Sledgehammer Cathy was measuring large for her dates with her third pregnancy. She and her husband and two toddlers were living in a small three-bedroom house, and this third pregnancy was entirely unplanned. Eventually, when the tape measure just refused to lie to me, I sent her to the hospital for an ultrasound, strongly suspecting twins. She was five months along by then, but she looked more like seven or eight months. She’d been wearing maternity clothes since the tenth week, but we had been trying to convince ourselves it was due to the fact that she’d given birth to her son less than a year ago. She and Don, her husband, chatted as the tech squirted gel onto her abdomen, and then they quieted down as the blurry images showed up on the screen. Quickly, the tech confirmed our suspicions: “Yep, here’s one baby, and there’s the other one.” As the couple was absorbing this shocking but not entirely unexpected news, the tech said, “Wait…” Cathy and Don became catatonic, however, when the tech then said, “Well, there are three of them.” Stunned into silence, they left and began driving home. As they passed a car dealership at the side of the freeway, Don swerved into lot and hopped out of the car. Cathy just sat and stared out the side window thinking, thinking, thinking… ‘Five kids under the age of four…’ When her husband returned with a yellow receipt in hand and said, “I just bought a van,” Cathy didn’t say anything. Dinner was quiet that night. The two toddlers didn’t understand the enormity of the information their parents had shared with them, but they knew something was different, and they, too, were uncharacteristically quiet. At the end of the meal, Don cleared the table, wiped two little grubby faces, and went out the back door. A few minutes later, a terrific BANG-BANG-BANGing shook the house, and Cathy ran to the TV room. She stood in the doorway, staring at her husband, who had already created a sizeable hole in the back wall of the house with a ginormous sledgehammer. “What on earth are you doing?” she shouted. Without breaking his rhythm, Don said, “I already bought us a bigger car. We’re going to need to add another bedroom and bathroom, at the very least. And I need to work off some stress. It just feels like starting demolition immediately is the right thing to do.”
Posted on: Sat, 05 Jul 2014 22:41:26 +0000
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