Girls Like Me by Nina Packebush

Author:Nina Packebush
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: YOUNG ADULT FICTION - LGBT
Publisher: Bedazzled Ink Publishing
Published: 2017-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

MOM PULLED UP to the Women’s Clinic, “Ready?”

“No.”

“It’ll be okay, sweetie.”

I doubted that.

We walked through the polished glass doors into a lavender room filled with overstuffed chairs in various pastel colors. The walls were covered in watercolor paintings of mothers and babies, most of them sitting in soft focus flower gardens. We made our way to the check-in counter. The thin woman behind the desk smiled at Mom.

“Hello,” she chirped.

Mom returned her smile. “My daughter has an appointment at one-thirty with Dr. McCanne. Amanda Logan.” As Mom said this, I realized that I should probably be the one to be checking in. I suppose that would be the grown-up mom thing to do, but I stayed silent.

The receptionist’s gaze shifted from my mom to me. Her smile melted into stern judgment. The woman looked me up and down, her eyes resting just a moment too long on my chopped up, scraggly hair—which had grown out into some sort of mad scientist style of a disaster—before moving down to my watermelon belly sticking out under the men’s shirt. She handed me a clipboard and pen. “Please fill this out and return it to me when you’re finished.” Her voice was hard.

Mom put her hand on my back as we made our way to two empty chairs. The room was filled with women, some with brand new infants in car seats, some with swollen bellies. A few had, what I assumed to be, husbands sitting next to them. All were much older than I was. I felt their eyes on me as we passed them.

“This sucks,” I whispered to Mom. “I feel like a freak.”

“I know, baby. I’ve been there. Just try to ignore them.”

I filled out the paperwork and returned it to the desk.

I heard a little boy say, “Mommy is that boy gonna have a baby?”

My fingers dug in. It didn’t bother me that he thought I was a boy because sometimes I totally felt like a boy, what bothered me is that girls like me didn’t fit into this heteronormative, middle class, shiny white world. I was too queer, too poor, too much in the middle of the gender binary, and too young. Did my baby even stand a chance?

I made my way back to my seat, flopped down, and picked up one of the parenting magazines from the small table next to us. A blond mom and her blond son smiled back at me. Today’s Most Amazing Moms was the feature story followed by 14 Totally Awesome Breakfast Hacks for Toddlers to Teens and Disneyland Planning Made Easy.

I flipped through the pages. All the moms looked straight and, if not rich, definitely not poor. They were all at least ten years older than me with husbands and houses and all the other things that you were supposed to have to make sure your kids turned out okay. I would never be any of these women that smiled back at me and my baby would never be one of these kids.

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