Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby

My babydaddy's out of town at the moment, and my kids requested to take care of the pet menagerie at Dad's house in his absence. Since they're too little to go it alone, that means I'm on the hook for taking them over there, to my former marital home. No big deal, I thought. Enough time has passed, and besides, I've recently found love in other places.

Now granted, I was feeling angry when we arrived. Somehow the festival of lights had become, for my kids, all about what gifts they get, and that didn't sit well with me. Neither did the fact that they really didn't eat the dinner I made them and protested mightily when I asked them to clean up the mess they made making me a Hannukah present (what kind of present is that?).

Even so, walking through the house, I really wasn't prepared to burst into tears as I looked at all the pictures, particularly of our firstborn when he was a wee lad. Pictures, mind you, that I'd lovingly framed for our family. Sigh.

The song that came back to me as I fell to the floor and cried (the kids were off with their pets so I was free to let it all out), was this one:

Is you is or is you ain't my baby?

The way you're actin' lately makes me doubt

Yous is still my baby-baby

Seems my flame in your heart's done gone out

A woman is a creature that has always been strange

Just when you're sure of one

You find she's gone and made a change

There is, of course, a layer of meaning related to the fact that I is no longer his baby. But the main reason this song is so strongly tied to my feelings about my former husband goes back to the day our son was born. He had a very traumatic birth, and his grayish-blue body was rushed to the NICU almost immediately after he came out. I had lost a lot of blood and was pretty out of it, so it was my husband who went with him. Later in the evening, my sister and my mom managed to get me into a wheelchair so they could take me upstairs to see my newborn baby. When I got there, his Dad was rocking him steadily while he sang:

Is you is or is you ain't my baby

Maybe baby's found somebody new

Or is my baby still my baby true?

He was never one for children's songs, and this Louis Jordan number really charmed our distressed babe. When he tried to hand our son to me so I could hold him, he started to cry in such a heartbreaking way that I just handed him back to his Dad and listened and watched while he sang, heart bursting with love and sadness and gratitude. Which is not unlike how I feel right now...