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

Mattie cried the entire time. Alan made light of it, crediting it to the fact that the baby’s infancy had thus far been spent in a basement apartment. “You’d cry too,” he told George and Nancy, “if you were seeing light for the first time!”
    Moving Up: Out of the Basement
    When Mattie was two and a half months old, Alan’s success was such that we could do something about our housing. We left the little basement apartment, with its calico curtains, old couch, dented mattress, and the brown shag carpeting.Now that we had some money,we could upgrade, so Alan located a beautiful brick home in the nicely landscaped, lovely neighborhood of Burton Hills in a very desirable area of town.
    The house belonged to Crystal Gayle, and she rented it out now and then. Our “yard sale” furniture would not look quite right in it, to say the least. “That’s okay,” Alan told me. “You just go and get stuff, whatever you want. We can afford it now.”
    We had not had the money to buy furniture or accessories before. I didn’t really even know what I liked—or, more important, what Alan would like. He had always made every major purchase, and I had always been happy with what he wanted.
    The very thought of taking Mattie to furniture stores while I browsed made me nervous. What if she cried incessantly? Would the store clerks think of me as a bad mother? I couldn’t control Mattie’s crying at home, so how was I going to be focused enough in a store to buy furniture? I began to feel more and more inadequate . . . and the longer I did nothing, the worse I felt.
    Moving day arrived, and Alan was on the road. His parents came to help me, and we arrived at our new home to find that the workmen who had refinished the hardwood floors hadn’t exactly finished in time. When I walked in, holding my screaming baby, the floors were still sticky with stain and gluey polyurethane.
    It was a last-straw moment. My husband was out every night, singing to screaming women who were throwing their personal clothing onto the stage . . . and here I was, without him, and we couldn’t even move into our home because it had glue-trap floors. I burst into tears.
    If Alan had been with me, we would have probably laughed about it and come up with a solution as a team. Without him, the floor problem felt like yet another sticky wicket I had to pass through on my own . . . and another daunting reality that was so different from my happy expectations.
    The floors eventually dried, and we moved in. Over the next few months, whenever Alan came home from the road, he was disappointed that I hadn’t made much progress with furnishing the house. He wanted me to be able to enjoy the new life we had always wanted.
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    MY GROWING DEPRESSION MADE ANY TASK SEEM ABSOLUTELY OVERWHELMING. SOMETIMES IT TOOK ALL MY EFFORT TO EVEN GET UP IN THE MORNING.
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    My depression made any task seem absolutely overwhelming. Sometimes it took all my effort to even get out of bed in the morning. Since our move, I had lost Donna’s wonderful support, and Mattie was a huge challenge. And now Alan—ever so capable and confident—was hoping for me to take pleasure in our lovely but intimidating new life. I was so down on myself that even though he wasn’t trying to control me, I felt like he would second-guess every choice I made, so I didn’t make any choices at all.
    Alan did everything he could think of to lift me out of my dark valley. He took me on an idyllic trip to Hawaii, encouraged me to get whatever help I needed. He desperately wanted me to feel better.
    â€œNisey, you’re going to be all right,” he’d say. “You can have everything that you want now,” he’d say. “We have a beautiful new baby, my career is going great . . . why can’t you be happy?”
    I asked myself the same questions. I felt like there had been too many changes too fast.