Read Online It's All About Him by Denise Jackson - Free Book Online Page A

Is she straight enough, is the sun in her eyes, is she cold, is she hot, is she wet, is she hungry? She made it home to our basement apartment in much better shape than I did.
    Tears and Fears
    As a teenager I’d never done babysitting, and as the youngest in our family, I hadn’t helped to take care of little siblings. I realized—belatedly—that I knew just about nothing about the care and feeding of babies.
    Cherie helped unload all the stuff that we had accumulated at the hospital. We had all kinds of pamphlets on child safety, choosing a doctor for your baby, tips on breastfeeding, postpartum depression, and a thousand other topics that I had never had reason to think about before, but that now seemed quite important.
    All four of our parents had driven up from Georgia the day after Mattie was born. Alan’s mother and daddy offered to stay with me until Alan returned from his trip that weekend. Alan’s mother prepared meals and took care of our little house so I could tend to Mattie. I was like a nervous cat. I could not relax, even though Mattie seemed content to eat and sleep. I stood over her bassinet, watching her anxiously.
    Stress and Sleepless Nights
    At least the feeding part went well. Mattie took to breastfeeding right away, and by her two-week checkup she was thriving. But during the third week, I began to notice that she was crying more and more . . . particularly after she nursed. I made sure that she was burped adequately and that everything else was fine, but she would cry and pull her knees up to her little chest in a fetal position. It was clear that her stomach was hurting.
    When I made a call to one of my friends with three daughters who had survived infancy (along with their mother), she informed me that Mattie had colic. In the months that followed, I acquired a tremendous amount of advice, both solicited and unsolicited, on how to relieve colic. Mothers, grandmothers, professionals, and strangers who stopped me on the street all gave input about Mattie’s condition, and I could have written a book. Oh, wait, I am writing a book. But not about colic. Never mind.
    Unfortunately, nothing helped. By now all the relatives had returned to the peace of quiet Newnan. Alan was out of town, working at least four days of each week. It didn’t take long for me to think that I had made a big mistake, or at least that I was the most incompetent mother in the world.
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    IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG FOR ME TO THINK THAT I HAD MADE A BIG MISTAKE, OR AT LEAST THAT I WAS THE MOST INCOMPETENT MOTHER IN THE WORLD.
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    Alan was always a smart thinker and a good problem solver, but he would get so distressed that the baby was crying—and that he couldn’t relieve her pain—that I felt like I needed to take her away, out of his hearing. It was almost a relief when he and his band would leave town on Thursdays.
    As the weeks dragged on, we resorted to anything that might possibly help. We put Mattie on her stomach on top of the dryer while it was on, at the suggestion of a friend who had heard that the warm vibrations would soothe a colicky baby’s stomach. It might have distracted her for a moment, but it was no solution. We even tried running the vacuum cleaner near her after someone told us that that had helped her infant. The vacuum helped our rugs, but not our baby.
    The only temporary solution came from above. My friend and our upstairs landlord, Donna Thompson, would come down to our basement apartment after she arrived home from work. Donna was an angel in disguise: she would bring a hot meal; insist that I take a warm, relaxing bath; and take Mattie outside, far enough away so that I could not hear her crying. That short intermission from the howling did more for my soul than Donna will ever know.
    One night we were invited to dinner at the home of country great George Jones; he and his wife,Nancy, had become wonderful friends. It was a lovely evening—except that