It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [122]
Still, when it came to leaving the band, it wasn’t about Axl. I just had new challenges on my mind.
Unfortunately for both me and Axl, more than a decade passed before we ever spoke a single word again. It’s sad, but the history of GN’R is so fraught with barbs and accusatory hand grenades that complete separation seemed to be the one and only answer for a while—for such a long while, in fact, that it seemed we might never meet again. I was just too damn exhausted from living on a razor’s edge for so many years. I didn’t regret the choice I made, but I eventually did wish we could still have been friends and have gotten together once in a while.
Susan and I went to see our doctor when she was two weeks overdue. He said he was going to make us an appointment to go into the hospital the following morning so they could induce labor.
Whoa!
Okay. We’ll just go home, pack some things, and get a good night’s sleep before we go and have our child the next morning. Yeah, right. We packed our stuff just fine, but the sleep part did not happen. We were way too excited. And ridiculously nervous.
When doctors induce labor, they introduce a drug called Pitocin into the mother’s bloodstream. Of course, they have to use the right amount at the right time to get the best results. In Susan’s case, however, they must have used too much because she went into sudden, acute labor.
Okay.
Shit, no doctor yet? No epidural? No spinal block?
Time to practice what we had worked on for the past few months: the meditation.
“Just look into my eyes, babe,” I said, “and stay with me.”
Easy for me to say.
Susan showed me through fifteen excruciating hours of labor that she owned the warrior spirit of ten men. She powered through all that pain and confusion. I know she was more scared than she had ever been in her life, but she never quit and never cried.
And then it happened.
Our daughter.
My daughter.
My baby girl.
I have a baby girl?
I have a baby girl!
We named her Grace.
Now life made sense. This was why I had survived my pancreatitis.
This was why I had survived my waterskiing accident. I was here to be the father of a baby girl, and I was, at last, ready for it.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Susan and I basked in parenthood. I learned to swaddle Grace, and I came to relish soothing her on my shoulder during those cool autumn nights in our quiet new surroundings.
Our dog, Chloe, had not only settled into the new house but had quickly made a new bed right underneath Grace’s crib. Just as she had gone everywhere with Susan while she was pregnant, Chloe now stuck close to the baby all the time. As Grace grew into a toddler, Chloe would gently play ball with her. It was astounding to watch them interact.
I decided to take another course at Santa Monica Community College—an intro-level business class. My decision to continue to take classes thrilled my mom, whom I was talking with even more now that Susan and I had a baby. Mom and I had excited discussions about the possibility of my going to college—not for a course or two, but for a degree. Her Parkinson’s disease greatly limited her physically, but her mind remained smart as a whip. My uncle John had told me many times that my mom was the smartest kid in the family, and that in another era she would have gone off to college and become a doctor or lawyer herself.
Thank God I didn’t have much work to do just then, because school ate all my nonbaby time. I didn’t know how to use Word or Excel. I had to learn rudimentary computer skills on the