Reba: My Story (33 page)

After the wedding, we returned to Nashville and to the annual “Music City News” awards show, televised over The Nashville Network. I won “Female Vocalist of the Year,” and when I went to the press conference after the show, I held up my wedding ring. That was my first official announcement that Narvel and I had gotten married.

Our honeymoon had to be postponed until I finished shooting
Tremors
, and Narvel joined me on the set for the last few days.

On the final day of filming, we were just winding up our dinner break when someone walked onto the set, waving at me. I waved back, and as the person got closer I was thinking, “Man, that guy looks like Narvel.” Well, it was Narvel! I hadn’t recognized my own husband!

“What have you done?” I asked.

“I was bored in the room,” he said, “so I shaved off my beard. We’ll be gone for a week on our honeymoon and
I just wanted to see how I would look without it. How do you like it?”

“Put it back!” I said.

He started growing it back the next day, and he hasn’t shaved it since.

T
HEN WE WERE OFF TO CANCÚN, MEXICO, FOR OUR HONEYMOON
. I had always heard that you shouldn’t drink the water south of the border. We wanted to be very careful so Narvel drank Diet Coke and I drank bottled water. But one night when we went out to a show—a very nice theatrical production with mariachi bands and dancers—I drank a margarita. Later that night I started feeling queasy; and I figured that the ice in the margarita was to blame. Even the thought of food made me ill, which was very unusual for me. I’m almost always hungry!

By the next day I was sicker, and Narvel was feeling queasy too, so we had to put off our planned drive to see some ruins a couple of hours away. We just didn’t think we could risk not having a bathroom close by. When my stomach trouble persisted, we decided it would be best to cut short our trip and return to the States.

Back home in Nashville, I discovered that I wasn’t suffering from Montezuma’s Revenge after all. I’ll never forget the excitement of the moment when, sitting on the edge of the bathtub in our condominium, I saw the white dot on the home pregnancy tester turn bright pink.

I was pregnant deader than a hammer! There was no doubt about it.

Narvel was at the sink, grooming his new beard, when I cried out to him, “Narvel—I’m going to have a baby!”

He came over, looked at the pink dot, and leaned down and hugged my neck. I was so touched that I cried.

That afternoon, as we were flying out to do a show, I called Mama from a pay phone at the Nashville airport to tell her I was pregnant. She was thrilled, of course, and
Gloria, Narvel’s mother, was too. Both mothers agreed not to spread the news for a while so we could have the chance to tell the people in our band and our organization personally. Also, I wanted to make sure everything was okay before we announced my pregnancy. I was thirty-four at the time.

I didn’t have a doctor in Nashville then. Dr. Darius Maggi, my gynecologist, who had also delivered most of the children of my sisters Alice and Susie, was in Denison, Texas, too far away to allow for regular prenatal visits. So once again I turned to my hairdresser, Breon Reynolds, and also to Kathy Collier, the wife of the minister who had married us, to ask for advice. It was through Kathy that I got an appointment with Dr. John Van Hooydonk.

At my first appointment, he said to me, “Now, Reba, you’re thirty-four years old. If you had an amniocentesis and found out that something was wrong with this baby, would you have an abortion?”

“No,” I said instantly.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be your doctor.”

“You wouldn’t be my doctor if I had said I was going to have an abortion?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I couldn’t do that.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be your patient.”

Not everyone would agree with the doctor’s point of view or with mine, and they’re entitled to their opinion. But I felt glad to have a doctor who stuck to his beliefs and had the integrity to come right out and tell me where he stood. I respected that.

That integrity made me feel sure that it wasn’t Dr. Van Hooydonk who leaked the fact of my pregnancy to the press. That very same night, I was shocked to see my picture on the ten o’clock news, and to hear the broadcaster say that I was going to have a baby. I didn’t like the invasion of privacy, of course, but I mostly resented losing the chance to announce the upcoming birth of my first child
myself. Still, the news leak was just a small cloud on our joy.

I loved being pregnant! Every bit of it!

I continued to tour for the rest of 1989 and finished on December 3 in Orlando, Florida, where Alice and Mama joined us for the weekend. It was Alice’s birthday, so Jim Hammon, our tour manager, and the band joined Narvel, Alice, Mama, and me in my beautiful green dressing room, where I presented Alice with her birthday cake. At one point, I looked over at my band leader, Kirk Capello, and he was laughing.

“What are you laughing at?” I said mischievously.

Then I smeared cake all over his face.

The next thing I knew, we were in a food fight. Cake wound up all over the carpet and walls! We were having a blast! It had been a great year, with a great bunch of people to work with! Something like that might not happen in one of our homes, but when you’re on the road, the kid comes out in all of us.

I had to apologize to the proprietor, and I was asked to pay rent on the room, probably for cleanup. I haven’t been allowed to use that dressing room since! I really can’t blame them.

When I got back to Nashville on December 4 and went in for my regular prenatal exam, Dr. Van Hooydonk told me my cervix had thinned considerably. Although my due date was March 8, Narvel’s dad’s birthday, more than three months away, I was already having minor contractions.

“You’ll have to take it easy or we’ll have to take more drastic measures,” he said.

Of course, I got worried. “Can I go to Oklahoma to spend Christmas with my family?” I asked. “Or would that be too risky?”

Dr. Van Hooydonk said that I could go, but only if I promised to lie flat on my back in the bus all the way from Nashville to Oklahoma. So I did that for the entire 1,400
miles round-trip and stayed off my feet the whole time I was home too.

Larry Jones drove us out there, since his family lived in Duncan, Oklahoma. I hadn’t been on my bus for a while because we had leased a plane to get to my November and December dates. As I lay in the stateroom relaxing and listening to some demo tapes, I told Narvel how much I had missed my bus. After a few hours of talking and listening to tapes, I headed up front, thinking as I walked through the front curtains that surely we’d be almost to Little Rock.

“We just passed Jackson, Tennessee,” Larry said.

“Good Lord,” I said. “We’d already be asleep in the hotel if we had flown!”

So much for missing the bus!

But for all my precautions, when I returned to Nashville I was put in the hospital twice, since I was still having contractions. After my second admission they sent me home with a little syringe, activated by a pump I carried in my shirt pocket, which was attached to a tube that ran to my stomach. It would pump a small amount of medicine into my stomach to stop the contractions. Then, every three days, I had to go to the doctor’s office where nurses would change the needle in my stomach.

It was a painful ritual. But I would have hung by my toes from the ceiling if it meant having a healthy baby.

Staying in bed all that time did have two positive effects: one, it gave me the chance to listen to my intuition. I had been having that “feeling” again, that sixth sense that has exhibited more wisdom to me than anyone’s mind, including my own. I still think that small feeling I get is really the whisper of God.

What I was getting the feeling about was Jimmy Bowen. I was scheduled to record with him January 16, 1990, but I was in the hospital with pregnancy problems at the time. And what the feeling was telling me was that I had to find a “logical” reason to tell Bowen, the president of
my record label, with whom I’d had the biggest recording successes of my career, that I wanted another producer.

I called Bowen and asked him to come by my condominium on Hillsboro Road. When he arrived we made small talk about my size and about how the baby would be a boy. And then, since I hadn’t come up with my reason, I just decided to blurt it out, without explanation: “I think we have been together long enough,” I said. “I think I need to get someone different to produce me.”

“I agree with you one hundred percent,” he said, “and I’ll work to find you another producer.”

That’s all the discussion we had—it was that quick and that easy.

I called him later and told him I’d interview Randy Scruggs, Garth Fundis, and Tony Brown. I eventually settled on Tony Brown, with whom I would record
Rumor Has It
in 1990,
For My Broken Heart
and
It’s Your Call
in 1991 and 1992, and
Greatest Hits Vol. II
in 1993. Each album, as of this writing, has sold more than two million copies, and each continues to sell.

The “feeling” had steered me right, once again.

Two, I couldn’t do much of anything except lay in bed, read, watch TV and listen to demo tapes. The latter is what I did most. I found some wonderful songs for the next recording session. We would later call that album
Rumor Has It
.

I
T WASN
’
T UNTIL FEBRUARY 1990 THAT MY DOCTOR TOLD ME I
could start going back to a more normal routine. “If you have the baby now, it will be fine,” he assured me. Although I still had fourteen days before my due date, the baby’s lungs were developed and he would be strong even if he came a little early. I was so relieved! And after spending most of two months flat on my back, I was definitely ready for a change. During this whole time, I had only left our
condominium to go to the clinic for my treatment, except for Saturdays when I got to go out to the new house.

So on Thursday, February 22, I went out shopping, but I got so tired that I had to go back to the condo and lay down. I remember calling Mama to tell her how tired I was. She said, “That’s how it is, close to the birth of a baby.” Little did we know how close I was!

Later that day, Narvel and I went out to the new house, which was fast becoming filled with our new furniture. While Narvel, Tom, and Gretta, our groundskeeper and housekeeper, were trying to lay down a beautiful Persian rug under the dining room table, someone said something funny; and when I laughed I kind of felt I might have had a little accident.

I went, “Oops! Excuse me,” and waddled into the kitchen bathroom, and when I got up, I noticed that the water in the toilet looked sort of milky. Could that mean that my water had broken?

Excitedly, I called out to Narvel. “Look at this!” I said. “What is it?”

He came in and looked but he was no help.

“I don’t know.”

Three children, and he still didn’t know what was happening? Narvel’s excuse was that all of them had been delivered by cesarean section.

I called the doctor and described the milky liquid. He confirmed that my water
had
broken.

“Come to the hospital now,” he said.

I’m amazed that I stayed so calm as I said, “Okay.”

As Narvel and I set out on the thirty-five-mile trip to Nashville’s West Side Hospital, I started getting really strong contractions.

I was banging on the window while holding a pencil and paper so I could time the contractions and how long they lasted. Later on I tried to read my notes, but my handwriting was pretty bad. When we hit the interstate, Narvel was driving more than 100 miles per hour, while
talking on the car phone to my Mama, telling her that we were on our way to the hospital. Then he called his mother and his children, Chassidy, Brandon, and Shawna.

I was admitted to the hospital at 10
P.M.
, forty minutes after my water broke. For security reasons, I checked in as Mrs. Narvel Blackstock, with no mention of Reba McEntire. I was shaking real bad as I got out of the car and into the wheelchair. The nurses said I was in shock.