When in Doubt, Add Butter Read Online Free PDF Page B

Cal would forever haunt me and keep me from giving as fully to the child as I wanted to. This was a human being, a person—boy or girl, eventually man or woman—that I was being granted temporary custody over, to guide in life toward whatever he or she would be. Sure, genetics mattered. They existed and potentially had implications for health and heredity, but that was just the physical. That had nothing to do with the soul, or with the true essence of the person who was being formed.
    This baby was no more Cal than I was.
    This baby was … Well, I didn’t know who the baby was. But I wanted to find out. To take that emotional journey for the next sixty or seventy years together.
    I was ready.
    Or so I thought.
    Then, in the blink of an eye, it all changed. Things went wrong: I lost my job over something stupid and found it difficult to find another because I was pregnant. My mom was as supportive as she could be, but her anxiety problems were increasing and I felt her detachment as clearly as if she were encased in ice. My memories of the time involve a lot of her sitting on the couch, smoking cigarette after cigarette, shaking her head. I knew I couldn’t live a suspended childhood in her house myself and raise another baby. This wasn’t a crazy TV movie where Baby Tender Love came to life and I had to step up until the spell could be reversed; I had to get it right from the beginning. Losing my meager income made me realize that if it was that difficult to get a job while pregnant, how was it going to be trying to get work when I had a child to take care of?
    How much did day care cost versus the minimum wage I was earning? How could I get a job that would pay enough for me to cover day care?
    And what about college ? I had always planned on going to college. A college degree was as expected in my family as a high school diploma. I was an only child, and thanks to my father’s life insurance policy, my mother had saved enough for me to go to, and live at, a Maryland state school, and she offered me the option of using that money toward another school if I preferred, with the understanding that the responsibility for the rest—whether grants, loans, scholarships, or whatever—was my own. I was expected to succeed, not just exist. I wanted to succeed, not just exist.
    So when I had a child, I wanted to be a great example for him or her to do the same. With my lack of experience and job marketability, it was easy to imagine being the clichéd single mother—exactly like my own—working to death at a low-paying job, too tired to play, too spent to contribute meaningfully to my child’s development.
    As much as I wanted it, there was no way to truly make this work.
    The veil was lifted, so to speak, and I realized with deadly clarity that I had been living in a fantasy world. I was a seventeen-year-old kid playing house like a six-year-old, with an imagined baby and no husband or father around. That idea had its place as the game of a child, but in reality, I was barreling forward, fully intending to raise another human being in a life that would inevitably be defined by struggle from day one.
    For months, my future visions had involved rocking a baby and playing Santa Claus and other idealized Disney Channel movie moments, but very little reality.
    Reality was grim.
    So with the kind of certainty people usually describe as “a religious moment,” I decided that if I really loved this baby, I had to give him or her up for adoption to a family that could provide everything I would want to provide myself but never could.
    My heart was broken. The decision itself gnawed a hollow inside me that I didn’t think would ever be filled. Knowing I was doing the right thing, the best thing, was some comfort, but it didn’t do squat toward helping me imagine a future in which I would ever have peace of mind.
    I was just going to have to wait that out and hope for the best. Hope that time would heal, the way so many songs