Amy’s husband Ral was furious when she delivered the black baby boy. He didn’t hesitate to dump her years later. D revealed the unthinkable. Amy gripped the two sides of the hospital bed and screamed with all her strength. She pushed the piercing cry of a newborn baby. It rewarded her efforts. She fell back on the bed and panted, sweat trickling down from her forehead. The nurse wrapped the baby in a blanket and brought him to her.
Amy was shocked when she saw the baby’s skin color. Confused, she looked up at the nurse. “Is this my baby? Are you certain?” she asked. The nurse nodded. Amy looked at the other medical practitioners in the room and saw them exchange strange looks. They had the same question as her. The medical staff knew Amy well; it had been in that hospital that she had given birth to her other three children. She was a white woman married to a white man, and they had three white children together. This baby was their fourth child, and he was unexpectedly black. Everyone wondered how that could be.
Amy’s husband Ralph came in a few minutes later to see Amy and the newborn baby. His expectant expression turned to bewilderment the moment he laid eyes on the baby. He went out of the room to look at the room number imprinted on a plaque on the door.
He wanted to be sure that he hadn’t gone to a room that wasn’t Amy’s. It was clearly Amy’s room; the room number said so. When he re-entered the room, he was frowning. He couldn’t understand how Amy gave birth to a black baby. He stopped at the foot of the bed, glaring down at her accusingly. Amy recoiled from his gaze and tried to explain herself.
“Honey, I can explain. I didn’t do this. I don’t know what happened,” she whimpered. Ralph sneered; he didn’t believe a word coming out of her mouth. He wasn’t going to wait around for her to come up with more lies to tell him; he knew the truth.
Amy slept with her big shot employer at the insurance firm where she worked. Amy was shocked when he said this. She shook her head and repeatedly told him that it wasn’t true, but he didn’t care. They couldn’t continue talking because a nurse asked Ralph to leave the room so that Amy could rest.
Amy’s head hurt. She just had a baby, and she was being subjected to this kind of mental torture. She hadn’t ever imagined that it was possible for Ralph to treat her this way under any circumstances. Let alone after all her energy was depleted. When she woke up from a nap that wasn’t restful because of bad dreams, Amy fed her baby. He was truly a beautiful baby, and despite the color of his skin, Amy could see the resemblance he shared with his three older siblings.
Months earlier, she and Ralph had selected possible names to call him, and she decided on Samuel. For the rest of her stay at the hospital, Amy didn’t see Ralph. She hoped that he was pondering their conversation and other possibilities that might have caused their baby to come out a different skin tone than theirs.
Ralph was Samuel’s father; she knew this because she hadn’t been with any other men besides her husband. Unfortunately for her, Ralph didn’t seem to think so. Ralph was cold towards Amy and Samuel after they returned home from the hospital. Amy felt deeply wounded but forced herself to keep a cheerful appearance for the sake of the children.
However, a few days later, Ralph packed his bags and announced that he was leaving her. In shock, Amy tried to reason with him. He couldn’t just leave her behind with their children. She begged him to consider all that they had gone through for more than 10 years of their marriage and the children they had together. Ral was unyielding, and his mind was made up. As far as he was concerned, Amy had betrayed him and wounded his pride. If he let this pass, people would mock him, and he would lose his self-respect.
So he left, abandoning his wife and family. Amy felt her entire world crashing down. She didn’t know how she was supposed to go on without Ralph. She had never suspected that he would be capable of dumping her so callously. She had known him since her college days; they had been friends for a while before they began to date. Eventually, he had proposed, and they had gotten married.
They had no problems conceiving when they were ready to have children. By their second year of marriage, children had come easy for them. Ralph only wanted two children because his idea of a perfect family was two kids, perhaps a pet, and then the typical home with a white picket fence. Amy had always wanted a large family. She had grown up an only child after losing her older sister to a school bus accident when she was 4 years old. She had felt lonely and didn’t want her children to ever know that feeling.
Yet she had respected Ral’s decision to have only two children. However, fate had other plans for them. During Amy’s first pregnancy, she and Ralph had been over the moon. They had spoken excitedly all the time about the grand plans they had for the child that they were about to have. Their joy was boundless on the day that they had welcomed their first son into the world.
Three years later, Amy was pregnant again and gave birth to a set of gorgeous twins, a boy and a girl. The couple had been happy about this, knowing fully well that Ralph didn’t want any more children. Amy had taken precautions not to get pregnant again, but 5 years after the twins were born, Amy had woken up one morning with symptoms she recognized from her previous pregnancies.
Terrified and secretly ecstatic at the same time, she had bought a pregnancy kit to confirm. And sure enough, she had been expecting. Ralph had been pissed when Amy broke the news to him. He had called her careless and stupid for letting a mistake like that happen. He was angry for a long time, but as her delivery date had drawn closer, Ralph became warm and tender again. Unfortunately, that had puffed into the air like smoke the moment that Amy gave birth to baby Samuel, who had dark skin unlike any other member of the family.
With Ralph gone, Amy pondered on how to raise her children alone. They were so young; her first child was 9 years old, the twins were almost six, and then there was Samuel. Amy didn’t know how to make her life work like it used to. She struggled a lot with taking care of the children and providing for them. Some of her neighbors, who used to envy her family and knew that Ralph left her, whispered behind her back. They mocked her, calling her an unfaithful wife and the hypocrite who used to present a perfect work-life balance in public. But all of that was in shambles.
Amy didn’t know who to turn to at such a distressing time of her life. She called her friends, asking for help, but none of them could assist her. They were all busy with their families and the things going on in their lives. The most that they did was offer words of comfort and ask her to stay strong.
Every night, Amy cried into her pillow. It felt as if someone was gutting her insides;
