Mother, a short story
I don’t’ know why I’m trying to write this right now; I can’t see straight. Obviously I’m about to have a migraine. Hopefully the medicine will kick in and it won’t be so bad. If there are huge typos in this know that it is because I can’t see half of what I’m typing. Everything on the right side of my vision is grainy.
A fictional short-story.
Mother
Abby Carson is an exceptionally ordinary teenager. She is 16 years old, average height, average looks, and she behaves herself well enough. She had a boyfriend, until very recently, and can’t begin to fathom why he would throw their perfect relationship away.
She is a good girl. She doesn’t do drugs, she doesn’t drink, she doesn’t text while driving, and she and her boyfriend were always safe. She is a good student, and she is determined to get into a good school. If there was more money she’d be aiming for Harvard, but she doubts any amount of financial aid would cover the enormous cost. Still, there are good schools out there that are slightly more within her family’s budget, and she knows she’s smart enough to get accepted into one of them. Her future is boundless.
Abby is careful and responsible. She is not pregnant. She will graduate high school childless and go on to be something great.
So that shrieking newborn is not hers, no matter what her mother and those nurses say.
end
This horror-story in miniature is not as preposterous as it might at first seem. My stepsister is a nursing major, and her boyfriend's mother is a Maternity Ward nurse, so they talk a lot about that stuff. My stepsis was telling me a few days ago about what her bf's mom was telling her about her experiences. She's said that she had seen, on multiple occasions, teenage mothers come in, go through labor, deliver her baby, and then still be in such grand denial that they refused to believe that the baby was theirs! She's seen these girls who drove themselves crazy with denial that they could possibly be a mother so young. I was inspired after hearing that to write this.
Another particularly horrible factoid: my stepsister had a gynacologist come and talk in one of her classes one day. And she said that it is rarely the baby's cord getting wrapped around its neck that is the reason it dies when that reason is given. Think about it: when a baby is in the womb, they don't breathe air. They get oxygen through the umbilical cord. So they can't sufficate until they start using their lungs, and they can't use their lungs until they come out. The lady was saying that unless there were some more complicated forces at play, getting the cord wrapped around its neck wouldn't suffucate a newborn in the womb. The baby would be out of the womb, and the cord removed before the infant even began breathing with its lungs. So what really killed those infants? As my stepsister put it, "When you look at how complex and fragile the human body is, and how many things can go wrong, it's a miracle any baby is born alive and healthy and without a couple of extra fingers growing out of its spinal cord." The doctor lady said that sometimes the baby just dies, and there is no reason for it. There's nothing that can be done, no explanation, They just die. Of course, "They just died" isn't going to fly with an anguished mother, so the cord wrapped around the baby's neck is the explanation doctors often give mothers so that they have something to blame it on.