Motherhood

All I ever wanted was to be a mother. (This story is based on true events).

I always wanted to have children. Even when I was young, I knew I was destined to be a mother. I used to spend my time thinking of names for all my future kids and wondered what they would be like.
    My boyfriend and I kept trying for one, but weren’t having any luck. It was his idea for both of us to be checked out by a doctor I didn’t want to admit that there might be a problem. But he persisted (and he was right in doing so), and that’s how I discovered my chances of becoming pregnant were slim-to-none.
    Hearing that was devastating. I think I cried for a whole week. I couldn’t get out of bed to save my life. After a while, though, I was determined to keep trying. Besides, a slim chance is better than none, right? Whatever it took, I swore that I would have a child of my own.
    My boyfriend was initially supportive of me, until he found out I’d begun sleeping around with other men. Yes, I realize it was wrong to go behind his back like that. I’m a terrible person, I know. But I was just trying to increase my odds. He wasn’t ever supposed to find out, and when he did he didn’t understand, so he left me. It made me sad that he wasn’t as committed to having a child as I was, but no matter. I didn’t need him, and I wouldn’t need any of these other men when the child came. Single motherhood suited me just fine. I kept trying with as many men as I could find. Still no success.
    It got harder once some of my childhood friends started getting pregnant and having babies. I would look at pictures of them with their gorgeous children and they just looked… overwhelmed with joy. It only served to increase my misery. Sometimes I felt so helpless and hopeless that I would just randomly burst into tears. I couldn’t figure out why they were so lucky and I wasn’t! All I wanted was to experience their joy for myself.
    The worst was when my best friend Kathleen announced her pregnancy. We had grown up together and had supported each other through thick and thin. I really did want to be there for her now and share this new chapter in her life… I wanted to be happy for her, but I just couldn’t do it. Instead, I fell into a deep depression. It was almost as bad as it had been when I found out my chances of pregnancy.
    It really is true, though, that things get worse before they get better. Not even two weeks later, I discovered that my dream had come true. I couldn’t wait to tell my friends and family. They didn’t seem to give me quite the reaction I wanted (they probably weren’t too thrilled about me having a one-night-stand baby but that was my problem, not theirs). I figured I would just lay low until I had the baby; they wouldn’t care where it came from once they saw it. Babies have that effect on people. They’re magical like that.
    I loved my baby belly. I was obsessed with it. It was all just a total dream come true for me, watching it grow. I kept taking pictures and putting them up on the Internet so everyone could see how big I was getting. I got so many compliments on how good pregnancy looked on me. Just like I knew it always would. Sometimes I would just stand and stare at my body in the mirror, running my hands over my stomach. I loved feeling my baby move around and kick. It made me giggle!
    The only thing that concerned me was I never saw a doctor. I would spend--I kid you not--hours in waiting rooms, but eventually I would just get frustrated and leave. If my precious baby was unhealthy, I swore I would sue. Nothing could happen to my miracle on my watch. I just have horrible luck with doctors, I guess. One minute they’re giving me the worst news of my life, and the next they won’t even see me.
    The months passed by faster than I expected. I wanted to savor every moment of my pregnancy, but I also couldn’t wait to meet my baby. It was going to be worth all the pain and suffering I had experienced. The only person who was really excited for me was Kathleen. We were both practically bursting at the seams, we were so pregnant. We’d been keeping up with each other via text since we were both too busy to see each other, but I wanted to hang out with her one last time before my child came and I was consumed by motherhood. One last hurrah, I guess.
    I called her and told her that I had bought a gift for her, and offered to throw her a small baby shower. Just the two of us.
    Kathleen agreed, so we met at this little picnic area by the river in town. It’s really nice because you can drive right up to it, so it’s not too much walking for a pregnant person. And there are all kinds of beautiful, tall trees and the rushing water. It’s a very nice place to be, especially because it’s nice and kind of tucked away. Good for getting away from the world for a while.
    We hugged as best as we could, and sat down to eat. I don’t know what she was expecting for lunch, but it probably wasn’t a chloroform rag. I caught her by surprise; she hardly had a chance to fight back with me holding the cloth to her face before she went limp, and I carefully pulled her body off of the bench by the picnic table and onto the grass.
    Cutting an infant out of a woman is something that should be done with extreme caution, since you don’t want to hurt the child in the process of removing it. I stupidly forgot my knives at home, which were going to make the process a hell of a lot easier. I had really planned to bring them, but desperate times call for desperate measures. A silly mistake, I know.
    I pulled out my car keys from my purse. The key to cutting a body with such a tool is to apply a lot of pressure and don’t be afraid to tug. Blood came spilling out all over the place. I worked as carefully and quickly as I could, my grip becoming slippery as my hands were covered"actually, I don’t think it was just blood, it was all kinds of body fluids. It was on my clothes and getting under my fingernails and pooling on the ground.
    “Kathleen, you b***h!” I muttered as the keys slid around in my hands. I put them down for just a moment, grabbing Kathleen’s throat with my bloody hands. I squeezed as hard as I could and shook her a little. She was trying to keep me away from my baby, even as she lay dying, and I wasn’t about to let that happen. Once I was satisfied, I wiped my hands and the keys off on my pants and got back to work.
    I didn’t realize there was going to be so much blood. It was already starting to feel sticky on my skin. But I patiently yanked my keys through Kathleen’s flesh. It was kind of like looking for the prize in the Cracker Jack box.
    Finally I was able to retrieve the baby. Thank god, she was perfectly healthy. My little baby girl. I held her close as she took her first breaths and cried, telling her how much I loved her. I loved her more than words could ever say. She cried for a while and I just sat there and let her. She made me forget all about the difficulty I had in retrieving her. I named her Sunny because I knew she was the light of my life. My sweet sunshine girl.
    “Let’s go home, my little darling,” I said to her.
    I put her in the car seat of my car and took off the baby belly I had been wearing. It was one of those ones the actors use on TV to look pregnant. One of the really nice ones, too. I wanted to make sure I experienced my pregnancy with Sunny even though I wasn’t the one carrying her. When I removed the belly, I tossed it into the river. No need for it now. I drove home with my new daughter as carefully as I could.
    When I was finally home with her, I just sat on my sofa and held her. The whole experience felt so surreal. I was finally a mother. I rocked her in my arms and sang to her. She was my world now. My everything. At long last, I knew the joy that I had always desired.
    I had only had her for about six or seven hours before there was a knock on the door. I didn’t want to answer. I wanted to be with Sunny. But it was the police, and they demanded that I open the door. I reluctantly acquiesced.
    They were so quick to put me in cuffs. I screamed and cried and told them that my baby needed her mother and that they couldn’t take me away, but they wouldn’t listen. They didn’t care. They didn’t know about the pain I had endured just for Sunny. She was mine no matter what they said.
    As they lead me out of my house and took me away from my baby, there were news reporters taking pictures of me. I was still covered in Kathleen’s blood.

Author's Note

This is draft 2! I've made some minor tweaks that I think add some clarity to the story. Let me know what your thoughts are! I've been too busy with school to hack and slash this to my heart's desire, but I'm hoping to commit to a final draft soon.

Reviews

[Chopstix]

Lady Celery. Thanks for reviewing my story. I am here to review yours.

I enjoyed this story even though it is a rough draft. Being male, I have trouble relating to the main character's motivation, but you state it clearly enough to allow even me an understanding. I liked her attempts to increase her chances by engaging multiple mates. I do worry, however, that this puts her at greater risks for STDs in particular AIDS. Her method shows both intelligence and ignorance. This is also reflected in the first person narration. Where third person narration should be clear and concise, first person narration can be wordy in ways consistent with the narrating character. Here, your writing reveals a young (boyfriend not husband) high school graduate with average, 2.5, GPA which is appropriate. He backup up plan to adopt doesn't fit as well unless it is present in a naive context.

Although the narrator thinks herself pregnant, it is doubtful she really is. A better choice may be to show her having a sympathetic pregnancy with Kathleen, developing symptoms and signs of pregnancy along with Kathleen, but, obviously, not really pregnant. IThis approach will take more text and interaction between the narrator and Kathleen, but making this clearer to readers will help us understand and accept the picnic scene.

Although this story has all necessary elements, it may be worth exploring some other options for it. At first, it read like a confession; it could be rewritten as such. I would like to read it as a dialog between a psychiatrist and the narrator character. At the very least, we can learn the protagonist's name.

I'll be glad to add a rating to this review when you've finished editing it. In the meantime, the two quotation marks are probably typos.

[Lady Celery]

Thank you so much for the review! I was pretty iffy about posting something so rough, but I knew I needed an outsider's perspective.

One of the major concepts of this story that I enjoyed was writing for an unreliable narrator, but I definitely agree with your feedback. I'll be sure to factor this in while I'm editing.

And yes, those quotation marks are typos which, oddly enough, were not present on the original document but showed up when I transferred the story here. They'll be the first to go!

[Chopstix]

I was going to mention the unreliable narrator thing, but it is a hard concept to get across. If that was what you were going for, good job.

[IndieVoyageRob]

I love it. You manage to make the reader know there's something askew and you still manage to just sneak up and knock us on the head.

There are a couple floating quotation marks in paragraphs 2, 9 and 10.

[Lady Celery]

Thank you so much! Time to go destroy some question marks.