Lydia
She just wasn’t cut out to be a Mother. True, she had gotten pregnant by Stan before her nuptials, had told Charles that the unborn child was his, all the while knowing that this was an end of an era, her independence squandered, the dependence of the child growing inside of her, causing her body to change, causing her to feel woozy one minute, ravenous the next, someone she did not even recognize, and then the dependence on Charles, for now she would be limited to bed rest, her doctor had told her. She wasn’t naturally built to carry a child, and the birth would be excruciatingly painful, a laborious process, so much so, that she began to loathe and detest the seed that was spawning. At what point did it actually become a living soul, she often wondered, as if there were any reasonable recourse for her.
There was a point in time, when she was a young girl, fair haired, wearing a yellow cotton sundress, hair pulled back into a ponytail, when she would carry her dolls, her babies she would call them, her babies, babies just like her, when she would fantasize about becoming a Mother, changing diapers, feeding, loving unconditionally these babies, the children she would someday have.
But something somehow had changed her, she had changed, and all she felt was a seething hostility at the boy she would be forced to raise mostly by herself, because Charles was always busy for work. Charles was busy at a rotary meeting, the Boy Scouts Club, or at a fundraiser. And she was left to feed and clothe Wayne, Wayne who also loved to play with his dolls the way she did, that faggot sissy boy. She used to watch him as he would say, “When I have my baby, I will dress you up in pretty dresses and bows,” just like she had done, and she felt repulsed and ashamed of him. It wasn’t as if she was religious and had a problem with whether Wayne would grow to like boys instead of girls. It wasn’t that she had a problem with the boy who would later apply mascara and go to school, the little freak boy who would get teased, pushed, and bullied by the other kids. It was the fact that she would have to come over to the school when they would call. “Please come pick Wayne up. There has been some trouble,” and Lydia would have to stop in the middle of putting groceries away or stopping right in the middle of preparing dinner, which would no doubt be ruined, to clean up his mess, his fucking mess. Always disgraced she was, and Wayne knew that his Mother was angry at him, no not angry, that she hated him, and that somehow made her even angrier. And that is how her life was stolen from her, an indiscretion with a handsome young man before her forthcoming wedding, producing a bastard child whom she despised that looked nothing like Charles. She remembered when she first called him Raccoon, an animal she thought, eyes lined with what appeared to be coal, something that made him appear soft and a target for ridicule, and how he had adopted the name for himself in mockery, humiliating her. All this work, this damned work she was doing for every fucking else, and nothing to show for it.
No, Lydia was not cut out to be a Mom. She knew it, just had she known the moment she had had sex with Stan in the heat of his car, throwing away her future, lying to Charles, telling him lie after lie after lie from that point forward. Like, when she told Wayne that she loved him, she had felt so disconnected and unrelated to this beast, that she actually gasped, this beast that was part of her, born of her, and who might someday grow to be just like her. Lydia, Lydia. How had it all gone so wrong, gotten so fucked up? Lydia, Lydia, Lydia. She lit a cigarette and exhaled slowly, blindly watching the serial on the television.
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