Sand Castles and Fairytale Endings
Part IV: Pink, Blue and the Colors in Between …
Author: Robbie (curlygurly87@hotmail.com)
Spoilers: Up through the Season 8 finale "Lockdown." However, bare in mind I might have taken some liberties along the way.
Archive: Ask and you shall receive.
Disclaimer: While I'd love to be able to lay claim to every character in the story, not a one really belongs to me. They are the property of the big shots at NBC, Warner Brothers, Amblin Productions etc …
Summary: Further insight into the events in life that helped to shape Abby Lockhart, from her POV.
Sara, my dear … thanks a ton and a half for going over this for me!
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It's funny sometimes to think about the silly little things that make the biggest differences in our lives. There are many people who keep things that most would consider junk when in their minds, these scraps of paper or moldy pieces of gum have such greater meaning. Isn't it every woman's wish to take her young, bright-eyed grandchild into her lap in a cozy rocking chair and drag out a cardboard box full of trinkets and gadgets that should have been thrown away years before but have some adverse sentimental value? And one by one, she'll pull out each scrap of paper, each tiny piece of contorted plastic or metal, and tell the sleepy child the story or memory stemming from a mere viewing of one of the objects.
Then again, there are also insignificant pieces of processed materials that, with the ounce of information they divulge, change your life permanently. For example, in my years working at hospitals, I've dealt with a forest's worth of paper. But each piece, as insignificant in the general scheme of things as it seems, divulged some fact or number that led to a diagnosis or a plan of treatment. Sometimes, it could be as simple as to alert a doctor of presence of a bacteria or virus indicating a common, curable cold. Other times, the slip of paper reveals a life-threatening cancer or debilitating disease that leaves the patient with nothing to do but wait for their inevitable and often impending death.
Of course, when you look at certain instances, the outcome of the newly disclosed information is all in the eye of the beholder. Such is the case I've experienced now, over four times. Each time, it all came down to a little piece of cold white plastic and the difference between two simple colors; pink and blue.
As I've found, the distinction in my current situation in life proved to make all the difference in reference to my feelings concerning the color that appeared on the little applicator stick. More so, the man standing by my side (or lack of) during the first viewing of the results also helped to color the feelings.
Fear.
Prime suspect in the investigation into feelings when viewing a pregnancy test. Also, not surprisingly, the overshadowing instigator of all more minor feelings of doubt, frustration, insecurity. Many times, the fear eventually gives way to a mind-numbing happiness, and euphoric excitement. But at other times, darker and unsupported times, the fear slowly grows, gaining nourishment from your insecurity and swiftly becoming a demon; sharp fanged and grotesque. The fear consumes you, influencing your behavior and decisions.
Such was the case that fateful evening when I found out I was pregnant with Richard's child. Things between us had been strained for months. He was busy with medical school, and I was struggling to pay the bills while at the same time battle with my ambitions to go to medical school and get out of nursing versus devotion to Richard's own ambitions. A baby was not the thing to repair a breaking marriage, as I'd witnessed first-hand with the birth of my brother Eric.
And, being the young and rash individual I was back then, I made the decision that seemed best. The decision that seemed the easiest and that would cause the least harm; damn the consequences.
I got an abortion.
Killed my unborn child, the helpless life created by me and the man who was my husband. The same man I'd promised to love and cherish, to honor with my word, and be with in sickness and health, sorrow and joy. But the fear that consumed me was too powerful, too overbearing and condescending.
It was swift and at the moment, painless. Over in minutes, I could barely utter an apology before the life of my child was cruelly and abruptly ended for eternity. It temporarily solved my motherhood issues, halted thoughts of a baby Maggie being brought into this world, into my life, under my care. At the time, I would never have guessed that the thirty minutes I spent in that clinic would mean the end of a marriage, and cause me a spiritual anguish so extreme, I craved physical pain.
Not a month after the abortion, still shrouded in a dark mourning my husband couldn't share in, I turned to alcohol and began the slow but sure descent into alcoholism. The guilt I felt was so strong, I couldn't bring myself to tell Richard. He lost the ability to get through to me, and soon stopped trying. To cure his own lustful inclinations, he began to turn to others, co-workers, women in bars, prostitutes, or anyone he could get his hands on.
We still lived together, sharing the same bed at night, but we were living in two separate worlds. I found that I couldn't cope with the overwhelming loneliness, and the alcohol gave me a blissful release from the stresses of my world. And Richard, obviously seeking the comfort I couldn't give him turned to other women.
We lived like that for around a year, skirting around our delicate feelings, never talking, never sharing anything with each other. He knew I was hurting myself with addiction to alcohol, and I knew he had yet to face the ramifications of his womanizing days. And yet … we lived together, under the false pretense that everything would work out eventually on its own. We lived under an umbrella of lies, deceit, and deception.
For the most part, he kept his other women away from me. I would find smudges of lipstick on his laundry, but I ignored it. Unaccounted for charges at expensive restaurants and hotels began to appear on our bills, but I made pitiful excuses for him and paid like the faithful wife I was. I didn't ask questions when I knew perfectly well that his shift ended in the early afternoon and he didn't show up at home until morning, reeking of the perfume of the woman he'd slept with.
But the last straw came the night I came from a long nursing shift at the hospital I was working at and found him in bed with some little blond bimbo with a chest the size of Pamela Anderson's. By that point, I'd had it. Twelve months of frustration, frazzled nerves, and anger poured out from mouth. I confronted him, he confessed, apologizing profusely and I left him.
Within in the next two weeks, I found myself an apartment on the other side of the city and left him the house and most of the furnishings. Not long after, I resigned my position as a junior ICU nurse at the hospital he was working at and found a brand new job as a nurse in Cook County General's Obstetrics ward.
I spent the next six months working up in OB, amid happy parents and their newborns. Despite the tormenting despair I felt, I was able to live vicariously through the delight they expressed. And for awhile, that was enough. I was finally on my own, doing a job I loved and I made myself believe it was enough.
As terms of our divorce, Richard was required to pay my way through medical school as I'd done for him. While picking up shifts in OB to make a living, that summer, I entered my first year of medical school, finally partaking in the dream I'd harbored since childhood.
And so, stumbling my way through the mundane activities of everyday life, I entered a new era of my life. My days were filled with anxious parents and the arrival of wailing newborns and the joy they bring. Nights were spent cramming for tests over steaming cups of coffee or frothy hot chocolate. Looking back, things were a blurred mess of activity, a hurricane of events where sleep was wedged in at random, inconvenient places.
Despite the chaos, and the struggle I faced opening my eyes every morning, it was another high point. Sometimes, that constricted feeling like I was fighting a loosing battle against a current that showed no signs of easing would overcome me. But I persevered, knowing better times were ahead. I got involved with AA to overcome my alcohol addiction and slowly muddled through life. Med school was going well, my social life was nonexistent, but things were going okay. I began a rotation in ER, totally oblivious that this would be my last rotation as a med-student.
A rotation filled with stress, tragedy, action, and a wagon-load of information and learning. It was during that rotation that I first met the people that I worked with for years after and who became like my extended family, though some more than others; and also the rotation that I experienced the trauma and grief of loosing a friend. A fellow med student, respected colleague, and beautiful young woman who's live was cruelly snatched away at the hands of a sick man's knife.
Lucy Knight.
After her death, my life suddenly didn't seem so bad. I was alive, living, walking, breathing, learning while her viciously mauled body lay rotting under ground in a wooden coffin. Her tragically short life put to an abrupt halt. She had her entire life ahead of her – med school graduation, a successful job, a husband, kids? No one will ever know what could have become of her spunky, cheerful attitude if she'd not gotten in the way of Paul Sobricki's knife that Valentine's evening.
If anything, suffering through that ordeal, though I was barely on a first name basis with anyone down in the ER, we grew closer together. I felt like I could talk to them, share a cup of coffee in the lounge with them, or even have lunch in the hospital cafeteria with a select few.
And before I knew it, things were changing rapidly around me. Carol Hathaway left Chicago to be with her fiancée and their daughters, whom I'd delivered in Seattle. Mark Greene and Elizabeth Corday had suddenly become quite cozy with one another and poor Luka took to brooding moodily around the place the moment Carol vanished. And I found John Carter, a man I felt tremendous respect and camaraderie towards, shooting up narcotics in an empty trauma room. And then we broke for summer, only for me to come back and find that my dead beat ex-husband hadn't paid my med school bills.
The anger I felt for Richard around that point in my life must have surpassed it at any other time. Sure, I was angry when he cheated on me with that blond bimbo, but I suppose I always imparted some of that blame onto myself for not trying harder to make things work between us or being a better wife to him. But not complying with the terms of our divorce agreement after I'd worked my ass off and put my own career on hold to send through school, that was positively the last straw.
The anger consumed me, burning up from my stomach like bile and leaving a sickly taste in my mouth. My hands shook, and my head spun and throbbed with all-powerful consuming rage. I took actions and said words so out of character for myself that it almost seemed that the essence of me had been removed from my body and all that stood in its place was an older, angrier, shadow of what I'd once been. And I told him so.
Not that it made much of a difference. When push comes to shove, he was still the same bastard I'd married too young for false love. The same pathetic excuses sprung forth from the same round, red lips in the same southern twang that I'd fallen for so many years ago. But now, far from turning me on, his words upped the temperature in my broiler and my rage exploded like a water balloon, covering him in its 'wetness.' I wanly wished for an oversized needle, its sharp silver glinting in the pale moonlight to stab into his inflated ego and permanently puncture and deflate it.
Only now can I look back on that time without contempt, without that listless ache in my stomach for that caliber of action that comes with being an MD. Because I know I'm good at what I'm doing. I'm happy being a nurse; it leaves me the time to be a mother to my daughters, ultimately he most important thing in my life. I know that my job is just as important as the doctors I work with, because while I answer to them and I'm constantly second to their authority, they only deal with the immediate medical problems of the patient before sending them on their merry way. But as a nurse, I deal with the person behind the medical problems; holding a trembling hand, smoothing a sweaty forehead, calming anxiety torn patients and getting to know their stories.
I don't get paid as much or receive as much recognition when someone is saved, but when I come home at night to my husband and children, it's enough to know that I've done the best I could and helped people. Doctors would be helpless without blur of behind- the-scenes action that is the team of nurses who really treat the patient. I'm satisfied to have helped and thankful for every day that I can walk out of the hospital on my own two feet and through the threshold of our lovely abode.
Over the years, I've become even more confident in my place in the general scheme of things. I'm a nurse today because I love being a nurse and helping people in the special way that only nurses can. I've also learned to forgive Richard for doing what he did to me. Everything seems to ultimately happen for a reason, despite the immediate, often negative consequences. Because I'm a nurse, I have more time for my family. Without Richard's negative input in that, I might today be doctor. Because he cheated on me and we divorced, I've found even greater happiness with my new family. But because we were married and at some time loved each other, I learned about making mistakes and have made sure not to let certain things happen this time around.
They say you only find love once in your life. But they're wrong. When I met Richard, he was everything I needed and more and I learned to love him dearly. And I would suppose that part of me still does. But the greater part of me has let myself fall totally and completely in love with my husband and I devote my all to him and our family.
This is the precise reason that I can't break the hearts of my daughters by explaining that their lives won't be as easy as the ones of Cinderella and Snow White. They have devoted their evening to their fantasy and built their sand castle with painstaking precision and care, despite the fact that the tide will eat away at it tonight and it'll be gone by morning. One day they'll have to leave the shelter of my house and my protection and go on with their own lives, learning by experience and by pain as we all must do.
My job as a mother is to protect my offspring, but in doing that I can't deny my children the chance to learn and experience things for themselves. Eventually they'll break free and fly with the wind. And for now, my job is to let them dream of the things that are to come. And that's exactly what I do.
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