Chapter Four - Baby Blues.

Sidney

“Can you talk to him, Sidney. Please?”

Smiling, I snorted out a chuckle.

“Did you say please? Not Isaiah begging! This must be important to you,” I joked to my stepson. It’s crazy even saying the word ‘step’ because that’s not even how I saw it. Isaiah was just as much my son as my own child would be. He just had a different mother.

“It is important to me,” he stressed.

“Well, if it’s so important, I’m sure you can do it all on your own. You don’t need me to talk to your dad for you.”

“But he’s not listening to me.”

“Because he doesn’t like dealing with people who are all talk. He works with doers, not talkers. If you want his attention, start doing all that shit you keep saying you gon’ do. All of them boring ass business plans you keep leaving in the bathroom thinking he will mistake it for reading material—”

“I figured if he’s in there sitting for however long, he might want to read it.”

“Isaiah, that man ain’t trying to read nothing. He trying to take a shit!”

He started laughing.

“Yeah, you might be right.”

“I know I’m right. Trust me.”

That said, we exchanged ‘I love yous’ and hung up the line. With a sigh, I reached into the backseat and grabbed my duffle bag.

I was at the sports center that Yolo and I started for kids in the hood. Kids that reminded us of us. Young ones in love with sports and the extraordinary things the body can do. We worked with the most talented, and being that Yolo was a sports agent and we owned our own sports league, we were able to give those kids a real chance at going pro. The same NBA that wouldn’t take me or Yolo, now pretty much bowed to us. Between the two of us, we had the #1 men’s and women’s basketball teams.

He ran all that, though. My joy was working with kids, so I ran the center. It was the main reason I didn’t want any of my own. I didn’t feel like I needed them. Between Isaiah and the kids at the center, my heart was full.

“Mrs. Sidney, can I stay at your house again? Before our game?”

I held my hands out to catch the ball that Tiera was holding. She took a moment to correct her stance and then passed it. A perfect pass, straight from her chest. It was a technique we had been working on. Tiera was only five and was used to throwing passes over her head.

“Of course, you can,” I told her.

“As long as your dad is okay with it.”

The second I agreed, Tiera’s face lit up, only for it to shift the moment I mentioned needing to get her dad involved.

“He won’t let me,” she said.

“He never lets me do anything fun.”

“That’s not true,” I replied to her.

“He lets you come here. The bus drops you off here every day. And this is fun, right?”

Tiera’s eyebrows bunched together, and she shrugged.

“Yes, but—”

“No buts,” I said to her.

“Let’s not think about what hasn’t happened yet. Let’s just...”

I paused, cutting my sentence short. I felt a flood of something wet gush between my thighs.

“I’ll be right back,” was the last thing I was able to say to Tiera before I ran away, bolting towards the bathroom door.

For the past two years, Yolo and I had been trying to get pregnant. Over a year, the natural way, but for about a year, we’d been trying along with the help of IVF. The pressure was intense.

Every month, we played the waiting game, waiting for the day my period would start while also hoping and praying that it never did. It was maddening and after two years of the same song and dance, I really wasn’t sure how much more of it I could take. Yolo wanted us to have a child together. He wanted to keep trying. But me? I just wanted the entire process to be over and done.

“Oh no...no...no!”

Crumbling onto the toilet seat, I sat hunched over with the blood-tinged toilet paper still in my hand. Another round of IVF ended in failure once again.

“Fuck!” I yelled, punching my fist against the stall door.

This was type of disappointment that I wasn’t prepared for. But even though it was hard to deal with it, the one thing that I was struggling with was my guilt. I’d gotten pregnant once, a long time ago, when we were teenagers. My mom had forced me to get an abortion and I went along with it, even though I didn’t want to.

I should’ve fought more for what I wanted. I should’ve made her fall back. I should’ve loudly protested in order to save the life of my child. But I didn’t. I stayed quiet and silent throughout the entire process and now my punishment was that I couldn’t get pregnant again.

My eyes were stinging with tears when I dropped my face into the palm of my hands trying to force my emotions down pass the lump that was situated in my throat. I sat there for so long that my thighs began to numb. I was trying to quiet my thoughts. Waiting for the pain to go away, I didn’t budge, even a little bit, until the moment I heard knocks on the door.

“Mrs. Sidney? Are...are you okay?” It was Tiera. In my moment of complete and utter devastation, I’d totally forgotten where I was and that she was waiting on me.

“Yes, Tiera. Everything is fine,” I told her after taking a deep breath.

“I’m okay and I’ll be out soon.”

“Okay!”

And the next thing I heard was her running away.

She replied in the cheerful way that children who believe in you do. She trusted me enough to know that when I said it was going to be okay, it was going to be okay. If only I could provide that kind of reassurance to myself.

After cleaning myself up, I exhaled out a long breath and got myself together, forcing my emotions down so that I could be the person Tiera needed. With any luck, it would be enough to distract me from dealing with my own shit.