Daily Story 61 - Looking Back, Part 5

So things went well for a while. Or, as well as they could have gone. I got out, explored Europe, did what I felt like doing. I was mostly living on my own at that point, and it was fine. But then my mom decided she wanted to try again. She got pregnant once more. And she didn’t appreciate me sharing my concerns.

I didn't bother trying to argue with her after a while. It was pretty obvious she wasn't going to change her mind, so it became a waiting game. Each day that passed that she didn't go into labor was a relief. See, our kind's pregnancies take around two months longer than normal humans', so the age of viability - when you can be pretty sure the baby won't need a fuckton of medical care just to survive - comes at around seven and a half months instead of six. I was born seven months after conception. My first sister, Molly, was born after six, and Finn was born after six and a half.

The fourth baby came out after five and a half.

I guess I forgot to mention that my mom had a very specific idea of her ideal family. She wanted a loving husband who stood by her no matter what, a house with a fenced-in yard, and she wanted one of each - a boy and a girl. When she married my dad, she got a disagreeable husband, a dead baby, and me, a disorder-ridden neurotic wreck who can't even make it through a simple dinner party without looking like an ass. This time around, though, she got a husband she gets along with and a perfectly normal baby boy, so it stands to reason that she'd want to complete her perfect little family. Oh, except she still has me. Talk about putting a wrench in your plans.

So she and her little baby girl end up in intensive care. The doctors tell us that it's not worth getting our hopes up, the baby hadn't developed enough to survive outside the womb and mom probably wouldn't ever wake up again. She didn't just have a rough pregnancy, she had it before she'd fully recovered from the last one. And she knew. She fucking knew that it could kill her, but I guess she really needed to have her perfect family.