Jennifer

I always knew I would get the baby back. Actually, both of my sons. I always knew I would get them back. However, I did not expect to get the baby back as fast as I did. Which basically means, there was no preparation what-so-ever.

You are basically dealing with four idiots, three of them who have no experience with kids, yet, we are trying our best to raise one. Like some ghetto/white trash version of Friends. Then, there is me. One would think I had my act together, but this is me we are talking about. I was a good mom. I mean the past six months was not a good indicator of that, but even then, it is not as if you would find me pole dancing my way into adult hood. Not yet anyway.

This was my life now. I would spend my mornings arguing on the phone with child suport that I do indeed have the baby in my custody, and there is no way I am paying 200.00 a month for my own child, that I have IN MY CUSTODY. I mean what did I have to do, take a selfie with the baby and I so they would believe me?

Then, there was our new day to day routine. Talk about comedy gold. Alphonso. Poor Alphonso. He never needed much. Just a couple of sofa cushions on the living room floor to sleep on, along with his Vougue magazines and fancy face cream. Well, Vinnie put a quick end to that when he decided to use the magazines as a toy and the fancy face cream as milk. Alphonso held that over me for at least a year. I had to promise to buy him his first round of botox just to shut him up.

Christin probably adjusted the easisest. I mean once she learned how to feed the baby, and the art of burping the baby, and once she got used to the fact that babies cry in the middle of the night, and they wake up at the crack of dawn and do not care if you had a late night or not, she was golden! She really took to Vinnie, after we went through the “learning curve.”

T. I’ll give him credit where credit is due. For a hot minute, he would wake up with me in the early morning hours when Vinnie would wake up needle to be change and fed. He would make the bottle as I was changing the baby. Of course I had to secretly remake the bottle because he would use coffee creamer thinking it was milk. I know what you are thinking. I sure know how to pick them!

Then your’s truly over here. I knew that above anything else, Vinnie needed to be loved. I knew that even though I was not in the most ideal situation, one day I would do something right to where he would be proud of me, his mom. I had to just get through this period. I was doing the best I could with the cards I was dealt….or the hand I was lost, whichever way you chose to look at it.

The one thing that was bugging me. The elephanst in the room that we all saw but no one wanted to address is things were changing. We as a whole were on our “Act 2” and we did not know how it was going to end.

One of my all time favorite songs is “Touched By An Angel” by the wonderful Stevie Nicks. There is a powerful line in the song that has always stayed with me.

“Everything was the same except that everything was different.”

That was our life now. Life with a baby. Everything was the same, except everything was different.

And Alphonso would be the first one of us to experience the “different.”