1.06: You Oughta Know

While Joaquin was sleeping, I made a trip to the bathroom.

I made it to the toilet just in time, and kneeled over the toilet for a while, just dry heaving. Ick. To be, like, totally honest, I'd rather have barfed and just gotten on with it.

As I lay on my side, my mind started racing. It'd been three nights in a row of this shit, and a while since I'd last needed those tampons hidden under my bed. I couldn't be... could I? Joaquin and I hadn't exactly been careful. Only one way to find out for sure.

It took some digging around, but I found it. The directions were easy enough: pee on the stick and wait five minutes.

Three minutes. Two. One.

"Come on, come on, please..."

Positive.

Fuck.

I threw the stick onto the floor and sat down beside it. Just me and my thoughts for a moment. Thinking. Nearby, the sink spouted a perfect arc of water.

I wasn't ready to be a mom. Was I? I had a little food in my fridge and a roof over my head, but I couldn't afford a plumber to come out and fix the sink. Sure, kids have been brought into worse circumstances, but I didn't want to be selfish and screw a kid over before it got a good start in life. The garden was bringing in a little money, as was my job, but Joaquin didn't make much at his own workplace.

Joaquin. Shit. We hadn't even been together that long. We hadn't had the discussion yet on marriage or kids - did he want either? I mean, I knew my own stances on both of those things. I wanted both, yeah, but not this soon.

And not at all if it meant ending up like my mother.

Mom was...well, for six years, she was fine. A little neurotic, sure, but nothing too out there. Sometimes, she struggled with getting out of bed or taking care of herself, but that's why she had Letitia, my nanny. To make sure I was fine. But by the time I was seven, I'd noticed she clearly wasn't fine.

Something had snapped. Full crazy - talking to voices that weren't there, more paranoid then ever. She fired Letitia at some point - pissed Dad right off and I cried for a week. Mom spent a year in an institution in Sim City when I was nine. She came back two days after my tenth birthday.

I remember the check-ins; once a month, somebody came to check on her and make sure she was taking her medicine and all that jazz. She had to go back for a few months when I was fourteen and for a two-week stint just before my seventeenth birthday. And me? I hated her for it. I wanted a normal mom - someone to take me shopping and teach me about boys and braid my hair. Not someone who relied on a rotation of pills to get up and function and not have an attack every so often due to a screwed-up brain.

I wish I'd gotten to tell her I loved her. Because I did; I know now she couldn't always help it. Like, I get it - I was a shit daughter and she wasn't a great mom, but I know she wanted me to be happy and successful and she did it in the best way she knew how.

I shifted into a more comfortable position on the floor.

Joaquin didn't know any of that. I was planning on telling him - like duh, how does that not come up with a boyfriend? But I didn't think we were that serious, just exclusive. But with this new development, I guess that we'd have to have that talk too.