Death Rattle

To Be a Mother

"Please! Don't do this!" Angie cried out. Tears streaked down the side of her face and into her sweaty hairline. She struggled hard against the restraints I was rapidly adjusting to contain her thrashing. The table shook under her so violently, I wondered if it would hold her weight. She didn't look comfortable on her back, not with how swollen her stomach was. "I don't know why you're doing this, but I'll pay you anything you want! Please!" She yelled over the rattling of the table.

"Hold still!" I yanked the rope harder on her wrist, causing her to scream out from the rope burn. My palm felt the burn as well. I was going to have to shut her up.

"Please! Don't hurt my baby!" She cried out with snot leaking from her red stained nose. "I'll do anything! Please have some empathy!"

This begging of hers was grinding against my nerves.

I took some rope and put it between her teeth, wrapping it around her head. I knotted it sharply into her damp hair. Her head whipped every which way as she tried her best to dislodge the rope from her mouth. She still begged, but the words were so smothered now that I couldn't really make them out. I assumed it was all the same annoying whining she had been doing before.

I had had my eye on her for a few months now. Monitoring every visit she made to the clinic for her prenatal checks. She was so close now. So ripe and ready to pop. She was also struggling. A poor, single, pregnant woman with no family and no one to assist her.

In other words. She was perfect.

It didn't take much to convince her to come with me. She already trusted me as her nurse. All it took was me offering her a friendly hand. Offering her resources and an eventual smash in the back of the head. She had dropped like a sack of potatoes. I really should have tied her mouth first, but restraining her limbs had to be my first priority. Go figure that it would stir her from her forced slumber.

As she jerked about, her hair painted a crimson smear across the table behind her head. I must have hit her harder than I thought.

"Relax." I placed my hand on her forehead in an attempt to soothe her. "I'm not going to hurt your baby. I'm not going to hurt you either. If you cooperate."

Her eyes plead with more tears. She was so frightened. She had no need to be. I meant what I said. I meant to help her. She was so young and all alone. She couldn't possibly raise a baby.

But me?

I could.

I had longed for a child for years. Seemed like my whole lifetime. Yet, the journey and the attempts were met with repeated failure.

Men failed me.

My body failed me.

It didn't seem possible.

That was until I met Angie.

Call it my rotten luck to work at an OBGYN clinic. Day in and day out, I would see expecting mothers come in with their little bundles of joy blooming within their wombs. All the while knowing that my womb was barren. Knowing that I could never experience what they were experiencing.

I placed my hand upon my stomach now, feeling a bit of disappointment as well as disgust for my failure as a woman to bring life into this world. My womb was useless to be so empty. I felt disemboweled... hollow...

What good is a womb that carried no life?

I was meant to be a mother. I was meant to create life. I was meant to hold my darling baby within my arms and feed them off my breast. That was my purpose. My calling. Without it, I was... what was I? Empty. I dug my nails into the skin of my abdomen in my frustration.