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And Riff and Coach stayed safely up by my head, holding my hands, feeding me ice chips, helping me stay as calm and relaxed as possible.
Though not too calm.
I may or may not have demanded that the doctor force a vasectomy on Riff right there in the room.
But at the end of it, we had two more little boys in our family.
“I was only halfway joking about the vasectomy,” I told Riff as he sat in the bed with me while the babies slept peacefully in their incubators.
“You weren’t joking at all,” he said, shooting me a smile before pressing a kiss to my sweaty temple.
“Look at it this way, if you get snipped, we can have consequence-free sex anytime we want,” I said.
“That’s some good motivation,” he said just as one of the twins started to cry.
Riff - 20 years
“Darlin’, it’s okay if you want to opt out of this,” Riff told me. For about the twentieth time since our older boys came up with this idea for how they wanted to spend their eighteenth birthday.
In a cabin in the woods.
‘Roughing it’ they’d said.
What can I say, our boys were very outdoorsy.
Our daughter grew to really like girly things eventually, especially now as a teenager herself. But she was always game for an adventure.
One of the younger boys was wild and feral too.
But that last one, the youngest one, he got his mama’s love of all things indoorsy and relaxing. He was the only one of the kids who enjoyed doing yoga with me, who took himself to a time out to do meditation when he was grumpy, and who, yes, loved reading.
In fact, we were standing in a bookstore in a little town in the middle of nowhere, watching him stack his arms full of books from the children’s section. From the looks of things, he had two complete series he wanted to bring with him. Even though one of his bags for the trip was already full of books.
Honestly, he’d probably read all of them too.
Sitting outside to get fresh air so his brothers didn’t rag on him about it, but he’d be reading for the whole trip.
“I could get you a hotel room right here in town,” Riff offered. “You could have a kid-free week all to yourself to read.”
Riff had gone into panic mode the second the boys walked away after telling us their plan for their birthday.
“Hey,” I said, voice calm, “it’s okay. I’m okay,” I assured him. “I know I have some… bad memories of the woods,” I admitted.
There was no denying that. Years may have eased the pain of that trauma, but it was still a part of me.
It was the part of me that forced our little girl into martial arts class from a young age. That had me making her carry weapons, and wear tracking devices hidden in her shoes, her purse, her backpack, or her jewelry. Because the idea of someone hurting her like I’d been hurt was enough to keep me awake at night.
“But I have some good memories of the woods, too,” I told him, leaning into his chest. His arm easily went around my lower back, curling me into him. “You carrying me through them,” I reminded him, those memories easily coming back, full of all the hope and relief I’d felt then. “Keeping me warm in the cabin…”
“I can certainly keep you warm in this cabin too,” he said, giving me a saucy smirk.
“At least this one will have food and heat,” I said, thinking of the pictures the boys had printed out for us to see of the cabin they’d chosen.
“Mom,” our little reader called, making me turn to look at him. He looked just like his father. But with my eyes.
“Yeah, bud?”
“The new book in your series is out,” he told me, shamelessly holding out the book with a scantily-clad, embracing couple on the front.
