Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [116]
“Have you been to a doctor yet?”
“We can’t find a doctor who takes Medicaid. This week has sucked.” Angela. sighed. “Todd’s being such a jerk. I’ve hardly seen him. He says he’s busy at work, but he’s been at Holly’s house. She’s the mother of his little girl.”
Angela told me that Marie’s kids had chicken pox. Her dad was bitching about money. Todd’s car needed a hundred dollars in repairs and that made him crabby. She’d been throwing up in the morning.
I asked how she felt about having a baby, and for the first time that morning she smiled. “I’m happy about that. I’m glad I’ll have someone to love.”
We spent the hour talking about her pregnancy. Angela had a project that she was interested in—being a mother. She loved looking at baby clothes at Goodwill and talking about pregnancy with her friends. She no longer felt so inferior to girls who stayed in school. She had something they didn’t have. I’m glad we had a happy session because the next time Angela came in Todd had broken up with her.
Angela’s eyes and nose were red from crying when she told me the news. But by then she was mostly mad. “How could he be such a jerk? He promised me that he’d stay with me.
“He called me last night and said that he was moving in with Holly.” She wobbled her head sarcastically. “They need him.”
She continued. “I hate men. All the guys I’ve dated have turned out to be assholes.”
At the end of our session she reported some good news. “I found a doctor and I haven’t had a smoke in six days.”
We talked about relationships in later sessions. Angela realized that after her folks’ divorce she’d been looking for love. She fell for any guy who told her she was pretty. Because she gave herself so impulsively and easily, she was hurt frequently. She grew to expect rejection and a part of her wasn’t surprised when Todd left her.
“If you take a little time, maybe you could find someone who would stick around and make you happy,” I said. “Could we at least set some criteria for what needs to happen before you have sex with a guy?”
“Like what?”
“You need to decide for yourself.”
Angela looked skeptical.
I continued, “It takes some time to know if someone is honest and caring. Jerks can fake things for a while. How long do you think you would need to be with someone before you knew the true person?”
Angela thought awhile before she said, “Probably at least a month.”
“That’s one criterion. Do you have any others?”
“That he have a job and a car. That he be fun.”
“Let’s write these down,” I said.
I saw Angela through most of her pregnancy. We talked some about her long-term goals. We discussed the perils of looking outside oneself for salvation. I suggested that being a mother wasn’t a sufficient goal. She needed to find a way to support herself and the baby, and she needed to establish relationships with people of both sexes that lasted.
Angela called me from the hospital to tell me that Alex had been born. He weighed just under six pounds and had naturally blond hair like Todd’s. Marie had been her birth coach. She sounded proud and happy. She said, “If you come up to visit, bring me some chocolate. I’m starving in here.”
I last saw Angela a few months ago. I was shopping at a discount grocery and she strolled by with baby Alex. She looked her old self—a happy smile, apple-red hair and black eyeliner. She handed me Alex, who was a chubby baby with spiked hair. He was dressed in a black Leatherette jacket. I held him and he cooed. I cooed. I could tell by his good health and smiles that he was well cared for. As he wiggled in my arms, Angela told me about her current situation. She had a new boyfriend now, Carey, who actually met her criteria for a relationship. He worked as a TV repairman, owned a Jeep and liked babies.
Angela was working on her GED. Her mother had never seen Alex and rarely called Angela, but Angela talked