The Other Side of the Pillow

Tevin was more excited than I had ever seen him. He was handing out cigars and you would have thought that the entire vascular unit had made a mass exodus from Sibley over there. The hallway near the nursery was flooded with people trying to get a look at the new prince. He looked like Tevin had literally spit him out instead of coming from my womb. I was definitely only the vessel. He had his miniature twin.

Estella sent me flowers but did not come anywhere near the hospital, to my knowledge. I appreciated that. While she and I could never be friends who hung out or talked on the regular, I was sure that her thoughts were genuine. I still had never revealed her daytime visit to Tevin and it was staying that way.

Adding to the chaos was a lot of my staff and faculty members from Medgar Evers. They were all over the hospital as well. One thing was for sure. TJ was going to have a lot of love in his life, several people claiming to be his godparents, and tons of gifts. Floyd and Tevin had made amends, even though Courtney had kicked him out of the house and filed for divorce. Both of them came to the hospital separately. Winsome also came by with her girlfriend. They were still going strong. I had also decided to try again with her, after getting Tevin to cosign on it. We both agreed that since she was not lonely anymore, she had no real reason to try to sabotage our marriage. Floyd loved Tevin, Tevin loved Floyd, Winsome loved me, and I loved Winsome. Bona fide, genuine love doesn’t simply die because everyone does not agree all of the time. People make mistakes. We are all flawed.

I had never gotten around to having a baby shower. I didn’t really want one, to be honest. I figured that we would get a lot of repeat items, which ended up happening anyway in the upcoming weeks, and I was too anal to go through the process of trying to do registries at various stores. Even though most offered online registration, it was still too much for me. Part of being a new mother was going to be making sure that everything was the way that I wanted. I was hoping for more gift cards and cash than actual gifts. We ended up getting a mix of the two.

After all of the excitement had died down on the floor and in my room for the day, I sat up in bed, trying to get adjusted to the staples in my stomach, and asked Tevin to hand me TJ.

He was holding him in a chair by the window, staring at him like he was a piece of gold.

He brought me the baby as I lowered my hospital gown, and then held him up to my breast. I was going to have to get used to producing milk. My breasts felt like concrete slabs. I was going to have to pump several times a day while I was in my office, once I went back to work in the coming months.

Tevin wanted me to take the remainder of the school year off. I was considering it but didn’t want to jeopardize my job in any way. He assured me that he could “manage” to get me a doctor’s report stipulating that I needed the time off for health-related reasons. It was a thought. Being able to spend the time with TJ until after Labor Day would be a blessing.

As TJ was figuring out how he wanted to latch on to my breast for dear life, Tevin rubbed his head gently.

“See,” I said.

He looked at me. “Huh?”

“Look at his head. His big-ass head. Could you imagine what would have happened to it if I had been forced to push it out the birth canal?”

Tevin chuckled. “I have to give you that one. It would’ve been a mess.”

“I love you, Doctor Harris.”

“I love you, Mrs. Harris.”

We both watched as TJ ate his dinner and then watched late-night television together. We were all looking forward to our next phase of life together. After all, it was a one-shot deal.

Comme

ntary by Zane

Originally, I had come up with at least three different titles for this book. I am not going to say them because they are pretty damn good and I may or may not use one, or all, of them at some time in the future. Like all of my books, I had a purpose in mind when I sat down to write it. Also, like all of my books, the story and characters began to take on lives of their own, and many of them morphed into different people.

In this case, when I started the book, Floyd and Courtney were not even on my radar. It was my intent to make this book about two people—Tevin and Jemistry—and concentrate solely on their “situationship.” But the picture became much bigger when I decided to address other issues that plague a lot of couples.

What this book really boils down to is “a conversation.” It is meant to be a discussion piece for couples, singles, and anyone who is interested in trying to figure out why there is often so much drama and strife in relationships. Why some people seemingly go their entire lives not ever finding what it is that most people crave: true love.

Despite what a lot of people try to make others believe—that they are fine being single and doing them—I am not one to buy it. Maybe it’s because I receive thousands of emails monthly from both men and women seeking advice about how to make love work for them. Maybe it is because I could never imagine my life with such an eternal void in it. Maybe it’s because my parents have been married more than sixty years and I realized at an early age that a healthy, nontoxic, non-dysfunctional household was actually possible if both people loved and respected each other enough to not only listen but to also comprehend.

So The Other Side of the Pillow is really a long-ass conversation piece. Instead of it being a nonfiction relationship book like Dear G-Spot, it is a fictionalized tutorial on how to communicate with emotional honesty, how to appreciate the difference between the ways that men and women view relationships, instead of fearing them, and how to either forgive or let go.

Too many people remain in unrealistic situations that have nothing to do with one party being good and another one being evil. They are simply unrealistic. Two people might be madly in love but circumstances will likely never present themselves that would afford them the opportunity to come home each night and fall asleep in each other’s arms. Two people might possess character traits that are not equally yolked and may tend to do things that are not acceptable in the world of the other person. One person may be lazy, while the other is ambitious. One person might think they are the shit while the other person believes that they are not up to par. One person might have a low sex drive while the other person wants sex several times a day. There is no right or wrong in those scenarios. They are merely unrealistic.

Jemistry signified the typical bitter black woman in the beginning of the book, to the point where I had her reciting a poem called “Bitter.” A lot of women have been overwhelmed, overshadowed, and overexerted by men that they attempted to love who could never truly love them back. The reasons for the men not being able to convert to what the women needed range from lack of knowledge to lack of emotions.

Jemistry was ready to give up . . . for good. But then when she least expected it, love walked right into her life in the form of Tevin. There is something to be said about not searching for love but allowing it to find you. Love was the last thing on her mind when she decided to express her feelings with that poem.

Now Tevin wasn’t actually looking for love either. He was on the mend, even though his marriage had ended years earlier. In his mind, he couldn’t fathom how he could be the total package that women always claimed to want: tall, dark, handsome, education, wealthy, and well hung, and yet be single. Sure, he could have dated women right and left, bedded them, and led them on. But that was not in his nature. He was a man who had never felt like conforming to whoredom because it was impressed upon most young men to do so. He had always yearned to be in a committed relationship and, as mentioned in the novel, he had witnessed the pain that his father’s infidelity had caused both his parents. That was not a road that he wished to travel.

So I created a rare man who actually expressed his emotions without fear of judgment. A man willing to cry over, willing to fight for, and willing to sacrifice some of himself for a woman he deemed worthy of it all. Too many times women say that they want a man who will do all of these things and then turn around and make them feel bad when they open up.

Twice in the past two months, I have seen that in action on my Facebook page when I posted a couple of advice emails in particular. One from a married woman who was prepared to cheat on her husband who was “99 percent perfect”—her words not mine—with a man who had six kids by five different women. He had found her sexting and had cried instead of punching her lights out so she was convinced he had to be on the down low. Ridiculous!

Then I received an email on the weekend that I actually completed this book from a husband who poured his heart out. As I type this, there are more than seven hundred comments and counting on that thread and a lot of people calling him weak and telling him to “man up.” Again, ridiculous!