The price of fame can be a terrible thing," Whitney commented. "Marvel was like the perfect baby and the most beautiful child. He used to get all this recognition for being one of those baby products models and in all these ads and stuff. Then, DC got a lot of attention because he was so sickly when he was little. He always had a nurse there for him and Mama was always checking up on him, if she wasn't around. I felt a little lost in the shuffle," Whitney admitted.
"You were our first daughter. If anything, we spoiled you," Sam commented.
When Mercy realized that we were having a girl, she was SO excited. She had been wanting a girl, even though she loved your brothers very much, including Andrew, her family was a huge mass of males. She had two brothers growing up, she had two sons with me and even the baby she brought forth for Blaine and Kurt was a boy, and Blaine and Kurt were both guys, so she kind wanted to get into her little diva fee fees. So, you were like a godsend for her. I remember her whispering to me that night, "I finally feel like I'm going to have a kindred spirit." The boys loved her, but boys generally wanna be like their daddy… you know, if they've got a good dad, he's their role model. She wanted to feel that. You were perfect at making her feel that way, Whitney. You've always made her proud. (The tears formed in Whitney's eyes and she nodded her head. She wished that he knew how much this meant to her, but a huge portion of that was the fact that Mama was no longer in her life, only in her heart.)
"Did you plan Majesty?" she asked.
"No, but we found out about her almost immediately. I think Mercy was like two weeks pregnant or something when she found out. By that time, I was pretty high up in the comics world and had several movies under my belt – comics that they made into movies from my screenplays, three producer films and I'd directed the TRIFECTA Trilogy and the first major motion picture production of Zadyn. Mercedes worked for fun. She didn't have to do a damned thing, if she didn't want to… but she wouldn't have had to, either. She had made several hit albums by that time, and was always on top ten lists, won like several Grammies and was still performing and touring."
Mercedes picked up the toddler, Whitney and squeezed her. "You are going to have yourself a new little sister!" She told her. Whitney tried to repeat the word. "Mama's gonna have another baby and you'll have a sister."
Sam looked at Mercedes, "Did I miss something? What makes you say that this is a girl? I mean – I'm for it, I'm for whatever, but – you sound so sure, and it's still entirely too early to tell."
"I bet you she is," Mercedes said.
"How could you possibly know that?" He asked.
"She feels like a girl," she said, with a shrug. "And I think I'll name her Majesty."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa… you named our last two children. It's my turn, now!" Sam argued.
"WE named DC. You kept calling him DC, and I had to find suitable names to fit those initials… and I only picked the D. You made the C – Creed, like I wasn't going to know by now that you were naming my baby after Sabretooth."
Sam smiled a crooked smile and told her, "I love it when you name drop and sound like you know what you're talking about." He kissed her on the cheek and said, "And you just so happen to be right, this time."
"Sam Evans, I pay more attention to you than anyone else in this world. Do you have any idea how many useless facts about comic books I have retained in my head all because I heard them come out of your mouth?" He took her lips into his mouth and she pulled away, "Don't, in front of my little angel."
"She doesn't even understand what she saw," Sam defended.
"Yeah, all she knows is that she imitates Mama," she reminded him.
"Oh, hell no. I better never see anyone kissing on my baby girl like that."
"I once was someone's baby girl," Mercedes pointed out.
"You weren't my baby girl," he said and winked at her. "Now, hand her over, Mama." He took Whitney off of Mercedes' hands and said, "And you and Majesty go lay down. You've been on your feet all day." He pressed his forehead to his wife's forehead and told her, "And I have to protect all of my baby girls." She smiled against his lips and took his hand. Mercedes led her husband to his lucky chair and prompted him to sit. She took Whitney back and sat on him with Whitney nestled against her.
"We feel safest in your arms, Sam," Mercedes told him. He smiled and wrapped his arms around both, all three of them and Whitney latched on to his hands and fell to sleep against her mother.
"About a year after Majesty was born, I wrapped up the trilogy and Mercy and I were taking a break from work. We were just enjoying our past success and enjoying all of you. You all had already formed your personalities and were honing talents and hobbies."
"I remember you and Mama supporting everything we wanted to do. Some of our friends were so jealous because you guys always taught us to follow our dreams, no matter what they were." Whitney was about to cry when the doorbell sounded. Sam got up quicker than Whitney even realized that he could and rushed to the door. His daughter took that time to collect herself and control her breathing, then got up and went to the door to greet her mother and Kelsey.