Member-only story
Featured
The Bloodline Ends With Me
What My Mother Never Lived to Mourn
I watched my mother fall in love in the fluorescent hell of a hospital room on a summer afternoon. Not with a man — those days were long behind her — but with seven pounds of new humanity that had nothing to do with me. Her weathered hands, mapped with blue veins that had carried my same blood for decades, trembled as they cradled my friend’s newborn. She didn’t just hold that child; she consumed it with her eyes, breathed it into her lungs, pressed it against the hollow space in her chest where dreams of grandchildren had lived for years.
I stood frozen, a voyeur to her most naked desire. The air between us thickened with all she wouldn’t say and all I couldn’t promise. When she finally looked up, our eyes locked, and in that single unguarded moment, I saw everything:
Her hope, my inadequacy, the unborn generations hanging in the balance between us.
Your Womb Is Not My Tomb
The yellow nursery existed only in her imagination, but she’d described it so often I could see it too. Lemon-colored walls, white furniture, the rocking chair her father had built that sat in her attic wrapped in plastic. “Your children will love it,” she’d say, so casually confident in my reproductive future that questioning it felt like blasphemy.
