An Overprotective Mother

Lord Almighty Girl!

"Lord Almighty, girl, won't you stop your moping and holding your belly like that?" Tania's mother, a pudgy, hardy mountain woman stooped with age though she was barely even 40, glared at her daughter and brushed biscuit crumbs from the table in the kitchen.

"Meg, leave the girl alone, she's just missing her fella." Tania's father, a tall man even more stooped than his wife from decades of mining coal sat across from Tania, his one day off for the week already spoiled by the querulous tone of his wife.

"Well, Charles, tell the girl ain't nobody trying to steal that youngin' of hers! She ain't even had the daggone baby yet and already she's too overprotective. Never good for a youngin' that, never good at all." Meg went back to washing dishes, her snow white hair escaping the tight bun she always kept the hank of hair in. Like Tania's, Meg's hair came down well past her hips but unlike Tania, Meg kept it pulled up neat and proper. Not like these girls showing off their locks today. No sir, Meg had some pride about her, even if these girls didn't.

"Now Meg..." Charles began but Tania stopped them both by awkwardly standing to her feet. The burden she was carrying defied logic on such a small frame but the young woman carried it as best she could, even if it did feel like she could barely move most of the time.

"I'll go to my room, leave you two be. I'll be there if you need me." Tania spoke quietly, her dark brown hair hiding the pale green of her eyes and the gentle beauty of her face. She just wanted to be left alone anyway.

Waddling to her room in the two story house Tania quietly closed her doors, drowning out the noise of her parents and her two younger siblings.

It was January 25th, 1977 and her husband of less than a year was in Missouri, at some army training facility, trying to provide for the family they'd created so early in their married life. Tania hadn't wanted Stan to go but he'd gone anyway, unable to get over the claustrophobia that made mine work impossible and unable to find work in the factories of North Carolina. He had to provide for her and their baby, he'd said five months into her pregnancy, he'd have to go.

Tania took comfort in the fact that the Vietnam war was over, Stan wouldn't be sent to the damp, hot, and far off country, but who was to say another war wouldn't spring up? Stan had gone off for his training and Tania had left the home they'd made in North Carolina to return to the hills of West Virginia to wait for the baby to arrive and Stan to return.

She turned on her radio, the only real luxury she'd brought to the mine house when she came, and sat on her bed as she stared out of the window, out at another row of houses hiding the mountain behind it. Southern West Virginia wasn't a very nice place on good days, in the cold months of winter even the snow turned black from coal dust and the air stank as the very coal the men dug up throughout the day was burned in stoves around the small village.

She and Stan had started out their life together with such big dreams. They'd moved to North Carolina, both barely past 18, both intelligent people but uneducated in birth control in the protecting, holy hills of the coal camp they'd grown up in. Birth control was for city people, and well, Tania hadn't even known what sex was when she'd married Stan, let alone what birth control was. Now she knew and almost wished she'd had access to it.

A new song came on the radio, one with a woman singing about a man lighting up the darkness for her, and tears sprang to Tania's eyes as her heart squeezed in her chest. Stan had lit up her life, he had brought her so much happiness, but here she was now, scared, alone, and with not one but two babies on the way.

Nobody believed her, of course, they told her this was her first child, she could be forgiven for thinking there were two babies inside of her, but her doctor said there was only one. Her mother, always a rigid woman with a cold attitude towards life, wouldn't hear any more about it because if the doctor said it was so, it was so. Tania had known to keep quiet, she'd grown up with the woman, after all, but she also understood that her parents thought doctors were infallible, almost gods even.

Tania supposed she could understand that, new advances meant the doctors were saving more lives than ever but Tania was afraid of her new doctor and he'd made her think, reappraise her thoughts on doctors and what they did. She'd been seeing a doctor ever since she'd first suspected she was pregnant, but when she'd moved back to West Virginia she'd had to find another one.

"Good Lord, another mountain girl, too stupid to keep her legs closed. Well, I guess you've not had any previous care then?" The man, in his early 50's with oiled dark hair, thick glasses, and a sneer on his craggy, mustachioed face, had stared down at Tania, helpless with her legs spread open on the exam table, dressed only in a blanket he'd thrown over her.

"Well, I was in North Carolina, Doctor Kline, I..." But, Tania hadn't been able to finish before the doctor cut her off.

"It's always the same with you girls, unmarried, no prenatal care, then you want to scream for pain medicine. Well, I'm not having it, I'm just not! You'll get what I give you and nothing more! That's if your baby even survives after all this time without prenatal care. I just don't know what's wrong with you people." The man turned away from Tania and began writing notes, all the while berating her.

Tania had gasped at his words, her hand going protectively over the slight mound where her baby grew. It had hardly moved from that spot ever since, though she'd discovered there were two once they'd started to move. She now spent a lot of time with both hands covering her belly.

"I'll tell you what, it wasn't like this in New York City, women were respectable, got married first, then had babies." Tania tried to tune him out but some of his barbed words still got through to her.

Tania was in tears by the time he left, her gentle, shy nature already assaulted by his clinical but rough examination was pulverized beneath his ego. She couldn't stop him long enough to explain she had medical records in another state or that she was married. The slim gold band on her finger should have told him she was married, her medical chart should have too, but he'd just plowed on, snarling about hillbillies.

Tania hadn't wanted to return to the doctor but he was the only one available in their mountain community and her mother wouldn't allow her father to take her to the nearest city for care. Tania had been stuck with the tall, vicious man and his sausage-like probing fingers.

Now, she sat in her small bedroom, both of her arms cradling the huge mound that her two babies made. Her skin, almost translucent it was stretched so tautly in her eighth month of pregnancy, showed the protrusions of four tiny feet, even through the polyester shirt she wore, the material stretched as well now.

Four little feet, four little hands, and the soft but hard knots of her children's heads. Oh, how she loved them already. She couldn't wait for the day their daddy came home, his dark hair and dark eyes beaming with love as he looked at them all. She couldn't wait to be back in his arms, safe, secure, and without fear.

Stan was supposed to get leave to come home on the first day of February, the arrangements for his transportation had been made already. Just a few more days and they would be together again. That's all that mattered, that he was here, that he would protect her babies, and that he would keep her from harm.

She'd heard the rumors going around the village, the whispered tales of young mothers dying, their babies disappearing, while no remains were given to the woman's parents or the baby's father. She knew what was going on up at the hospital and she didn't want to become another statistic in that doctor's chart. Staring out at the dark fall of snow on the ground Tania knew she didn't want that. Not one bit and Stan would ensure that did not happen.

He had to.