made mistakes, too. “I wish now I’d tried to compromise with Darcy instead of pushing to have a child right away. I should have waited.” Easy to say in hindsight. At the time she hadn’t seen any other course of action open to her.
“Why didn’t you?”
“I panicked when he said he didn’t want another child ever. That made me feel I had to convince him now or I’d lose all possibility of having a family.”
“That sounds horribly familiar. Hang on.” Tessa whined in the background for something to eat. “I’d better go.”
Emma said goodbye and carried Billy to the nursery and laid him on the change table. He continued to cry as she peeled off his sleeper and wet diaper. “Shh, it’s okay,” she ground out, unable to muster even forced cheerfulness. “Soon you’ll be dry and fed and you’ll be happy. Please be happy. One of us should be.”
Dispassionately, she went through the motions of caring for her baby, but the truth was, her heart wasn’t in it. It wasn’t only the breastfeeding that had gone wrong. He might as well be a stranger’s baby for all the love she felt. If only she could breastfeed him properly, she was sure the bonding would come. And the joy. At the moment she wasn’t enjoying Billy at all. She felt guilty for not being a better mother and guilt made her resentful.
He wasn’t an easy baby. And she hated not being her usual self-sufficient, capable self. Nor did she like asking her sister and her friends for help. Everyone thought she was this amazing superwoman—student, nurse and mother.
Marge had offered her services, anytime. She and Roy had come to see the baby in the hospital, but there’d been no contact since. Emma felt badly about that, but how could she call on Marge when she’d cut Darcy out of Billy’s life?
Darcy hadn’t even come to see his son. That hurt, even though it was her fault he’d stayed away. She’d been so adamant she would do this on her own and he wouldn’t be involved. So she certainly couldn’t call on him for help.
Which was fine because she could handle this. She sat in the rocker in her bedroom and put Billy to her breast, wincing at the pain as he tried to latch onto her cracked nipple. He gave up after a few seconds and cried harder. “All right, damn it. I’ll give you a bottle.”
She went out to the kitchen, fighting tears, and prepared a bottle, grabbing an apple from the fruit bowl for herself. These days she didn’t even have time to shop for groceries or eat properly.
Billy took the bottle with no problems, the little sod. Emma stifled a yawn even though it was only five o’clock in the afternoon. Her books and laptop on the desk taunted her with the work she should be doing. If this had been Holly, she could have put the baby to bed for a nap and had plenty of time to do her term paper. Billy was completely different in every respect to Holly.
The rest of the evening was a blur—feeding, bathing and changing Billy again. Emma ate toast and peanut butter because she was too tired to make dinner. Finally she put Billy to bed and sat at the dining table to work on her paper.
Around ten o’clock she was rubbing her eyes, more than ready to call it a night. Maybe, just maybe, tonight Billy would sleep through. No sooner had she thought that than he started to wail. Like clockwork.
She hurried into the nursery, flipping on the Blinky Bill koala lamp on the dresser. Billy’s scrunched face was red and angry, his little fists clenched and waving.
“Shh, sweetie, it’s okay.” She scooped him up and positioned him over her shoulder, ready to begin the hours of walking the apartment. Nothing she did seemed to help. He would nurse greedily, then cry some more. Sometimes he threw up everything he’d eaten, making him angrier than ever and hungry all over again. Emma was worn-out.
In her dressing gown and sheepskin slippers, eyes open only enough to see where she was going, she paced a well-worn route from Billy’s room, past the stack of library books three weeks overdue; through the living room and the piles of clean laundry waiting to be ironed and folded; past the dining table, where flowers were rotting in the vase; into the kitchen, where dirty dishes and takeaway food cartons were piling up