When It Happens to You by Molly Ringwald Page A

her finger and rubbed it across Marina’s cheek, only realizing her gaffe when she saw the dumbstruck expression on her childless friend’s face.
    â€œOh! Sorry, honey.” Una laughed. “Mommy’s got baby brain!”
    Marina wanted no part of it. As soon as she escaped the mommy brigade, it took twenty minutes on the elliptical until she began to feel like herself again.
    And then for five long months, she watched her body metamorphose into exactly what she disparaged in her friends. The years that she had spent perfecting those twin lines down the sides of her abdomen, the delicate sloping inside toward her navel—she would have to say good-bye to these forever. At night, if she was really quiet, she felt as if she could hear the muscles tearing.
    Marina followed her obstetrician’s advice and ate the minimum amount required to sustain the life of what she viewed as the alien growing inside of her, but even with that, there was no stopping the ruthless expansion; once she hit the thirty-pound mark over her ideal weight, she stopped stepping on the metal-and-glass bathroom scale. She grew deeply depressed when she could no longer wear her own clothes, and yet refused to buy anything that she wouldn’t need again, thinking it wasteful. Her friends donated boxes of frumpy, drool-stained maternity clothes to her, which she thanked them for as she resigned herself to the ugly garments. Gritting her teeth, she avoided her own reflection and waited and waited and waited for the reprieve.
    And then, exactly on the due date, Marina woke up with contractions. Three hours later she was holding her seven-and-a-half-pound son in her arms, staring in awe as he snuffled around her breast and fastened on with a hungry little rosebud mouth. She had never seen a face so fine and symmetrical in her life. He didn’t look anything like her, but very much like the caramel-skinned surf instructor she had rolled around on the beach with during those last nights of her holiday. Her baby had a soft carpet of circles covering his tiny head, and gray eyes the color of pussywillows. He was the most beautiful creature she had ever laid eyes on, and Marina was shocked to find herself at the age of thirty-seven so deeply in love. She named him Oliver.
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    For the first few weeks, Marina was terrified that she would not be able to keep Oliver alive. Never had she had even so much as a plant to take care of, let alone a little boy. Growing up, her family had an outdoor dog, but mostly her father took care of it. Marina personally never had anything to do with the dog, and if her parents went away on vacation, they would hire a dog walker to come by each day, feed the animal, and give it a modicum of affection. This was so that they wouldn’t return to a situation, as they did the first time they had left Marina home alone, where the dog nearly starved.
    When Oliver was a baby, Marina found herself waking up in the middle of the night terrified that he had stopped breathing. She stripped his crib of any potential smothering hazards, getting rid of stuffed animals, pillows, bumpers, and blankets, but even with this precaution in place, Marina would find herself in his room night after night, camped out next to his crib, listening for the sweet inhalation and exhalation of his tiny lungs.
    And despite or perhaps because of her fears, Oliver thrived. Though not particularly hefty, he hit all of his developmental milestones and was thought to be an exceedingly healthy child. He was breastfed longer than most children and never exhibited anything resembling an allergy: peanuts, shellfish, soy, dust, dander . . . nothing threatened him. The only thing to which he demonstrated an adverse reaction was a haircut. Oliver screamed anytime a pair of scissors came close to his long, curly hair. The first two words he uttered in sequence occurred when Marina brought him to a children’s hair salon for his first