This week in writing prompt was the loose subject of school. We only had to mention school one time in the story for it to qualify. This is the story that came out.
Woman/Mother
I was twenty-two years old and working as a waitress when I first uttered the words, “I don’t want to have kids” out loud.
I had just sat down for my lunch break in the dingy little break room of Piccadilly Cafeteria when a coworker asked me, out of nowhere, when I was going to “find me a man and have a few kids.”
My mouth began to work before my brain could catch up as I heard myself say it.
“I don’t want kids.”
Even though, up until this point, I’d never felt the urge to become a mother, I thought that one day I would. That’s what women do, they become mothers. So the normal thing would be to have a child. This was how it worked out in my mind.
Here I was, a college dropout working as a waitress, being asked the question once again and a truth I’d hidden from myself spilled out. It was this moment when I admitted something I felt but hadn’t put into words, and it caught both me and my coworker off guard.
Mrs. Carla, a cook well into her forties, stood with her mouth agape for a second before her face darkened. “Your ovaries should be ripped out and your rights as a woman stripped away.”
I sat in shock as she stormed off red-faced and angry.
This was confirmation that the thing I had just discovered about myself was not only bizarre, it was also extremely wrong. Something about me and how I felt wasn’t right. So much so that I was told, by the first person I’d ever admitted this to that I didn’t deserve to be a woman.
I could scarcely finish my shift from the jolt, and Mrs. Carla refused to talk to me for months after that.
