Bitch
(Brooks, M / Peiken, S) Performed by Meredith Brooks
I hate the world today
You're so good to me
I know but I can't change
Tried to tell you
But you look at me like maybe
I'm an angel underneath
Innocent and sweet
Yesterday I cried
Must have been relieved to see
The softer side
I can understand how you'd be so confused
I don't envy you
I'm a little bit of everything
All rolled into one
I'm a bitch, I'm a lover
I'm a child, I'm a mother
I'm a sinner, I'm a saint
I do not feel ashamed
I'm your hell, I'm your dream
I'm nothing in between
You know you wouldn't want it any other way
So take me as I am
This may mean
You'll have to be a stronger man
Rest assured that
When I start to make you nervous
And I'm going to extremes
Tomorrow I will change
And today won't mean a thing
I'm a bitch, I'm a lover
I'm a child, I'm a mother
I'm a sinner, I'm a saint
I do not feel ashamed
I'm your hell, I'm your dream
I'm nothing in between
You know you wouldn't want it any other way
Just when you think, you got me figured out
The season's already changing
I think it's cool, you do what you do
And don't try to save me
I'm a bitch, I'm a lover
I'm a child, I'm a mother
I'm a sinner, I'm a saint
I do not feel ashamed
I'm your hell, I'm your dream
I'm nothing in between
You know you wouldn't want it any other way
I'm a bitch, I'm a tease
I'm a goddess on my knees
When you hurt, when you suffer
I'm your angel undercover
I've been numb, I'm revived
Can't say I'm not alive
You know I wouldn't want it any other way
Back to the timeline of my life: Last time I wrote that my younger brother and his wife got married in October of 1997, and unknown to most people at the wedding, I was already pregnant with Mallory. Meanwhile at our house, Dave was working incredibly hard to get ahead at Maple Leaf - which, of course, I appreciated - but it left me mostly alone with a toddler and a growing belly; in a city that was convenient for Dave's commute, but removed from family support (and with a burgeoning inability to make new friends in a new city, I was mostly alone both physically and emotionally.) Hormones from the pregnancy couldn't have been helping my mental situation, but if you asked Dave at the time, with all of the pressure he was feeling to succeed at work coupled with my unhappy temperament at home, he might have tagged this as my themesong (but he wasn't doing much for my mental stability).
We only had the one car (we leased a used Pontiac Sunbird through one of Dad's contacts or we would have found it impossible to have a car at all), and for the most part, that was good enough - I spent my days playing with Kennedy at home and at the playground across the street from us, and I could get my shopping done on the weekends. My mother would drive up at least once a week to take us out to lunch and she would try to plan this around any doctor's appointments we might need to be driven to. We didn't have a family doctor yet - Cambridge was notorious for being underserviced at the time - so like when I discovered I was pregnant with Kennedy back in Edmonton, I went to the yellow pages to find an OB-GYN. I couldn't get in with the first two doctors that I called, so I wasn't very choosy when the third - Dr JM Harvey - was able to take me. I took a dislike to this doctor when I met him - he was old and cold - but I really didn't think I had any other options. He would turn out to be a terrible doctor for this pregnancy.
I remember that the first year Dave was with Maple Leaf, the sales team (of which he was a very junior member) had their AGM in Toronto. And even though this was close enough for him to come home after the meeting part, it was apparently expected that he would stay in the city for the after-party. I assumed that any "party" was optional and wasn't impressed that Dave didn't come home where I needed him. This second year, the AGM was held out in Whistler, and I was really not impressed that he got to go on a minivacation while I was stuck at home, mostly alone with a toddler and a growing belly. I knew that this wasn't actually optional for Dave, but I resented it while he was gone and was really turned off when he came back and said that it was crazy, with everyone getting out-of-control drunk and at least one unlikely couple (the man of which was married to someone else) hooking up in the hotel hot tub. What the hell?
Dave invited one of his best friend coworkers and his wife to come to our tiny home for dinner one night, and I was excited about that - we hadn't had a dinner party since we lived in Edmonton and I was just so desperate to make friends. I was big and puffy and as unsexy as a wife could be, so I was stung when, after dinner, Dave started talking about his acting days and he brought out a scrapbook to show Mark and his wife his handsome headshots and then turned the page to show them professional cheesecake photos of some old girlfriend of his in a Cabaret-like outfit/pose. Dave was wagging his eyebrows at Mark - hey, whattayathink? - and Mark and his wife both kept cutting their eyes at me to see how I was reacting to this, and while I think I was keeping my face neutral, I was skewered. Dave is certainly not a cruel or crude person, and I still have no idea what he thought Mark and his wife should have made of this, but this started my reluctance to have anything at all to do with his coworkers: If this is the way Dave acts in front of his pregnant wife, what kind of humiliating horndoggery goes on behind my back? If coworkers feel free to get wasted and hook up in hot tubs when they're away from home, just what kind of atmosphere was Dave spending the majority of his time in? All while I was marooned at home with no friends, very little help with parenting and housework, and being pregnant, feeling 100% trapped in my situation.
And I was mostly alone with the parenting - Dave (for us, I knew that even then) would be gone at least ten hours a day, and he usually wasn't home in time to eat dinner with me and Kennedy; often not home in time for her bath or bedtime. Kennedy was always a super happy child, but she never liked bedtime and she would need for me to lay down with her, read her a bunch of books, and then rub her back until she fell asleep. We tried only once to let her cry herself to sleep when we first moved into the townhouse and she finally had her own room, but it went on for too long and Dave and I both thought it was cruel to let her believe that she was all alone in the world; it never happened again and I don't regret the extra time and effort it took to help her to sleep. Her favourite book at the time was a Disneyfied Pinocchio, and while it was way too long and boring for me, Kennedy would always catch me if I tried to skip over paragraphs - she hung on every word, and eventually, insisted that if she had to have a little brother or sister, she wanted it to be named Pinocchio. On the other hand, when Dave would take a turn to help her sleep, he tended to skip the books and sing Elvis and Kenny Rogers songs to Kennedy - probably only in our house were In the Ghetto and Ruby (Don't Take Your Love to Town) considered lullabies (in case it's not clear, this is not a complaint; Dave is a great Dad and he connected with his kids in a way that made sense to him).
It was while I was pregnant with Mallory that Dave's boss, Greg, and his wife invited us over for dinner. They didn't live very far away from us and Dave really wanted to impress Greg, and when we got to their big, beautiful house, we understood that we were being given a glimpse of a future that was possible for Dave if he worked hard enough. Dinner was great, and Greg and his wife were both lovely and entertaining hosts, and as they had a son and daughter a few years older than Kennedy, the kids were all sent downstairs to play after the meal. We were having lovely adult time - Greg and his wife mostly telling funny stories about when they first met and were poor but happy - when suddenly, their son came up to say that they had a situation in the basement. We went down and discovered that Kennedy (at two) had taken off all of her clothes and had made a nest out of the couch cushions, stuffing the spaces between with an entire box of Kleenex. She was cosied all down in the cushions and tissues - so you couldn't see her nudity - but we were used to Kennedy taking off her clothes like this at home and weren't exactly shocked. Greg's son, however, was very embarrassed and we had to convince the nesting Kennedy to get back into her clothes. (This Greg would eventually leave his family for a much younger coworker, a curvy young woman who worked directly for Greg and whom he had been shagging on company retreats for years - it was this Greg who set the party tone for work events, and as he eventually proved, it was never totally just team-building or blowing off steam.)
Whether it was hormones or the actual stress of the situation, I know that being mad at Dave for trying to fit in and get ahead at work wasn't fair of me; I just needed more of him than I got - he was going out for lunches, having daily laughs (perhaps at my expense?) with coworkers, going on trips while I hadn't had any kind of vacation for years, coming home from work whenever he chose, and I was lonely, constantly caregiving for our child, and while all of my basic needs were met, I lived in a kind of poverty that Dave wasn't really experiencing. And maybe that made me a bitch. The final straw during this pregnancy: Mallory was due the first week of May, and at the end of April, the Rolling Stones were coming to Toronto. Because Dave really wanted to reconnect with his high school friends now that we were back in Ontario, and because they had been massive Stones fans back in the day, he decided it would be fun to invite them to go to the concert with him. Dave bought four floor tickets, with money we couldn't afford to waste, and gave them to his friends, Dave and Dave, and one to my brother Ken. I was so mad and stunned that I couldn't even complain about it. Dave showed me a pager he borrowed from work, and after arranging to have my sister-in-law, Lolo, spend the night with me, Dave assured me that if I went into labour, even if he was in the middle of the concert, all I would have to do is page him and he'd drive like crazy to get to the hospital. I assured Dave that if he intended to get so wasted with his buddies that he needed to stay overnight in a Toronto hotel, there was no way I'd be paging him. He refused to promise to stay sober enough to drive, so I promised him I wouldn't be paging him. Dave went to the concert anyway, I did not go into labour, and I was too mad at him to even ask him if he had fun when he eventually came home again.
My overwhelming feeling during this pregnancy was of being trapped - of feeling constantly abandoned and humiliated by a husband whose material support I needed; I was unhappy, yet had no option but to stay where I was. I vowed I would never be in this situation again, and that is one of the reasons that we only had two children. That's all unpleasant water under the bridge by this point, and next week will be about the happy result of it all: the birth of Mallory and the completion of our beautiful family.
