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and I sat motionless to stop the sound of leather squeaking around me before I myself started screaming.
    Man, I don’t know if a soccer ball is going to cure whatever ails this child.
    Within twenty minutes Ben was curled up on his side on the floor, breathing evenly. I waited until I was sure he was completely out before I picked him up and carried him toward the stairs.
    The feel of his warm little body in my arms made me ache again. Ever since we had moved to Nashville, he had steadily grown more distant, until in the last few weeks, he’d backed away from my every touch as if my fingers were on fire. It hurt. And it surprised me that it hurt.
    Unlike my sister Bobbi, who clung to her children every bit as desperately as they clung to her, I had never been naturally maternal. In fact, although I was thirty-one when I married Chris and was well into my career and had a healthy stock portfolio in place, we still hadn’t planned to have children right away. When I discovered I was three months pregnant six months after our wedding, I slipped into
pre
-partum depression.
    There were so many things Chris and I wanted to do. Buy a house that was more upscale than the one we had. Go to Europe (my dream) and Australia (Chris’s). Probably most pressing of all, I wanted to start my own business before I became a mother. I couldn’t see how that was going to happen with a baby.
    Once I got past morning sickness, my vision changed. I
could do
it all, and I was going to. That was when the first bristling between Chris and me started. Until then, we were the perfect match. Both upwardly mobile, ambitious—yet fun. We belonged to a church we both liked and went most Sundays, and I was on the obligatorythree committees. We never argued about money or pizza toppings or vacation destinations. We agreed on almost everything. Until I started making noises about starting my own financial firm anyway, as soon as Baby Wells was old enough to go to a sitter.
    Chris only made a few well-aimed remarks during that period. I found out later that he thought once I cradled our child in my arms, I would opt for full-time motherhood. I did fall in love with Christopher Benjamin Wells III the minute I held his goopy form and looked into his indignant little face. I liked his attitude.
    But he wasn’t going to stop me from being all I could be. I tried to tell Chris that Ben would never be a happy child if his mother wasn’t happy, and that his mother would never be happy staying at home. I was blown away the first time Chris said to me, “Mothers have no business going out to work when their kids are young.”
    My response? “Who are you and what have you done with my husband?” I had never had an inkling that Chris felt that way. He had always been supportive of my career, always seemed to like my drive and sophistication. We’d talked about our career goals more than we had anything else in our relationship—obviously more than we’d talked about child-rearing.
    And so the battle had begun—me weaning Ben at six weeks and going straight back into the fray at the Richmond firm I worked for, and Chris taking every opportunity to try to wear me down. Each time Ben sneezed or had a bad night, Chris would attribute it to my working. When the neighbor’s same-age baby crawled before Ben did, I got the blame. The child couldn’t burp without my career goals being held up like Exhibit A. Never until then had I resented being married to an attorney.
    Chris refused to help at all. Laundry could pile up to the ceiling, and he wouldn’t lift a folding finger. We could completely run out of clean dishes, and he made no offer to even open the dishwasher. It infuriated me because we had always shared the chores that Merry Maids didn’t tend to when they came twice a week. He was punishing me, which only served to make me more stubborn.
    As I started up the steps now, I looked down at my