“Miss Katie Said You Don’t Deserve Kids”

Maybe some people grow up with adoring parents and sweet siblings and perfect homes, but I don’t actually believe that. Logically, I know it must be true. Naively, I believe that it will be true for my children. I like to believe that I’ll be a good mother, but I am not some divine being incapable of wrong. It seems so hypocritical to believe that perfect homes don’t exist, but simultaneously believe that my children will grow up unaware of kitchen table bills or extramarital affairs. I keep thinking of the playhouse rotting in my childhood bedroom in a home that’s been abandoned for four years. I feel it in my bones, when I go to sleep, when I shower.

Maybe there is something to the idea that this is everyone’s first time on earth. No one has any idea what we are supposed to do, much less how to parent I like to believe that my father didn’t want me imagining this playhouse and my abandoned childhood home in my twenties. I am sure he didn’t think when I was six and playing innocently with my dollhouse that he would disown me at fifteen.

“Surely we would be better parents at least,” I confidently laugh to my fiancé as I throw the negative pregnancy test in the black trashcan near our entryway.

I hold back a sigh of relief because deep down I know.

I know that I will be a horrible mother.

I am selfish, impatient, easily frustrated, and most of all, naïve.

I believe too strongly in the idea that continuous effort is worth more than natural perfection. But when I lay down at night with my phone buzzing from my dad’s unanswered messages, I know that no matter how hard you try, you cannot undo every mess up.

I think of every twisted apology, each time I begged him to change, and I finally see myself from his perspective.

I know you must forget that your babies turn into people with autonomy, and now my dad spends Thanksgiving alone. I struggle to take constructive criticism, and I know a human a fraction of my age is not the best contender to change me, even if they have my DNA. I also know there are some things that aren’t worth pondering.

But as I throw this Clearblue test away, I feel like it’s an acknowledgment that I am better off.

Katie, now ex friend of my fiancé’s family, once said that I didn’t deserve children. I cried, but I had a sick sense that surely, she knew better than I did. This fifty-year-old woman, in all her wisdom, knew that I shouldn’t be a mother. Surely it wasn’t his vindictive ex-wife that led her to think that way. Logic and emotions are oil and water in my brain.

When my friends say, “You’d be the perfect crazy aunt,” I can only hear the missing part of that sentiment, and I feel a piece of my denial crumble at my feet.

“But their father will not be like mine,” I think to myself.

The fault in my thinking, though, is that my father was always unkind, stern, and quick to anger and that my mother was always scared, quiet, and reserved.

But people are not born like that, and that scares me too. I am worried that somehow, I will morph into evil incarnate every time I command one of my children to time out.

So when my doctor says, “Sit tight. I think this is an ectopic pregnancy, and if so, I need you in the ER now,” the summer before my junior year of undergrad, I feel terror wash over me.

As I sit in the pale-yellow room awaiting my fate, I imagine my dollhouse. The last time I saw it, it was the same color as the walls of this stupid waiting room. The roof had caved in on the left side of my bedroom, closest to the porch, and the once pink and teal playhouse turned into a yellow and moldy green color. I wonder why such a small artifact of my childhood plagues me, why something I probably only played with for a year or two occupies my mind as I am waiting to know if my life is about to change. I imagine the childhood that was stripped away from me. I imagine a child I will never get to hold.

 

Brianna Waddell enjoys writing creative nonfiction and dabbling in poetry. She works as an assistant manager at the University of South Carolina Aiken Writing Center, and in her free time, she enjoys journaling. Most of her works include themes of family, grief, and frequent references to oddities and antiques.