Fifty Shades of Post-Partum
Chapter 49: Bedtime
"Now, Teddy," scolds Ana. "It's time for you to eat something other than starches for dinner. Look, Daddy is eating the macaroni and cheese with peas in it."
Ted has a very cross look on his face, to match his little arms crossed on his chest. He scowls at me because I am committing what he considers one of the seven deadly sins. At Shonda's suggestion, Gail added peas to the macaroni and cheese to get at least some vegetable in him. I can hardly taste them, but he is looking at the harmless green globes as if they are radioactive.
She wanted her to add some ham as well, but Gail decided that step might be pushing things too far. Personally, I like a little more flavor in my man food. And Shonda is right. The little man needs more protein if he is going to grow into a big man. Of course it was very easy for her to say that and then flounce off into the kitchen to eat with Gail and Sophie.
Phoebe is watching Teddy with interest. Shonda told Gail that rather than feeding her baby food, it is better to give her various kinds of adult food masked up. Her mashed peas look much more appetizing than the nasty stuff that comes out of jars. In between her own bites, Ana is feeding her small spoonfuls, which Phoebe appears to be enjoying.
I feel as if our family life is finally returning to normal. Teddy glowers at Phoebe who seems to be another traitor in the food wars. This is not going to be an easy transition. At least over the past month, Shonda has managed to help Gail improve his table manners.
I hope that she is seriously considering my job offer, despite her initial rejection. She reluctantly agreed to reconsider it, but only after I plied her with offers of college and graduate school tuition for her daughters. But she's so stubborn that I may have to bring Ros into the negotiations.
Once dinner is over, we take the children upstairs to get ready for bed. I am happy that Ana is willing to leave Phoebe in the nursery that we prepared for her. Taylor just had an intercom system hooked up that connects to our room, his apartment, and the security command room to the two children's rooms. Not that he or anyone else is going to come over to change a dirty diaper, but if something is wrong, all Ana has to do is call and someone will be there to help her in minutes.
Teddy is difficult to settle because he is still wound up from Ana's return and the dinnertime battle, but at last he is hunkered down in his train bed. He loves it, but thinks that the toddler bars are for babies. When we leave, we latch the toddler gate behind us. It is low enough for an adult to step over, but for the moment, it keeps Teddy in.
Shonda has warned us that it won't be long before he figures out how to climb over it, but we don't want to close the door. There is a second gate that he would have to pass through to get into Phoebe's room. My masculine instincts cringe a little as we enter her room, which for the sake of convenience and to sooth her injured feelings, Mother let Mia decorate. If there is something out there that could make it more girlie, I can't imagine what it is.
Ana and I stand beside Phoebe's crib watching her sleep peacefully. I look down, admiring my beautiful daughter. As she has grown older and her facial features have begun to individualize, I am pleased to see that she is growing into Ana's delicate beauty. However, as her eyes have lost their "baby blue" color, I have noticed that they are changing to a soft grey, like mine.
Phoebe and Teddy are an interesting contrast. Elliot teases me that Ted is a "mini-me" with blue eyes. It looks as if Phoebe will be another Ana with grey eyes. Even her hair is darkening into Ana's shade of mahogany as it grows in.
"So beautiful," whispers Ana, as she reaches down to softly stroke her cheek.
"Like her mother," I answer, kissing her cheek.
She looks at me as if she wants to disagree, but changes her mind
"Come," I say quietly, holding out my hand.
Ana reluctantly takes my hand and allows me to lead her out of the room.
"I've missed them so much," she sighs. "That's the worst part about being in the hospital, not knowing that they are close by."
I don't mention that before she went in, for the past six months, she has hardly ever spent any time with them. If she wanted to sleep (which was almost all the time), then she was hiding in our room. There is no need to encourage her to feel any guiltier than she already does. I had no idea that so many layers of guilt could exist in one mind. And although she has begun to peel them back, she has yet to tear them off and toss them away.
Unknown to Ana this morning, Charlotte had a long conversation with Bob Adams about Carla. Apparently, Carla has not been doing well since they left on New Year's Day. She has been alternating between anger and depression, and making his life hell in the process.
One minute she will rant about Ana's deep ingratitude for all the sacrifices that she made for her and the next she is in the depths of despair about the mess that she has made of her own life. She seems to forget that because of the ever-patient Bob, her life no longer is a mess.
I might feel sorry for her. Except for the fact that nowhere in her psychological torments has she accepted any responsibility for her own actions or considered what they have done to Ana. Charlotte gently counseled him to get her some help for her unstable moods. He said that he has tried, but Carla, unsurprisingly, is very uncooperative. And so far, Bob has not shown the necessary backbone to stand up to her.
But who am I to judge? How long did I allow Ana to carry on with her unhealthy behavior? How many hours did I suffer as I waited for her to return to her normal self as she spiraled ever downward? And how difficult was it to get her to finally acknowledge her issues? I find it much easier to feel sorry for him than for Carla.
Bob is a decent man. I recognized that about him from the moment we met. At that time, we were in the midst of the wedding preparations and he was looking at his wife indulgently as she tried to "help," but more often complicated things with her foolish notions. It could not have been easy for him to stand back as his wife took her place as mother of the bride alongside her ex-husband (another of Ana's stepfathers) who played the role of father of the bride.
Luckily for both of them, Ray and Bob share the same mellow, easy-going temperament that meant that there was never a moment of discomfort throughout the whole event (It was a plus that Bob is a fisherman). However, things have changed between Carla and Bob. Before they left, Mother told me that Bob was suffering under the strain of dealing with Carla and her erratic emotions. And Carla treated Ray to a good old-fashioned temper tantrum, which he took in silence. Evidently, those emotions have not stabilized since they returned home.
Charlotte learned from Bob that he knew the truth of the situation with husband number three when they were there. When he had met Carla in Las Vegas, she had told him that she had come to get a divorce from her third husband. She was an emotional wreck at that point, claiming that she had been abandoned by her daughter who didn't like the ex. Since Bob has very strong protective instincts, he felt compelled to offer her the shelter and comfort she craved.
Despite his age (he was in his fifties at then), he had never been married before. He had been very busy building his own small technical company. A computer geek from the time that mainframe computers were large enough to fill rooms, he was well ahead of almost everyone else in that revolution. In the right place at the right time, he developed a rather ingenious piece of software that made the laptop possible. After he patented the idea, he sold it to the highest bidder and shortly thereafter decided to retire for life.
It was at that point that he met Carla. He had never seriously dated before because he was so busy working for himself. Now that he no longer had to work for a living, he was filling his time with various leisure pursuits and casually looking for someone to share his life with. Carla appealed to him on some level that is incomprehensible to me. Until recently, she has amused him and helped him to cultivate the social life that he never had.
In addition to getting a wife in Carla, he had someone with whom he could develop a circle of friends, including other men who shared his interests. Now he had golf and tennis partners. He attended parties and other social gatherings. And he had a woman who happily spent his money creating the perfect home for him. But since December, that has all fallen apart.
Still, Bob is what Elliot would call "good people." Just because Carla is going through a rough patch, he has no plans to leave her. Before he would marry her, he insisted that she tell him the whole story about Stephen Morton. Naturally, she swore him to secrecy, which was why he wouldn't tell us anything when they were up here. It is hard to be angry with him for his loyalty to his wife. He would only discuss the episode after he found out that Ana had told Charlotte everything.
He isn't sure of what he can do about it. There had been a scene when they returned home after their visit a couple of weeks ago. It explained why we hadn't heard anything from Carla. She somehow has decided that Ana's illness is a betrayal of her parenting skills. Of course, we all knew that through the years they lived with one another that it was Ana who did the parenting. Carla's selective memory appears to have shifted into high gear.
We hadn't seen much of her since Teddy was born anyway. She doesn't like being a grandmother very much. It makes her feel old. It does no good to tell her that she was a grandmother at forty-three because she had been so young when she had Ana. And Ana's one successful marriage appears to her to be a condemnation of her own failure rate. If Carla weren't so comfortably well off with Bob, I am sure that things would be much worse. Perversely, she resents Ana's warm relationship with Mother.
So she has decided that she will not see Ana again until Ana is ready to apologize to her for blaming her recent illness on her. Her denial of her own mistakes is now bordering on delusional. Bob, demonstrating the patience of a saint, lives with a constant ebb and flow of crazy behavior. And he doesn't know what to do about it. Carla refuses to see a doctor.
Charlotte advised him to try to take her to a family physician for a well check up. At her age, she is due for some routine testing including a mammogram and a colonoscopy. Her hope is that any attentive physician would be able to pick up on her other symptoms. She wouldn't give Bob a diagnosis over the phone, but she suspects that she may be bipolar.
There is no doubt that because Carla has lived through a number of severe emotional traumas in her life, she is having some serious problems. It is perfectly understandable that she would have psychological issues stemming from them. Until Ana became ill and Charlotte began asking some standard questions about her family's mental health history, she had successfully buried all of her past problems.
Living with her for a number of years now, even before they came to Seattle, Bob had begun to suspect that she might have some form of undiagnosed ADHD. Her impulsive and erratic behavior, coupled with her inability to stick to one project for more than a few months was his first tip off. But her scatterbrained behavior that at first had seemed so charming and endearing is beginning to wear on him.
I understand his frustration, having just lived through a similar situation with Ana. She refused help because she was denial about her problems. It took one crisis to bring her to the realization that something truly wrong and then a second to compel her to take action. It has been a rough road for all of us, but we are finally on the way back. However, Ana is not Carla.
I am actually rather relieved that Carla doesn't want to see Ana in her present state. I am hoping that Ana has no desire to see her and won't for a while. Charlotte plans to counsel her to wait until she is much stronger before she attempts to make contact. There is no reason to tell Ana what is going on with her mother unless she asks directly. If she does, we won't lie to her. I doubt that she would be surprised anyway.
Ana and I return to our own room. It is still relatively early, but I can't wait to finally sleep in my own bed. Ana can't wait to take a bath.
"The shower in the hospital gets you clean," she comments. "But it is not very relaxing. I can't wait to soak in my own tub. Care to join me?"
"You know that you don't have to ask twice," I answer quickly.
While I undress, I hear Ana drawing the bath. Our bath "tub" has warm jets that we can turn on to create a Jacuzzi effect. It was my idea to install them so that we could indulge in the pleasure of a bath, while having the pulsing effect of a shower to loosen stiff muscles after long days at the computer, or a hard work out. I can see the steam seeping from the bathroom and the delicate aroma of jasmine from the foaming bath salts.
When I enter the room, Ana is waiting for me wearing nothing but a shy smile. I meet her smile with one of my own, and do my best to hide my concern as I look at her body. Always slim, bordering on fragile, she now looks thin in the extreme and frail. She is even thinner than she looked after our temporary separation after the belting incident. I don't like the way that her bones stick out of her neck and shoulders. I feel like I could count not only her ribs, but also the vertebrae down her back. Her hips look jagged.
It is a relief when the tub is finally full and she submerges herself in the water. As she does so, I turn on the jets and she breathes deeply.
"Ahh," she exhales, as she lets them pulse over her body. "Aren't you going to join me? There's plenty of room for two."
"I know that," I reply with a smile. "I believe that it was I who designed it."
Stepping in carefully, I sit across from, enjoying the jets that beat against my lower back. I can feel the stress of the day slipping away and the damp warmth permeates my pores all the way through to my muscles. Ana is blissfully resting back with her eyes closed. I even can't remember the last time I saw her so much at ease.
"Don't fall asleep," I tease. "I wouldn't want you to drown."
"I trust you not to let that happen," she answers, flicking back a spray of water in my face and then closes her eyes again.
I notice that she has her hair pulled up into a "gym bun" on her head, with a few tendrils clinging to her damp neck. That usually means that she doesn't want to get her hair wet. I decide to test how playful her mood really is. Before she knows what I am doing, I fill my hands with water and dump it over her head.
"Hey!" she says. "I didn't want to get my hair wet!"
"I know," I reply, widening my grin. "I just wanted to see your reaction."
"I'm annoyed," she says, but her eyes still look amused. "I really didn't want to wash my hair."
"No problem," I shrug. "I'll wash it for you."
Lightening fast, I grab her and dunk her head under the water. When I let her come up, she is coughing and sputtering.
"Are you trying to drown me now?" she asks outraged.
"No," I say virtuously. "I was just trying to wet your hair so I could wash it. Turn around so I can lather it up."
"I don't know if I can trust you," she grumbles, but turns around anyway, sitting between my legs.
I pick up her shampoo and rub it in so that I can massage it into her scalp. She groans in pleasure.
"That feels good," she purrs. "I forgive you for splashing me with water and dunking me."
"I was counting on it," I answer cheerfully. "I was hoping that you wouldn't make me sleep in one of the guest bedrooms because of a little water."
"Are you kidding?" she asks. "I've been looking forward to tonight for the last ten days. Don't think that all I want to do is sleep in that bed. And don't think that I want to do it alone."
"You better not," I growl. "I taught you everything that you know, and it wasn't only for your own self-gratification."
"Hmm," she says. "That feels good. I would say that you should go into business with Franco, but I wouldn't want any other woman to enjoy this."
"But think of business that we would do!" I ask. "How much do you think that women would pay to have their hair washed by the Christian Grey?"
"Not enough to make it worth your while," she shoots back. "Just stick to mergers and acquisitions, okay? Leave the hairdressing to Franco."
"Yes, ma'am," I reply obediently.
Things feel so normal, that I am wondering if the last five months in hell actually happened. But I also know that beneath the surface of her apparently happy mood, lie minefields that could blow up in my face at any time. I know that the wrong turn of phrase or nuance in tone could change her mood in an instant. At the same time, she doesn't like it if she thinks that I am treating her with kid gloves.
I pull her back again to rinse her hair and then she turns and she says, "Your turn!"
Willingly, I turn my back to her and she tugs on my hair to pull my head back into the water. Then I feel her fingers deftly working the shampoo through my hair and down to my scalp. It is very pleasant.
"It's been a long time since I have given Teddy or Phoebe a bath," she comments.
"You're not missing much," I grimace. "At least in Teddy's case. The one time that Gail cajoled me into bathing him, he got as much water on me as he did on himself. And does he really need so many bath toys?"
"Did you try to take any out?" she asks. "That definitely falls into the pick your battles category. It may seem like he doesn't even look at most of them, but if you try to take one out, he notices right away and then there's hell to pay."
"How did he end up running the house?" I ask.
"Only when you're not around," she says. "You were the one who told that he was the man of the house when you weren't around. It might be a smart thing to rescind that order."
"Sounds like it," I say thoughtfully. "Are you done playing with my hair? I'm getting a little bored in here. And since when have we turned into parents? You know, talking about our kids all the time?"
"Since we became parents," she says smoothly. "But you're right. I think that we should try to find a more interesting topic of conversation now."
"Any suggestions?"
"Well," she says. "At least one of them involves getting out of the tub and into bed."
"No arguments here!" I reply enthusiastically.
Once we get out, we dry each other off with the fluffy towels. Once again, I am reminded of how frail she is. She ate a good dinner tonight, and I know that she was eating well in the hospital. I only hope that she can keep it up so that she fills out again. I notice that when she is dry, she wraps herself in a towel and goes off to bed. Taking her cue, I put a towel around my waist and follow.
"Did you see Dr. Green while you were in the hospital?" I ask curiously.
"She gave me a shot five days ago," she says. "Two more days to go."
I grimace and pull a foil packet from the nightstand.
"I hate these things."
"Me too," she agrees.
"You can really tell the difference?" I ask.
"Of course," she replies easily. "Skin on skin is always better."
"I'm glad to know that you feel the same way," I say, as I slip in beside her.
I turn off the light so that only the nightlight off to the side is burning. I feel less urgency than I had in the hospital, probably because I don't have to be afraid that some smartass nurse is going to burst in on us in delicto flagrante. Ana's response appears tranquil at first, but it doesn't take long for her to become passionately engaged. I suspect that she was holding back in the hospital too.
When I am done exploring her, she begins exploring me, pushing me back down on the soft mattress and touching me everywhere. It is difficult to remember that there was a time when I couldn't bear even her touch on my back and chest. When she is done, she rolls back to pull me on top.
"I think we need that foil packet," she whispers.
"Your wish is my command," I answer, as I hand it to her.
Quietly we move together until we each find our release. Then, we turn on our sides so that I can pull her into my arms and surround her. It is not long before she is breathing evenly and sound asleep. It is only then that I realize that her hair is still damp. I feel guilty because in my eagerness, I didn't insist that I dry her hair. But her face looks so calm and peaceful that I can't bear to wake her.
Who would have ever thought that I could ever have derived such great pleasure from this most vanilla of vanilla sex? But beyond pleasure, I feel fulfillment. I suppose that my months in the desert have curbed my thirst for the more exciting aspects of our sex life. Now as I rediscover my wife, and I feel her returning to me, each encounter is more fraught with meaning.
Who cares if there are no toys or different positions to explore? She has returned to me from her self-imposed exile. There is intense gratification in knowing that my own wait has not been in vain. I think of the snide remarks of others who thought that I couldn't live without sex for any given time. They had it all wrong. It's Ana that I can't live without. How could I ever trade what we have together from some meaningless encounter to satisfy my "needs."
It is not the absence of sex that I have missed, but rather the absence of lovemaking. I have missed the deep physical connection that we have shared since the beginning. And even though she has been sleeping in my arms most nights, this feels different. She seems to be radiating a sense of joy that has been missing for so long. And for once, as I fall asleep, I am not afraid of what the morning may bring.
