American Wife (8 page)

It's not the right thing for every woman, and certainly I was lucky to have the option. But it was also one of the best decisions I've ever made.

It was around this time that a routine medical screening warned that Chris might have tuberculosis.

We talked about it on the phone. I remember the discussion vividly, not because of the disease—I thought further testing would say he was fine, which it did—but because of his attitude.

Namely, that he was replaceable.

“If I die, you could just get a new husband and Bubba can get a new dad,” he told me.

It made me furious. Heartbroken. It was as if he didn't understand how irreplaceable he was to me, to our son, and to the rest of the family.

It was as if he didn't know how much I loved him.

I realized later that, in his mind, he was only being realistic. He wanted what was best for me. He had seen death up close and watched the mission go on, lives go on, whether people wanted it to or not. If he couldn't be there, he still wanted me to be happy.

Even so, it was a devastating statement at the time. In some ways, I never got over it.

A GIRL!

Having children changes things in a marriage. There are good changes and bad changes. One of the worst is that it tends to shorten tempers. That made things a little testy around our house after Chris came home.

I saw it as the natural state of things—and only temporary. Chris was surprised, I think, that things weren't as smooth between us as they had been.

“Oh, we'll get through it,” I'd tell him.

“I don't know.”

“Other people go through this all the time, especially with a new baby. Didn't your parents ever argue?”

Actually, they don't seem to have argued at all, at least not in front of the kids. Maybe there's a lesson for us in that—it's okay to argue in front of our children; it prepares them for later in life.

And those of you with idyllic marriages where you never fight at all—fake it a few times for the rest of us, okay?

Just joking.

Chris's enlistment was nearing its completion, and we began talking about whether he would stay in the Navy or not. Having lived through two deployments already, I was more than ready for him to come out.

I thought he was, too. In his letters home he said he couldn't wait to be home and spend more time with us; he said he hated being away. We had started our family, and both of us wanted a more stable life with him home and involved with the kids.

This was all true, but it turned out that I wanted that more than he did. He loved being a SEAL more than he loved being home, or at least he loved them equally and thought he could continue doing both. I didn't.

It took only a few conversations before I realized that he was leaning heavily toward reenlisting. If he did, he knew he would redeploy back to Iraq within a year. To look at it from his point of view, he thought he still had work to do there. And truthfully, few people could protect as many people as Chris could; even though I told him he had already done his bit, he felt it was his duty to continue fighting for his country.

“If you tell me not to reenlist, I won't,” Chris told me.

“I don't want that on my shoulders,” I answered. “Telling you not to live your dream. You love your job. But I also want to be honest. If you do reenlist, it will change the way I think about things. It will be different. I don't want it to be, but I know deep in my gut it will be. You keep saying romantic things, things about wanting to stay and build your home here. If you go and reenlist, then I don't know that I'll think they're true.”

In retrospect, I think those romantic dreams were true for Chris. It's just that he thought he could have his career in the Navy and his family life. Many people do. And I think he realized that while I might discount what he said about wanting to be home, I wouldn't give up loving him.

I prayed that God would help him make the best long-term decision for our family. I was disappointed when that answer turned out to be reenlisting.

No, I didn't stop loving him. Things did change between us, but it was more than just his enlistment: soon after he re-upped, we discovered we were expecting again.

We got pregnant with Angel almost by accident. I was thinking it was just about time to go on birth control and wham—it happened. We wanted two children, but were thinking of spacing them out a little more. God and Angel had other plans.

I'm so glad. Bubba and Angel are so close in age and such good friends that I can't imagine it any other way. But at the time, I was more than a little apprehensive about it. Once again, it worked out that Chris was preparing to leave just when I was due.

They say God only gives you what you can handle. Chris didn't cope with crying babies very well. So either he paid the military to deploy him with each baby, or God was looking out for him with well-timed, newborn-avoiding deployments.

This time, the Team guy karma worked: the sonogram technician confirmed it was a girl several months into the pregnancy. She was going to be the first female born into the Kyle side of the family in eighty years. Which made her unique, and her grandparents particularly tickled.

Chris couldn't resist the opportunity to tease them with the news.

“We're having a boy,” he said when he called them back in Texas with the news.

“Oh, how nice,” they said.

“No, we're having a girl.”

“Whoo-hoo!” they shouted.

“No, we're having a boy.”

“Chris! Which is it!?”

“A girl!”

If they could have gotten away to visit us that night, I doubt they would have needed an airplane to fly.

One of the things I loved about Chris was his sense of humor, which seemed perfectly matched with mine, even at its most offbeat. April Fools' Day was always a major highlight. A month before our daughter was due, I woke him up in the middle of the night.

“Don't panic,” I told him, “but I think I'm going into labor.”

“Do we have a bag?” he asked, jumping up immediately.

“No, no, don't worry.” I slipped out of bed and went to take a shower.

Chris immediately got dressed and, calmly but very quickly, gathered my clothes and packed a suitcase.

“I'm ready!” he announced, barging into the bathroom.

“Babe, do you know what day it is?” I asked sweetly. It was two
A
.
M
., April 1.

“Are you kidding me?” he said, disbelieving.

I laughed and plunged back into the shower.

He quickly got revenge by flushing the toilet, sending a burst of cold water across my body.

In retrospect, maybe I'd been a little cruel, but we did love teasing each other. At our wedding, we'd smooshed cake into each other's faces. That began a tradition that continued at each birthday—whether it was ours or not. The routine never seemed to get old. We'd giggle and laugh, chasing each other as if we were crazy people. Our friends and neighbors got used to it—and learned to stay out of the line of fire.

I had a routine appointment with the obstetrician roughly a month before Angel was due. Ordinarily Chris went with me to the appointments, and this one was no different; we planned to meet at the office. But when I got to the building, he wasn't there.

One thing you have to know about Chris: if you set a watch by him, it would have been ten minutes early. He was
never
late for anything he considered important. And he considered his babies very important.

So when I was called in and he still wasn't there, I was concerned. I knew something must be up.

There was nothing to worry about, I told myself. He was still in the States, far from danger. Something must have come up and he couldn't use his phone for some reason.

Your loved ones don't have to be in a war zone for you to worry about them. In fact, there are all sorts of statistics on how dangerous life can be outside of a war zone. It's just that ordinarily we don't think about that. We don't focus on our anxieties.

I put all those possibilities out of my mind as I went into the exam room. I was relaxed. I'd been through one birth, and I knew what to expect. Even better, my platelets were under control this time.

Except . . .

They hooked me up to the ultrasound machine. The operator's brows knitted. Before I could ask what was up, she'd gone to get the doctor.

The ultrasound showed that Angel was in a breech position. It meant that she was backward in the womb; rather than her head, her feet were positioned to come out first at birth.

That is much more difficult for the baby than a “normal” birth, but it's hardly an emergency. More critically, the image showed Angel's amniotic fluid was low and the umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck.

The technical term for the latter is
nuchal cord,
and in a small number of cases, it can lead to a constriction of the umbilical vessels and hypoxia. (
Hypoxia
is a fancy term for “not enough oxygen,” and in the case of a developing baby, this lack can cause developmental problems or even, potentially, death.) The bad stuff happens only in a very small number of cases; in fact, many times the baby untangles itself before birth and there isn't even a hint of a problem. Low amniotic fluid, or
oligohydramnios,
can cause developmental problems for the baby. The exact danger depends on a number of factors.

In my case, the doctors were confident that neither situation would be critical, as long as I gave birth soon. After laying out the specifics, they recommended I have a C-section as soon as feasible—no later than the next morning.

I have to confess that having the cord wrapped around my baby's neck was always one of my worst fears. It's the one thing you really can't feel or sense as a mother; you know the kicks and the movements intimately, but the cord's placement is as much a mystery to you as it is to everyone else.

So okay. C-section in the morning? Why not?

Chris still hadn't shown up when I left the examining room. Nor had he answered my call asking him what was up.

I got in my car to drive to the hospital, then did what a lot of women do in that situation: I called my mom.

“Hey, honey, are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes.” I burst into tears. Until that moment, I hadn't realized how close to panicking I really was.

“What's wrong?” she asked.

“I . . . don't know where Chris is. I have to go to the hospital to have the baby—”

“It'll be OK,” she said quickly. “I'm going to the airport. I'll be there.”

I didn't even get to explain the full situation.

Then Chris called. “Where are you?” I asked. I was somewhere between relieved and angry—or maybe I was both angry
and
relieved.

“I just had some stuff happen,” he said. “I'm okay. I'll tell you when I see you.”

“I need you now,” I said, telling him about the baby.

If you've read
American Sniper,
you know what had happened to him: he passed out during what should have been a very routine procedure to remove a cyst in his neck. It was a freak thing that led to what we think was a temporary seizure.

Some “thing.” But being a SEAL and being Chris, he completely minimized it. In fact, I didn't know what had happened until later. All I knew was that he met me at the hospital and was by my side when I needed him.

There is a bit of a funny story attached to the incident. A friend of Chris's happened to be with him when he passed out.

“Stand back,” his friend told the corpsman.

“What? Why?” the corpsman asked.

“Because when he comes to, he's going to come up swinging.”

“No.”

The corpsman leaned down. Just then, Chris came to and, as his friend had warned, started swinging. Fortunately, the corpsman jerked out of the way just in time.

Chris said in his book that the incident was nothing. From his point of view, he was right: there were no ill effects, and he never had a seizure again. He was cleared for the deployment, which was scheduled to begin in a few days.

But from my perspective, he shouldn't have deployed at all. He should have let the doctors fully investigate the situation. Someone should have figured out why exactly he passed out—even if it was just that he didn't like the sight of spooky long needles.

But you can't tell a SEAL that. SEALs may not think they're indestructible—most if not all are too smart for that—but they are all absolutely 100 percent convinced that they will let their brothers down if they are not in the fight, no matter what. And something like this was, not only to Chris but I'm sure to any SEAL, truly insignificant.

But anyway . . .

ANGEL IS BORN

I hated getting the C-section. The idea of it was bad enough—getting cut open rather than giving birth naturally, as painful as that had been. But even getting ready was difficult. They strapped my arms out like I was being crucified. They gave me a shot for pain, but apparently an air bubble interfered with the injection, because I felt tremendous pain in my neck right after the needle went in.

Then I got pretty numb. Chris held my hand, watching calmly. “It's all good, babe,” he said calmly.

That was as much as he said—wisely. It wasn't a good time for talking, even if I was under sedation.

They put a big blue sheet over me, blocking off my view of what was happening. Nurses and doctors and lord knows who else were gathering at my feet, getting ready to go in and get my baby out. Meanwhile, the talk in the room was incredibly banal:

So, what are you doing this weekend?

Going on a hike. What about you?

All of a sudden, the chitchat stopped. The conversation became sharp and terse, precise and very medical.

Scalpel.