Miriam Cole Ω Sofie Bojakshiya (lastavatar) wrote in thereincarnates, @ 2015-05-10 15:41:00 |
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Entry tags: | miriam cole |
Who: Miriam Cole
What: Mother's Day shaming for the non-mother.
Where: Her father's church, in Homestead, FL
When: Sunday, May 10, noon
Warnings: Religious themes, might be offensive to Christians... and parent issues.
Every year, Miriam's father's church did a special lunch on Mother's Day, where all the food was made by the women of the church that didn't have their own children. Every year, more of the women Miriam's age, and even younger, joined the ones sitting at the table, and Miriam was left with girls who looked like children to her. Girls she'd gone to school with, they whispered about poor Miriam, with her dead husband and no baby to show for it. Miriam, who kept refusing her father's attempts to set her up with nice young men, and didn't she know that she was getting older, and it was more than time to start a family? Children were a blessing from God, after all. A woman's real purpose in life. Poor, unloved Miriam, who might never know the joy of being a mother, whose own mother was surrounded by the other young women of the church like a reigning queen, holding their children like the grandbabies that Miriam wasn't giving her.
Miriam pretended like she couldn't hear them. Her father didn't, of course, too busy talking in loud, booming voices with his deacons, being congratulated on a sermon that was recycled year after year, about a mother's love. It always managed to come back to honoring the man, though, honoring your mother and your father both, but the father was the head of the family. A good mother deferred to the father. Her place was in the home, devoted to her children and her husband. No one knew how little Miriam's mother had to do with her, when she was growing up. They put on a good show, in public, but in the privacy of her home... well, if Miriam ever had become a mother, she wouldn't have been sure where to start with that whole loving her child thing. It was a foreign concept.
Some of the girls were talking, in the kitchen next to her, about how it was going to be the last year at least one of them was there. Elizabeth was four months pregnant, and she could have joined the mothers this year and no one would judge her, but she'd decided to cook this one last time and teach her younger sister, just old enough to join them in the kitchen, how to make her potato salad. Rachelle and Tanya had both gotten married just that last month, and they were both praying that God gave them a baby soon. Miriam kept her head down, bit back everything she wanted to say about how God didn't care. Even if God was real, he didn't give a damn about whether two housewives got knocked up, any more than he gave a damn about the families with more mouths than they could comfortably feed. If God was real, he had better things to do than breed good little Christian women with good little Christian men.
If she even said anything at all, they'd all excuse her. She was the preacher's daughter, after all. And she had to be bitter over the fact that she hadn't been blessed with a child during her marriage. They didn't know that the only prayers Miriam had ever said were that she would bleed on schedule, every time her husband got to come home on leave. These little girls who thought that motherhood was the pinnacle of life, they wouldn't understand that Miriam was too afraid of what would grow in her womb to ever want to risk it. Any child she had wouldn't be a gift from God. It would be a curse on the whole world.
Tanya said, loudly, that she couldn't imagine how awful it would be to be over twenty-five and not have her own baby. All the women fell silent then, looking over at Miriam, twenty-seven now and no baby to show for it. Her grip tightened on the bowl of slaw she was stirring, and she waited in hopes that the silence would die away before she looked up and saw the pity, and the horror, on all their faces. Muttering a quick "excuse me," she slipped away, headed for the door from the fellowship hall to the sanctuary. A flurry of whispers broke out behind her, taking her escape as a sign that they were right. Let them think that. Let them pity her. It was a heck of a lot easier than explaining the truth that they would never understand. She heard someone moving behind her, hoped for a minute that maybe her mother would join her.
She didn't. After Miriam had sat down on the front pew, the door opened a moment later and one of the older ladies in the church that had nearly raised her in her own mother's absence. She sat down beside Miriam, laid a hand on her knee. "Miri, honey, I know it's hard, but God's got a plan for you. He's going to send you the right man, and a beautiful family of your own. You just have to have faith."
Miriam forced a smile, muttered, "Thanks, Sister Sandra." She didn't say anything more than that, just sat and stared at the cross, and tried really hard not to think about how that was exactly what she was afraid of. After all... she was going to have to make her choice someday.