She did not get any exercise at all, claiming that the baby exhausted her. I had seen my Mom continue to run an entire household and work out every day while she was pregnant, so the exhaustion seemed put upon. We would load up into the car to head to the next appointment with some government agent only to discover when we got there that Adriana had left all of her paperwork at the house. One time, she walked out of a meeting with a woman at the Social Security office because she was offended by the woman's tone. It took us weeks to get her set up on Medicaid, and she never called to set up a prenatal appointment, even though my mother gave her a list of free or sliding-scale clinics to call.
My mother and father dealt with her shenanigans throughout the summer, hoping that providing stability and security for her would give her an example of how she wanted to treat her child. My mother had taken me and my siblings with her to Adriana's parents' home to collect some of her belongings, and we had seen rats scurrying along the floor and heard a horrifying story about her younger brother being attacked by a rat. We all genuinely believed that if she just had enough exposure to a better way of living and saw that people were willing to help her, she would begin to do some things for herself. However, she continued to drag her feet...
My parents knocked on her bedroom door and got no answer, so they eventually opened the door. She was sitting in the bed, talking on the phone with her boyfriend. She then told my parents that she was miscarrying. My mother, knowing that she was not telling the truth, called her bluff and told her she needed to get in the car, because she was going to school or going to the hospital. Adriana chose the hospital, whether it was because she thought she could continue the lie with impunity or whether she really did not care if she had a home, I still do not know. My father took her to the emergency room where they announced that she was absolutely fine. My mother packed her bags while she was at the hospital with my father, and they told her that she was no longer welcome in our home. She had tried to bluff about being ill because she did not want to go to school, not ever suspecting that my parents would call her bluff and take her to the emergency room. While I never anticipate being in a situation like hers, she taught me the most important lesson I have ever learned: do not bluff when I have everything to lose and nothing to gain.
