His First Wife

This plan worked with perfect precision, just as my mother had promised. One of her best friends got her husband to let me work at his office and I volunteered at my church, packing toiletries and Bibles to give away to the homeless. It felt good. I was making my own money (it wasn’t a lot) and I honestly felt smarter, more experienced, and more mature than I did the year before. I was ready to be accepted and take the next step in my life. I was a grown woman and I could stand on my own two feet. I’d show them that in my statement of purpose. I’d have the grades, raise my MCAT scores, and have some life experience. While the MCAT scores didn’t go up that much, I was still confident. In fact, I was so confident that once again, I only applied to the top five schools. Surely, they’d see me differently this time, surely they’d give me a chance to contribute to their schools all that I had to offer.... Surely, I was dead wrong.

It seemed like it took about a day for the schools to start rejecting me again. I wasn’t exactly hurt when I got the first letter. It was a fluke. Some hate-filled receptionist had sent me the wrong letter by mistake.... But by the time I got the last letter, I was a wreck. No one even bothered to wait-list and then reject me this time. There were five no’s and one sad me.

I showed up at a romantic dinner Jamison had been planning for months (anticipating an acceptance) with my eyes so swollen that one of my contacts popped out onto the table. I couldn’t stop crying and Jamison, who’d already gotten his acceptance to Cornell Medical School but had decided to put it off to stay in Atlanta with me until I left for med school, was trying his best to cheer me up. “Are you sure being a doctor is what you want?” he asked uneasily. “I’m just saying, I believe in you, that you can do it, I really believe that, baby, but sometimes the universe has a way of showing us what we really want.” I wanted so badly to scream at him and tell him he’d had some nerve saying that. I was meant to be a doctor. It was my dream. It was written on the piece of stationery. I wanted to say all of this, but I was tired and kind of feeling like he was right. I wanted med school, but sometimes, late at night when I was lying silent in my old bedroom that my mother had turned into her gift-wrapping room when I left for college, I’d wonder how it was going to help me get closer to what I wanted to really do . . . whatever that was. I enjoyed being with the patients at the medical office, but the doctor seemed so tired all the time, worn out and stretched in so many directions. I wondered if I could do that. If I wanted to do that with my life.

“I don’t know,” I said to Jamison that night. I just kept crying and shaking my head.

“Maybe that’s someone else’s dream,” he said, his eyes moving quickly from me to his plate.

“Whose?” I asked.

There were two things Jamison and I tried not to speak about in our relationship. The first was his mother. She hated me because Jamison put off medical school to stay in Atlanta with me. And the second was my mother. She hated Jamison because he wasn’t from any Georgia name she could recognize. He’d gone to Morehouse, but it was on a full scholarship. And while he was clearly a smart man destined for success, this just wasn’t enough for my mother. “Title entitles,” she’d always say, advising me to find a man whose last name carried weight in the traditional Georgia movers-and-shakers circle.

“Maybe you’re so stuck on the doctor dream because of your mother,” Jamison added. I was speechless. Of course, I’d toyed with the idea of this before. My mother was somewhat of a control freak. She was a master manipulator and since my father got ill, I was her project. It could be overwhelming sometimes, but mostly it felt good. She was usually right about the advice she gave me and thus far my life had been perfect because of it. It was a lot of pressure, but the way people looked at me, the way I felt about myself, made it all wor

th it in the end. “We’re the winning team,” she’d always say. “The best pearls of the dive.”

That night when Jamison and I got back to his place, he made me promise that I’d get some real help to work through all of the emotions I was feeling. I’d never been rejected before, and it had to be hard. If he couldn’t help me, I needed to talk to someone (besides my mother) who could help me get things into perspective. While I wasn’t exactly excited about what he was suggesting, I felt so down I was sure something was really wrong with me that I couldn’t fix, and I wasn’t about to ignore it. So, instead of telling my mother about the new set of rejections, the next morning I called a random number in the yellow pages and went to see a psychologist.

Like Jamison, my psychologist seemed to keep coming back to my mother whenever we started getting to the root of what he called my “obsession with perfection.”

“You carry too much weight,” he’d say, pushing back in his old, sweat-stained leather office chair. “No one can breathe under all that weight. Lighten the load.”

After three months of biweekly therapy sessions, Dr. Bellinger gave me the best advice I’ve ever received concerning my mother. His words would get me through the next eleven years as my mother continued to try to rule my life and allow her own to spin out of control.

“Stop letting her surprise you,” he had said. “Stop setting yourself up to be hurt by her disappointment and letdowns. Accept your mother for who she is and expect nothing from her other than what she commonly gives.”

It was like the Daughterhood Bible had finally been translated into my language. Something in me slowed down, while something else sped up. For the first time in my life, I was able to tune out my mother and tune in myself. While most of my thoughts sounded like hers, at least they were coming from my own mind. I could hear her, but I fought with everything I had not to let her drown me out.

I supposed I should’ve heard Dr. Bellinger’s wise words in my ear when I was walking toward the waiting area of the jail. While I’d stopped seeing him years ago, “Stop letting her surprise you” might have come in handy when I expected my mother to be there on the one day of my life when I needed her most. I was about to give birth and had just gone to jail for hitting my husband in front of a home that belonged to the woman he was having an affair with. I wanted my mother to be there for me. Therefore, “Stop letting her surprise you” would’ve been the perfect phrase to have pinned to my brain when I walked into the waiting area and this was not the case. Sitting in a little, red, plastic chair was . . .

“Marcy?” I called, fruitlessly scanning the room for my mother. My heart sank in shame.

“Kerry!” She jumped up and ran toward me with her arms wide open, concern on her face. I was a bit perturbed that she wasn’t my mother but also very happy to see my best friend. Marcy had the kind of “girl-next-door” beauty that was hard for most people to see. She had soft, delicate features like a baby. A little button nose, chubby cheeks, and perfect pouty lips. Her complexion was clear and her skin was the light brown of a perfectly toasted croissant.

“My mother . . . I thought she was coming,” I said, accepting Marcy’s embrace with the little bit of arm space I had due to the baby.

“She called me at my job.”

“Your job?”

“She said she was on her way out of town and that she needed me to get you,” Marcy said. I was beginning to feel angry, but my body was so drained that I was just happy someone had come to get me.

“I’m sorry—” I started.

“No,” Marcy said, clasping my hand in hers to stop me. “This is not about that. You needed me and I’m here. You don’t need to be any more upset than you already are, so let’s let that go.” She took the small bag that held my belongings and led me to the car. She said Jamison called her too and said he’d be waiting at the house.

“He’s there?” I asked, standing beside Marcy’s car.

“Yes,” she said. “But you don’t have to go there. You can come home with me. Whatever you want to do, I’m here.”

I sat back in the seat and covered my face with my hands. I didn’t want to see Jamison. I wasn’t ready. I started crying again and this time the tears were coming from a place of fear I hadn’t yet felt. I was literally falling apart. Everything I knew to be true about the world and the life I was planning was about to topple over and I had not one unswollen leg to stand on. I wanted everything to disappear and to have my life back. If I couldn’t have Jamison, then I didn’t want his baby. And if I couldn’t have my baby, I didn’t want to live. It was too much and I couldn’t keep pretending I was strong enough to make it. I was afraid of being a single mother. I didn’t have whatever those women in jail had. I wasn’t raised to be strong alone. I needed my husband. I wanted my husband.

“Kerry, I know it’s hard. And I’m here for you for as long as you need me. You hear me?” She was crying now too. “Neither of us expected this from Jamison, but it’s here and we’ll get through it together.”

Marcy started the car and because I didn’t want to go home to see Jamison, we decided to go back to her place, so I could freshen up and get some sleep before her daughter Milicent came home from school.

“I meant what I said before,” Marcy said, turning onto her street after listening to me sob the entire way there, crying about how stupid I felt for being married to and impregnated by an adulterer. “You’re not stupid because no one would’ve ever thought this would happen between you and Jamison. Not the way you two began.... I was there and it was like the two of you were meant to be together. He was crazy about you.”