68 - Half

Maia soon found out that she had gotten pregnant from her elevator woohoo with Mickey at the movie theater.

She was glad about it of course, but she didn’t feel that same thrill that she normally did when she discovered she was expecting.  And all the recriminations and self-loathing she heaped upon herself for feeling such little excitement about the new life she had helped create did not help matters any.

The only thing that kept her from feeling any lower than she already did was keeping busy, so Zak becoming an active toddler gave her a reprieve from those negative emotions.

Zak was a fast learner and Maia was able to teach him his skills quickly and easily.

Too quickly.

Maia chafed under the restrictions of her maternity leave, feeling listless without a job to go to or many household tasks to keep her occupied.  There were only so many meals she could prepare ahead of time, only so many plants needing weeding and harvesting, and only so many metamorphium potions she could create in advance for her children’s IFs.

Most of the time, while the older children were in school, she sat in the nursery rocking chair with Zak while mindlessly watching TV and listening to the radio for company as she waited for the restrictive feeling that her pregnancy brought her to end.

Maia was relieved to go into labor at last.  She set Zak down to play with his IF Jester and left the teens to babysit while she called Mickey and then headed to the hospital.

And when Mickey and Maia emerged from the hospital, it was as the new parents of quadruplets!

Welcome Elise, Chloe, Brielle and Ian!

Taking care of the four infants was a full time job in and of itself, and with all of them on different feeding and sleeping schedules plus caring for toddler Zak, Maia had little time for anything else.

It was only later that she became aware of the fact that Ian was her fiftieth baby—she was halfway through her challenge! She had given birth to fifty children which was a major milestone, but one that also meant that she still had fifty more to go before she finally finished. She felt that she had barely made it this far; how could she bear all the years that still remained, alone? The glass that was half full was equally half empty...

And shortly afterwards Maia was stunned again as she realized that the birthdays of her twins and their IFs had already arrived! 

Happy birthday Tesla!

Happy birthday Pascal!

Happy birthday Winks!

Happy birthday Blinks!

At the end of their party, Maia expressed to Isak how awful she felt that she knew practically nothing about their grown children—what their interests were or their plans for the future—because her daily interactions with them had been half-hearted at best.  She had been so focused on keeping herself busy progressing in her job and having children for her challenge so as not to think about Reid... her only real comfort was in knowing that at least Isak had been there for them as a father as they grew.

Maia wasn’t certain what she expected Isak to say, but he neither consoled nor criticized her. He simply asked, “So what are you going to do about it?”

Maia didn’t know, but she needed to try to make it right. She realized that in shutting off all her negative emotions, she had inadvertently become disengaged from her family, which in turn not only made her feel even more alone, but also made her miss out on so much of their lives.  She wanted to fix things, and just by having that motivation, that battle was half won.

So Maia spent the time rebuilding her relationships with her grown children.

She discovered that Tesla was a bot fan and had begun to learn how to design trait chips and reverse engineer nanites for bot-building like her father.

Winks had a flirty nature, which gave her plenty of writing material to work with for her future romance novels.

Maia learned that Pascal had his unstable moments, but he had also inherited Isak’s handiness. Working on that skill helped to steady him and improve his focus.

And she found out that Blinks had dreams of starting a huge science-fiction inspired town for travelers those who wanted the immersive experience of a futuristic-themed vacation. He was thinking of calling it Oasis Landing.

By the time graduation day rolled around, Maia finally felt like she knew her kids much better than before. She was proud that they all graduated with highest honors and that Winks was named class valedictorian.

And when she hugged them goodbye, her regrets weren’t nearly as bad as they easily could’ve been.

But Maia didn’t stop there.  She didn’t want to do her job as a parent by halves ever again, so she made her children the focus of her daily life as they should've been all along. So she worked on learning more about her triplets and their interests.

Phineas was into sports. 

And when he wasn’t playing games of b-ball or attending sporting events at the stadium, he was reading books about them.  He’d even begun to write his own sports stories.

Sibyl loved to be outside and often collected things on her little jaunts around the neighborhood.  At first it was flowers that she gathered. 

And later, once she joined the after-school geology club, Sibyl started collecting shiny rocks—the sparkly ones were her favorites.

Cassandra enjoyed baking desserts using the little toy oven, and she was always looking for fresh ingredients from Maia’s garden for her latest recipes.

Since she wasn’t skilled at gardening yet, Maia planted her fairy daughter a cocoa bean bush of her very own, and Cassandra talked to it every day.  “Go, cocoa, grow! You’ll make beautiful chocolate chip cookies someday!”

When it came time for the triplets to become teens, Maia was able to celebrate it without reservations.

Happy birthday Phineas!

Happy birthday Sibyl!

Happy birthday Cassandra!

Afterwards, the triplet teens made Rune, Crystal and Cookie real.

And that meant that Maia now had six teenagers begging to learn how to drive...

But even teaching so many teens their driving skills wasn’t all that difficult in the broader scheme of things. The bigger challenge lay in figuring out how to learn to cope with her life situation without falling apart again. So she was left to ask herself the same question Isak had asked her before—what was she going to do about it?