Frontier Follies Read online

  He also turned the tables on me last spring, as we were gearing up for our respective forty days. “Hey, I have an idea,” he said. “How about you give up coffee? Then we’ll both be in the same boat, caffeine-withdrawal-wise.”

  I couldn’t believe he would try to interfere in my faith in such a way! I mean, Lent is between me and God. The nerve of some people.

  What Do You Do with Girls?

  I married a man who grew up with two brothers on a male-dominated cattle ranch, and when our first baby was born, it took a few moments before he could grasp that the baby was a girl. So certain had he been that his first (and second, and beyond) child would be a masculine child (to quote Luca Brasi in The Godfather) that it was completely evident to me that he hadn’t even considered the alternative. We were one of those rare couples in the mid-nineties who didn’t find out the gender of our babies before they were born, so it was indeed a complete surprise . . . but in this case, it might have helped soften the shock if he’d found out about it a few months before. His surprise was surprising to me, because Ladd had always been very good with numbers. But somehow that whole fifty-fifty gender probability thing hadn’t even registered with the poor fella.

  Now, I would not in any way suggest that he was disappointed. Our baby Alex was healthy and the birth experience had been a blessed (if slightly messy) moment in our young marriage, so Ladd was first and foremost grateful. But I could tell how much he was trying to process the sharp turn his life had just taken. A firstborn . . . daughter? He’d never imagined such a phrase—such a reality—for his future. I studied his face as the nurses cleaned Alex’s newborn body and checked her vitals, and for a moment I thought someone might need to check Ladd’s vitals, too. I didn’t recognize this perplexed look on his face.

  My mom and sister came in a few minutes later, and we commenced oohing and aahing over the sweet little nugget in my arms. Since I was preoccupied with the ladies in my life, Ladd wandered out to the waiting room to call his parents and tell them the news. They were out of town (Alex had arrived a week before her due date), and he wanted them to know as soon as possible. After he told his mom the bullet points and she expressed her excitement, there was a long pause on Ladd’s end of the line. When Nan pressed him on whether he was okay, Ladd asked his mom a simple, direct question: “What do you do with girls?”

  He was being completely forthcoming and honest about what was on his mind and in his heart at that exact moment (a quality that would hold true over the coming years). Ladd was the youngest of three brothers and had spent his childhood working on his dad’s ranch and reading Spider-Man comics in his pockets of spare time. His buddies came out to the ranch and fished along the creek, and he poured himself into football and wrestling as he grew older. His siblings were guys, his friends were guys, his college roommates were guys . . . so except for the occasional female cousin or love interest in high school and beyond, he never hung around (let alone lived around) girls or women beyond his mom, whom he did love and admire very much. But let’s just say there were no tampons in his bathroom growing up. No perfumed body lotion or lipstick lying around. And definitely no bras on the floor.

  I think bras on the floor was exactly what Ladd pictured (and feared) now that he knew he was officially the father of a daughter. Bras on the floor, bras hanging from doorknobs, bras swinging around a ceiling fan, bras under the sofa cushions. Bras everywhere, as far as he knew! Ladd understood how to dwell among guys; he could handle that. He just had zero experience at all in the girl/bra realm. I know this isn’t necessarily unusual with many men who’ve grown up largely around their brothers and friends . . . but in Ladd’s case it was highly amplified. As for the ranch, he had no clue how a girl would fit into his world there—saddling horses, wrangling calves, feeding cattle, preg-checking cows, hauling hay, and fixing fence, all of which require a unique level of strength and skill and guts. Could girls even do all that?

  When Nan later told me about Ladd’s call from the hospital after Alex was born, I asked her how she answered him when he floated his desperate “what-do-you-do-with-girls” query. Her answer was so perfect in its simplicity that I still think about it and try to picture the exchange in my mind: “The same things you do with boys,” she told her son.

  There’s nothing like a mother’s advice.

  A couple of years later, when I was pregnant with our second baby, both Ladd and I figured it would be a boy and nicely round things out in our household. Ladd’s Luca Brasi “masculine child” side had a faded a bit, and when the baby turned out to be a girl, he threw up his hands and completely surrendered to the process. Ladd had both of the girls on horses at a young age, and he took them along with him when he worked on the ranch, showing them the literal and figurative ropes. He bought them little Wranglers, little boots, little Carhartt coats, and little deerskin work gloves. While it would have been so much easier for him to wake up in the morning and head out the door sans kids, he woke up Alex and Paige and taught them the fine art of getting out of bed before 5:00 a.m. “I don’t want ’em to get too used to sleeping in,” he explained, fully serious. They were four and two at the time.

  The truth is, he loved having the girls with him when he worked on the ranch. They surprised him with their willingness to jump in and do all the things he was doing, even if they were squeamish or scared. The girls were sweet to the cowboys, they loved the animals, and they never minded getting filthy, as evidenced by the condition of their clothes, faces, hands, hair, and nostrils when they got home with Ladd after work. The laundry told quite a story . . . but there was something more, and I could see it in the interaction between the three of them. The girls were tender. Tough when they needed to be, but never afraid to grab Ladd’s cheeks with their sweet palms and give him a smooch on the lips, even if he had a hot branding iron in his hand. More than once, after they were tucked into bed and Ladd settled onto the couch for the evening, he’d shake his head, look off in the distance, and say, “Man, I love those girls.” He was bitten by the bug, to be sure, and was totally on board for his girl dad role.

  So smitten was he that when I finally, at long last, gave birth to the masculine child he always wanted . . . he didn’t even care. Well, he cared . . . it’s just that gender no longer mattered to him. The same was true when our baby Todd was born a couple years after that. Yeah, they’re boys, okay—fine. Yada yada. He was excited for our family to grow, he just didn’t care about the boy-girl thing anymore.

  Throughout their childhood, even after the boys were old enough to join the cattle working activities, Alex and Paige excelled at ranch work. The boys were fine. “They try hard,” Ladd would say with a chuckle. “But man . . . those girls are good help.” The cowboys confirmed this—especially as the girls moved into their teenage years. Cattle workings on the ranch just went smoother when Alex and Paige were there, as they seemed to know intuitively where to be and what to do, without much direction or instruction. On the ranch, Alex and Paige were essential workers. Suffice to say, they didn’t get that from their mother.

  When Alex’s high school graduation rolled around, both the joy and the pain in the house were palpable. We were a homeschooling family then, and since Alex had attended a co-op in Tulsa, her ceremony consisted of just twelve students who shared the co-op with us. This made the whole event very special, as parents of each student joined them onstage and said a few words about their kid. People were eloquent and composed, and even Ladd and I were both fine . . . until it was our turn to get onstage and begin to speak. I went first, because I’ve had more public speaking experience than Ladd, but I couldn’t get past the first word (“Alex”) without choking up. Brave Ladd saved me by taking the mic, and he turned to Alex and spoke from his heart.

  He told his oldest child, his firstborn daughter, how proud he was of her—how hard she worked, how kind she is, how much she has meant to him over the past eighteen years. I was sobbing by now, and Alex had tears in her eyes, trying to hold it togethe
r. He went on and on, describing her strongest, best qualities and encouraging her to follow her heart and dreams. It was so darn sad, I could hardly stand it. But then, as Ladd was wrapping up his sentiments, I noticed his bottom lip begin to quiver. “Oh, God,” I thought, gripping the stage floor with all ten toes. “Please don’t let Ladd cry. The world will never be the same.”

  Ladd Drummond—the cowboy who’d grown up in a male-dominated ranching world—did begin to cry. He cried openly, onstage, in front of a hundred-plus people. He cried because his heart had broken open some eighteen years earlier, when a creature called “girl” had unexpectedly entered his life. And now it was breaking open again. He cried because, like me, he couldn’t believe she was moving on to college, and to whatever life had in store for her beyond that. He cried because he would no longer be able to share the bond of the ranch with her on a daily basis.

  Which brings me to his line at the end of the graduation speech. “I love you, Alex,” he said in almost a whisper. “I think you’d make a top hand on anyone’s ranch.”

  I started crying harder, but I also started laughing, which was a nice excuse to leave the stage immediately. Snot was dripping from my nose and I couldn’t see through the tears. It was one of the sweetest, most hilarious, most devastating things I have ever heard . . . and three years later, he did the same thing at Paige’s graduation.

  God sure gave that cowboy exactly what he needed.

  Twenty Interesting Things About Ladd

  He can’t get in bed without taking a shower first.

  He’s never had a sip of coffee.

  He can feel a crumb in bed from 1993.

  He can bench three hundred pounds.

  He’s never smoked a cigarette.

  He went gray at twenty-three.

  He dated his wrestling coach’s daughter in high school.

  He can’t stand lotion.

  He’s scared of the dark.

  He’s never had a glass of wine.

  He loves movies based on Jane Austen novels.

  He retains every word he reads.

  He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible.

  He likes to watch the boys’ football games alone in the press box so he doesn’t have to talk to anyone. (He analyzes every play.)

  He can fall asleep anywhere within five seconds.

  He has never tried a recreational drug.

  He loves Spider-Man.

  He likes to read.

  He doesn’t hunt.

  He weighs the same as he did in college.

  (And Ree!)

  (I like to shower in the morning.)

  (I ingest gallons per day.)

  (I could sleep in a bed of crumbs and never notice.)

  (I can’t do a push-up.)

  (I smoked Virginia Slims in college.)

  (I had a gray hair once and plucked it.)

  (I can’t top that.)

  (I have thirty lotion bottles in my bathroom.)

  (I long for the dark.)

  (No comment.)

  (Me, too!)

  (I skim and miss 70 percent of the details.)

  (I only read the parts I like! Ha ha.)

  (I like to be in the stands with cowbells and orange pom poms screaming and cheering with the other moms! Go Huskies!!!)

  (I have to wind myself down for thirty minutes.)

  (No comment.)

  (I love murder documentaries.)

  (I love murder documentaries.)

  (Oh deer! Me neither.)

  (No comment!)

  Motherhood

  Pride, Prejudice, and Epidurals

  My first childbirth experience went off without a hitch. I began having contractions at home around midnight, then implemented the ironclad procedure I’d drilled on for months: I hopped in the shower, shaved my legs, dried and curled my hair, then put on plenty of makeup and a cute outfit that included a sleeveless denim maternity jacket with embroidered flowers, bless my 1997 heart. Then I woke up Ladd, who’d been clueless about both my contractions and my inappropriately excessive grooming, and we headed to the hospital an hour away. A few hours later, our baby girl Alex was born. Some two years later, Paige, our second child, entered the world without incident . . . albeit not without stitches. (Ow, that smarted.)

  I received epidurals with both my baby girls, not because I’d planned to do so ahead of time, but because I had no choice. In fact, I’d never dreamed my body was capable of being overwhelmed by such profound discomfort until I experienced the sensations of labor. It wasn’t even pain. Pain is definable and quantifiable, and I actually would have preferred sharp, stabbing pain over the misery I was experiencing. Labor, for me, was an all-encompassing, mind-numbing, total-body level of incomparable suffering that’s quite impossible to put into words. It was like I entered “bad cramps” into a Texas Instruments calculator, then multiplied it by one million and pressed the equal sign. My pre-childbirth “Pfft, how bad can it be?” assumptions were very quickly replaced with moans, groans, and, ultimately, panicked pleas to the nursing staff to end the torment and give me anything they had, absolutely anything—or just knock me over the head, whichever would take effect faster. In both of my first two childbirth experiences, once the nurse sat me up and the anesthesiologist inserted that blessed epidural needle into my lower back, I was able to live again and stop regretting the day I ever met Ladd. It was such sweet, sweet relief.

  In the months that followed the birth of Paige, it slowly began to gnaw on me that I hadn’t been able to resist anesthesia during labor. This was made much worse by the fact that both Hyacinth, my best friend, and Missy, my sister-in-law, had given birth to their babies with no anesthetic assistance at all. What the heck? I wondered. What was going on? I was a tall, robust, slightly weird but emotionally stable, moderately tough, bona fide country woman by now—why had I not been able to rise to this challenge? Why couldn’t I withstand the pain of labor when centuries—nay, millennia—of birthing mothers had done so before epidurals came along? Why had I caved? I was stumped, defeated, and annoyed . . . and while I was grateful for the good health of my two girls, the navel-gazing side of me needed answers.

  I researched and examined all possibilities while the girls took their naps, because it was much more fun than doing laundry. The first internet suggestion I stumbled upon was birth order: Did the fact that I was not a firstborn sibling in my family of origin increase my chances of waving the white flag during labor? Great, another middle child issue for me to stew over. A second theory was that women who can’t endure the pain of labor and wind up giving in to the relief of anesthesia do so because they are carrying excess emotional pain from their childhood and the cumulative load becomes too much for them to bear. But considering I had grown up eating Cocoa Puffs, watching Gilligan’s Island, and roller-skating around my neighborhood, I immediately ruled that out. There were yet other suggested factors, from the mother’s astrological sign, to the baby’s astrological sign, to the barometric pressure at the time of birth. I was about to give up and go throw a load of whites in the washing machine when I saw a new piece of information that immediately piqued my interest.

  “Redheads Require Increased Anesthesia,” read the headline, and here was the skinny: A new line of scientific thought was emerging that suggested that redheads were of a specific phenotype that seemed resistant to typical levels of pain-numbing meds. A certain mutation that happened thousands of years ago not only caused an absence of pigment in the hair, but also seems to have made us gingers more sensitive to pain. So from dental work to childbirth, redheads were now found to feel pain more acutely and require higher levels of analgesics. This was a revelation. This was awesome! Not only was this redhead theory a possible explanation for my utter wimpiness, it also meant, more important, that this whole thing totally wasn’t my fault!! I couldn’t wait to tell everyone, especially Hyacinth and Missy. Never mind that they had likely spent approximately zero seconds obsessing over the chasm between my labor pain approac
h and theirs. And while I wasn’t certain more babies were in my future, this working theory at least gave me a scapegoat for my past anesthetic failures. It also offered a workable solution for the future, if I were to lose my marbles (or have that second margarita) and get pregnant again: I would simply dye my hair dark brown before my due date!

  Just kidding.

  Three years later, through a chain of events I’m not going to get into, I did get pregnant again. And while I was plenty busy with my two young daughters, I managed to find time during the third trimester to give myself regular epidural-avoiding pep talks, which of course was much easier than signing up for a Lamaze class, where they taught actual proven methods for avoiding epidurals. But I lived in the country, and the truth is, I guess I didn’t like signing up for things. (I still don’t.)

  In an ironic twist, Hyacinth, my best friend and labor pain nemesis, wound up appointing herself my cheerleader once I confessed my years-long resentment of her dumb, stupid natural childbirth talents. Annoyingly, not only did she not judge me at all for having had epidurals, she told me that every childbirth is different and I shouldn’t ever put pressure on myself to have any specific outcome. This infuriated me further. Still, I asked her to please be in the delivery room with me when I gave birth this time because I couldn’t possibly do it without her. I mean, Ladd was invited, too, and all . . . but I was absolutely resolute. I wanted to give birth without an epidural, and I needed my best friend in order to do it.