Page 53 of Next Time Will Be Our Turn
Iris took in a sharp breath. I could almost hear her instinctive reaction, telling me no, but then she paused, probably flipping through the past few months. Recalling how much time I was spending with Hazel myself.
“Now that Parker’s being groomed to take over the clinic, I don’t have as many responsibilities,” I pointed out helpfully. “And I love spending time with Hazel. You’d be doing me a favor.”
“I don’t know…” Iris looked down at the stroller and bit her lip. “I feel terrible even thinking about going back to work. Andthe stuff I’m trying to do, there isn’t really a part-time option. It’s all or nothing.”
“I know. You’d miss her. I could bring her by while you’re at the office. We could have lunch together, the three of us.”
“Why are you doing this?”
I shrugged. “I love Hazel. And honestly, I don’t really know what I’m doing with my life, aside from taking care of her.”
Iris’s mouth thinned. She never liked that I wasn’t as ambitious as she was. That I could so easily fit into the Chindo wife mold, if I wanted to. “Would Parker be okay with it?”
“I don’t see why not. He’s hardly home in the day anyway, so as far as he knows, nothing much would change.”
As Iris nodded, I could see a tiny light dawning in her eyes. She was digesting my offer, considering the kind of life she could have. “Really?” she said after a while. “You really mean it?”
“Yeah.”
She stopped and hugged me then, and I tightened my arms around her. “I’m sorry I was always such a bitch to you,” she said.
“You were never a bitch to me,” I lied.
“Oh, I was. But it’s sweet of you to say I wasn’t.” Laughing, she linked her arm through mine and we pushed the stroller together, one hand each on the handle.
Iris started working that very night. She contacted a couple of people and told them she was ready to dive back in, and by the time she got off the phone, her face was as lively as I’d ever seen it. I was just finishing up a feed and was in the middle of burping Hazel when Iris said, “So, you’ll be okay if I go back to the office tomorrow?”
I nodded. The grin that took over Iris’s face made her lookall of five years old, which assured me we were making the right decision.
The next morning was utter chaos. Neither of us was ready for this. Iris went back and forth between shoving miscellaneous things into her briefcase and hurrying to Hazel and asking if we were going to be okay. I bounced Hazel on my hip and told Iris for the millionth time that we would be fine even as I thought:Oh my god, what am I doing?But I kept up a confident facade for my sister, ignoring the concerned, judgy glances from Parker. Parker disapproved of Iris’s decision to go back to work, but I wisely pointed out to him that the faster Iris got back on her own feet, the sooner she’d be able to move out. Of course I had no plans of encouraging my sister to move out, but I figured we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.
As soon as both Iris and Parker were out of the house, I stared down at Hazel, both of us looking a little stunned, like we were both thinking:Oh shit, now what?
“We’re gonna be fine, right?” I said to Hazel. Her face turned red and her cheeks tightened in a look of determination. “Yeah, see, you get it,” I said, a moment before she pooped so much that it blew out the sides of her diaper.
But you know what? Ignoring the diaper blowout, the rest of the day went by okay. At four months of age, Hazel no longer had indigestion, which meant she was no longer vomiting up all of the milk we fed her. And she was able to fit her little mouth around the bottle now, forming a better suction so the milk was no longer leaking down her face when she fed. All in all, dare I say it, she was a pretty easy baby. And I—as much as Iris hated the term—was a natural mother. It sounds creepy, I know, butover the next couple of weeks, I took to taking care of Hazel like a duck taking to water.
Everything I did with her felt like second nature to me. I took her to mom and baby classes where she plunged her chubby hands into sensory buckets and climbed all over a baby gym with other roly-poly babies. When people found out I was her aunt, not her mom, they were always shocked. “You look so much alike!” they’d exclaim, and I would smile and say, “She looks even more like her mother.” I sent Iris dozens of pictures and videos of Hazel. Hazel blowing bubbles, Hazel gnawing on her foot, Hazel napping.
One morning, after Iris had rushed out of the house, I was putting Hazel down for her morning nap when I looked up and saw Parker gazing at us. His expression was surprisingly soft, especially after the tension that had lurked between us since Iris moved in. I smiled at him tentatively, and he walked over and looped his arm around my waist. The one gesture alone was enough to make me weak-kneed. We padded out of the nursery, careful not to wake Hazel, and once outside, he grabbed me and kissed me long and deep, the way he used to in the first few days of our marriage. Then he swept me off my feet, quite literally, and carried me to our bed, where we couldn’t get our clothes off fast enough before devouring each other.
Is this making you uncomfortable, Izzy? Really, for a modern teen, you are very prudish. Look, all I’m saying is, your grandfather and I had a fantastic sex life. Well, sometimes, at least. Okay, I’ll skip to after.
Afterward, I lay in his arms and closed my eyes, not quite dozing, just savoring this rare peaceful moment with myhusband. When I opened my eyes, he was once again staring at me with that soft expression. “What?” I said, smiling.
“We could start having one of our own, you know,” he said, tucking my hair behind my ear.
The smile froze on my face. I thought to myself:Do not let it slip.“One of our own?” I said, trying to buy myself some time.
“A baby of our own.”
It took everything inside me not to roll off the bed and run out of the house. It wasn’t that I didn’t want a baby. You only had to look at my bond with Hazel to know I loved babies. It was that I didn’t want a baby with Parker’s family. Because I knew what a baby meant. It meant Parker’s mother and father would explode back into our lives, inserting themselves right into the thick of everything, controlling every part of the pregnancy and all the rest exactly the way they controlled the wedding. I’d watched enough of my friends go through pregnancy and motherhood to know that once you get pregnant in the Chinese-Indonesian community, your body is no longer yours, and once the baby comes, it is no longer your baby but the family’s baby. We hadn’t had to deal with that with Hazel because Iris was separated from Erik, and for that, I was secretly, selfishly, grateful.
“You’re so busy at the clinic though,” I said. “You’ve got all these amazing plans for it, plans that I believe in.”
“Yeah, but you’re so good at being a mom. I doubt it would affect what I’m doing for the clinic.” He said it with such confidence, like,Duh, of course a baby wouldn’t affect ME. Silly girl.
I fought hard to keep a neutral expression on my face. I was afraid that if I rejected him outright, he might turn around anduse it as ammo to get rid of Hazel. In the end, I said, “Let’s think about it. I want to make sure that I’ll be the best possible mom to our child.”
