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Finally, we arrived at my parent's home where I had been staying for the past six months. I hated my living situation and hardly asked for help while pregnant to make a point that I was self sufficient. Furthermore, it was important to inconvenience my parents and those in my life as little as possible. It was not their fault my life had taken a drastic turn and I didn't want to inconvenience anyone.

My father was a little crazy and overbearing as I tried to be a mother. He was afraid that my dogs were going to eat the baby, so they were kept outside or in a kennel. He kept reciting stories about babies who were eaten by household pets in graphic detail. He also said that interrupting a baby's crying patterns would impede speech development. This had apparently happened to his brother. This made me quite bitter.

I quit talking to father. Ignoring him, I focused on the relationship I thought I was sustaining with the father of my child. Once again, I was on Skype with live video camera rolling through all hours of the day and night. "One day soon, we will be together, and this will all be easier and we will love each other intensely," he told me...and I believed it. I kept on believing it as I woke up all hours of the night to breast feed my new baby. I believed it when I woke up, I believed it all hours of the day.

Hardly a moment went by that I didn't think of how great my life would be with this new baby, her father, and myself living comfortably in a small cottage in the Andes Mountains with goats, chickens and other assorted barnyard friends. What bliss! My life would change. In these fantasies, I didn't have such a run down car, I had a better motorcycle, and a happy little family.

This fantasy kept me as content as I could have been and I thank God for my stubborn optimism during this difficult time. Breast feeding in itself is an impossible chore. I loved that for the first (and last) time in my life I had tits, but the throbbing, saturated pain was not something I would wish on anybody. The paranoia of owning a new baby was quite intense for me. What if I dropped her and her oversized head snapped backward violently and she suffered from "Shaken Baby Syndrome" or what if she choked or what if she went to sleep and just stopped breathing?

In moments of fear, I often imagined my life without my newborn baby. What if she just disappeared? Life would surely become easier. Maybe if she stopped breathing it would have been God's will and completely out of my control. It sounds like pure evil, but sometimes I hoped that maybe God would help me out with this one.

Of course, if anything tragic did befall my daughter, nothing would have been gained. My life would not have returned to the way it was before. It never does. I would simply have had to deal with a more difficult and devastating set of circumstances. I don't know anyone who wouldn't have lost their mind. I struggled with acceptance and serenity. Holy shit, life was difficult.

Living with my parents provided me with luxuries. They spoiled my daughter. Every time they went out they returned with a new baby toy. Once in a while, I was able to hand her off to them. As I saw joy well up in their faces, I envied them. I wanted joy, but I was too tired. My parents both worked during the week, so it was just the baby and I from eight in the morning until about five in the evening.

I watched daytime television...a lot. Maury Povich, then Judges Judy, Alex, and Joe Brown, then Cash Cab, then finally Malcolm in the Middle. I was stuck somewhere in the middle myself. I was far from the characters that appeared on Maury since I knew who the baby's father actually was and I was far from having my own stable immediate family like Malcolm, Dewey, Francis, and Reese did.

I could not identify with anyone, whether it was in real life or on television and continued to fantasize about the functional and healthy life I would have, if only I was with my daughter's father. Surely, he was the missing piece of my life. Communicating with him ten hour per day online was not enough. I told myself it was simply the physical intimacy and companionship I was missing. If I was physically with him, I would surely feel that "love" that new mothers have that I read about.

He was that piece. He was the clutch in my manual transmission. It felt like I was revving up my RPMs in first gear. I needed him to give me the power to shift and advance to second, then together could get to third, fourth, and then we could cruise the highway to happy destiny together. That is how we would roll.

My baby did not do much at this point. She was a ball of flesh that ate, slept, wet herself, and cried. That was it. How do people do this? It is a paralyzing amount of work. I believed that I needed her father and I took steps to make that happen.