Priceless Inspirations (8 page)

When I first felt the baby kick inside me, it terrified me. I knew I was pregnant, and I knew that meant the baby was in there, growing and getting stronger, but there was a part of me that didn’t believe it until I felt that first kick. All of the sudden it was for real
for real
. There wasn’t any getting around it. In a few months, I’d be responsible for another person.

I was big. Really big. I had a lot of complications. I had anemia and I had to get blood transfusions because of a problem with the placenta. I got real high blood pressure and had problems with fluid retention that made me swollen, sick and heavy. I kept thinking about something my grandmother said once, “Having a baby means you have one foot in the grave and one foot out.”

It was true. The bigger and the sicker I got, the more I realized the limits of my body. Before, I had felt like I would live forever. I didn’t believe anything could hurt me. I was used to taking chances and risks and having everything come out okay. Being pregnant made realize that, if I didn’t learn to take care of myself, I might die. I realized for the first time that I wouldn’t live forever.

I learned that it wasn’t anybody else’s responsibility to make sure that I followed what the doctors told me to do. I tried to take the medicines they gave me. I tried to eat as well as I could and to rest. It was my job to take care of my health for the baby’s sake. I had to take care of myself.

It was hard. I was worried all the time about the baby, about being a mother, about Dream, and about what people were saying about me. The stress made me sicker, but I just couldn’t stop worrying.

The months passed. I got bigger and bigger. My due date was November 28 and I had Reginae on November 29. Dream took me to the hospital. He had to leave a concert he was doing, but he came and took me. He hadn’t seen me in a minute, and by then, I was swollen like Professor Klump in
The Nutty Professor
movies that Eddie Murphy made. I looked terrible.

The delivery went awful, too. While I was labor, Reginae turned around inside me. She would have been born breech, feet first, and the doctors thought that was very dangerous. I really didn’t know what they meant. I just knew I was scared. I ended up having an emergency Caesarian, and that scared me too. I really didn’t want them to cut me, but I understood that they had to so that Reginae could be born safely. By the time they put her in my arms, I was exhausted and weak, but I was happy, too.

She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

The day after she was born, Dream came to the hospital to see us. He took one look at me and said, “Is she gonna stay like this?”

I didn’t know what I looked like, but I saw the look on his face. I guess I must have looked pretty bad.

“You’re beautiful,” Aunt Kris said firmly and gave Dream a disapproving look. “You just had a baby. You’re beautiful.”

The look on Dream’s face said something different. The look on his face said I looked fat and ugly and that he wasn’t attracted to me at all anymore.

That scared me, too. In the beginning, we had talked marriage. I didn’t want to be a single mother. I wanted a family. I wanted a husband. Now, marriage wasn’t something Dream seemed to have much interest in. He told me that he’d always be there for me, but he felt like he was too young. Of course he was. So was I. The reality is that for me, “being young” was over. I had a baby to take care of.

He gave me three rings before we actually got married. I waited because I knew he was getting the player out of him, and having his time with all these other girls. I was miserable about it.

They kept me in the hospital for two full weeks. I had to learn to walk again from the days of bed rest and waiting for the swelling in my legs and feet to go down. Finally, they let me and Reginae go home.

This time, home was at Uncle Nat’s and Aunt Kris’s house. Auntie Kris fixed a room for me and the baby, and friends and relatives threw me a baby shower. We did our best to settle in.

I was in love with my baby. She looked like her father, and while I had finally accepted that I was in love with him, too, my timing couldn’t have been worse. He was drifting further and further away from me as he became more and more famous. I was so lonely and so sad that I poured all the love in my heart into Reginae.

She made it easy. She was a good baby and when she started talking and calling me “mama”, just hearing her say my name could make my day. “Mama, mama, love you, love you,” she’d say in her little baby girl voice. It always made me laugh. It made me forget how hard I was struggling at school and how lonely I felt.

I took her all the places my mother didn’t take me, like the zoo, Celebration Place, Chuck E. Cheese and things like that. When she was very small, she’d sleep next to me and give me kisses before she fell asleep. As she grew older, we talked about everything under the sun. I answered her little questions and explained the world to her in words she could understand. All the love in my heart belonged to her. It still does.

I was in awe of her. It was all about her. Nothing else mattered. I felt myself changing again. I wasn’t worried about the things I had been worried about before her. I forgot about friends, clubs, and partying. I wanted to be a great mother. From then on, that was all I wanted to do. I didn’t want her looking for a place to belong. I wanted her to always feel like she was wanted, cared for and loved. I felt like I had finally found someone to love me and I was going to do everything I could to keep her love.

Money Matters

Babies are expensive. You’ve got to have some money coming from somewhere if you’re going to raise a child. I had no money of my own. Nothing. Dream would give me money every now and then, but it wasn’t anything I could depend on. When I asked him for it, he would give it to me, and give it generously, but it was getting harder and harder for me to reach him. His career was hot, and by now he was famous. Things started to change things between us. I had to go through his mother and his friends just to talk to him.

It was depressing to find myself so low on his list. It was hard to remember the sweet, kind guy that I used to talk to on the phone for hours. It was hard to remember the guy who had told me, “I’m your family now.”

I was 15 now and I had a child. I needed a plan for how I was going to take care of her with no high school education and no skills. I talked it over with Uncle Nat and Auntie Kris and other family, and we decided that I should go back and finish school. With my high school diploma, I’d have a better chance to get a decent job and to take care of myself and Reginae. I was also going to look for a part-time job.

I went back to high school. It wasn’t easy. I was worried all the time about my daughter. Since everyone was at work or school during the days, Aunt Edwina was watching her. I couldn’t think of anyone better for the job. Even though she was getting up in age, Aunt Edwina was still the closest thing to a mother I’d ever known when I was small. She taught me everything I know about diapering and feeding, then potty-training and other parts of child care. Without her, I don’t know how I would have made it. I always felt like I could ask her anything, even something silly, and she wouldn’t laugh or think I was dumb. When she passed away in 2005, I was devastated.

Even with Aunt Edwina watching little Reginae, I found it hard to concentrate in school. People were talking about me and Dream. Girls who were trying to get with him were always trying to fight me. I sometimes felt that I’d lost myself. Everyone was always whispering “that’s Dream’s baby mama” or “that’s the one who says she’s with Dream” and blah, blah, blah. Hardly anyone thought of me as just “Toya” anymore.

Dream made it worse. He’d sweep into town and go and be with a bunch of girls, making them think they were special to him. Then he’d come back to me, tell me he loved me and that we were gonna be together, and then leave again. Those girls would come after
me
thinking that if they could fight me and win, they’d get Dream.

It was terrible. When I finally got a car, girls would come and spray paint nasty words on it. This one girl wanted to fight me every time she saw me. Once she put it out on the public address system at a basketball game that she would be fighting me after the game. I didn’t want to fight. I was looking cute that day in Gucci shirt and a fresh hairdo, but I had to fight her. She had told everyone, and I couldn’t let her punk me. I lost that one and ended up going home with my face all scratched up.

Young girls think it’s cool to date popular guys, rappers and bailers. You’ve got to know that dating those guys means you gotta deal with a lot of envious girls. I’m still dealing with that, passing comments people make out of the side of their mouths like they don’t want you to hear, but they really do. Really negative, hurtful stuff. Even now that I’m making my own money and doing my own thing, people still connect me to that one relationship and have something ugly to say. Sometimes it seems like no matter how hard I try, people won’t give me credit. It feels like I’m still fighting haters, and still losing.

Back in high school, whether I won or lost the fight with some girl who wanted him, Dream did what he did when he wanted to do it, with whoever he wanted to do it with. None of my fighting ever changed any of that. I know that now, but I didn’t know it then. Like I said, I entertained it. I guess I thought that beating those girls would prove something to Dream, but it never did. I fought a lot in high school, and I had nothing to show for it, not even Dream.

I missed him. I missed the close relationship we had once had. I worried that Reginae didn’t know her father much at all. Dream was around, but at that time, he wasn’t the best father. He wasn’t like what I remembered about my Uncle Frank, who worked hard at the old Woolworth’s Department store, then came straight home to wrestle on the couch with his children. He wasn’t like Uncle Frank who brought home pockets of our favorite candy, just because he knew we liked it and because he’d thought about us during the day. He wasn’t like Uncle Frank who had been married to the same woman for decades when he died.

That’s what I was hoping for, but Dream wasn’t that man.

He was young, and he wasn’t into it. He wasn’t into the sacrifice of it all. He had to learn to be involved, and to respond to the little things that mean so much to kids. I was expecting more out of him then, but he just wasn’t able to do it.
We
weren’t parents;
I
was. I was the one with the baby, so I had to be more responsible.

When I talked to him, we usually ended up coming back to two topics--Reginae and money. He saw his daughter when he wasn’t touring and happily gave me more money than I asked for, but I did have to ask. He never complained about how much and he was never stingy about it. He still isn’t that way. What bothered me was asking for it and taking it. I felt like I needed money of my own. Money I made myself.

I got a job at Papa John’s, but I only lasted a few weeks. Not because I didn’t want to work, but because every day it was Dream, Dream, Dream.

“He got money, you don’t need to work.”

“You need to make him support you and his child.”

“When you gonna make him be responsible? You need to get the state on him and get your money.”

The more people talked, the more I wondered if I was being stupid by slogging away at Papa John’s when Dream was doing so well. While I did want to Dream to help me with Reginae, it wasn’t just financial support I was looking for. I wanted
him
. I wanted him to be a father to her and a partner to me. I wanted his love. I wanted to be his only woman. I wanted us to be a family.

A check alone couldn’t bring me that, and I just wasn’t sure that I wanted to go to court for child support when money wasn’t really the issue. The more people talked, the more I doubted myself. I loved Dream so much, and maybe I wasn’t thinking straight. Maybe I
should go
to court. Maybe that would be the smartest thing to do, for Reginae’s sake.

So I left Papa John’s. I went to court and filed a claim for child support.

It was a mistake.

I’ll never forget the hurt in Dream’s voice when he called after he got the papers.

“Really, Toya? It’s like
that
?” he said. “Didn’t I just send you more than I promised?”

He had. I’d just gotten a generous amount of money a few days before the papers were served.

“Did you really feel like you had to do me like this?” he asked.

No. I really didn’t. Dream had never given me any reason to doubt him and he’d always done what he said he would for us financially. Talking to him, I realized I’d let what
other people
said was the right thing to do guide my choices, even though I knew in my heart that it wasn’t the right thing for me.

I’m not saying that our baby’s fathers shouldn’t be responsible for their children financially. For some people, court is the best way to make sure that happens. For me, it wasn’t. The relationship we had was better than that, and Dream didn’t need to be forced to pay support. I regret now that I let myself be persuaded to do something that had never felt right in my heart. I guess I was angry, too. I wanted things to be different with Dream, and I thought that maybe using child support would get his attention.