God Save the Sweet Potato Queens by Jill Conner Browne

Author:Jill Conner Browne
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781400082865
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2004-11-29T22:00:00+00:00

12

What to Do When the Rabbit Dies

I know a lot of y’all are young and cute, which also puts you at childbearing age. Let me tell you, dear ones, nothing will tear asunder that young cuteness quite like pregnancy and child rearing. I kept a journal and wrote voluminous letters while I was frittering away my own young cuteness being pregnant. Somehow I knew these records would be useful in my lifelong mission to help others. (Actually, I wasn’t even young and cute then—I was thirty-five.)

FROM MY JOURNAL, JULY 1987. Well, fine. Been married an hour and a half and I’m pregnant, thank you. Yes, it’s true, and I certainly hope you’re satisfied. The blessed event should be just in time to screw up any plans I had for Mardi Gras, not to mention everything else for the rest of my entire life. This is a fine mess.

This is one of those things I had anticipated reading about but never actually doing myself, you know. It’s the kind of thing that happens to other people, like an earthquake or the headline FIEND SEIZES HATCHET, SLAYS SIX or when your mother says, “Put that down, you’ll put your eye out.” Never do you actually believe that one day you’ll be wearing a patch where your eye used to be. Or airplanes. Not for a minute do I believe they fly. The thing weighs a billion pounds with all those lard-bucket people wedged up in it—here’s something flying soon? No, you just pile up in there and, somehow, magically, you end up in a different place, sometimes even where you want to be.

Well, I figured babies were sort of the same principle. I was the baby in my family, and the only other one I ever knew much about was my sister Judy’s son, Trevor—at thirty-something he’s so old now we are forced to tell people that he is our little brother so they don’t think we’re old enough to have raised him. He’s the only baby I’ve ever been around, and he just sort of turned up, or so it seemed to me, still a child myself when he was born. Who knew? Well, apparently plenty of people—but who believed them? I never thought this would happen to me.

The moment I conceived, I gained fifteen pounds—in my back. Seriously, I immediately got this back like a walrus. I am now gaining weight at the rate of eleven pounds an hour, and the doctor, witty guy—a good friend of mine actually, named Rascal Odom—is pleased to announce that the baby is the size of a golf ball, max. I am so pleased.

The mood swings are pretty entertaining, I must say. Judy warned me about these. She said at least ten times a month she would go totally berserk at something her bothersome husband, Ole Shep, did or said (such as walking in the room and saying, “Hello”), and she would then announce in no uncertain terms that she was not putting up

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