Just Like Mother

by Anne Heltzel

It was May 7: the twenty-fifth anniversary of the raid on the Mother Collective. I’d celebrated my eighth birthday that same day. How had I forgotten?

“I really hadn’t planned to start like this. I’m a little vulnerable, I guess. Oh, hell. I may as well just be candid. I lost my daughter five years ago.”

“Well, it sort of is just what you do,” Emily replied. “Right? It’s the greatest power we’ve been given as women. It’s what we were made to do.” “Like I said, skeletons,” Micah broke in, shaking his head. “This is probably why you don’t have a partner.”

Like are you fucking serious right now?!

“Whether you’re religious or not,” Emily barreled on, “you can’t deny the science of pregnancy and childbirth is semi-miraculous and incredibly empowering. It’s one thing if a woman can’t physically have children. Obviously those situations are tragic. But to deny your body its natural right when you’re able to have them sounds … confused, at best.”

It was at this point i wanted to put the book down!

“I know you don’t want to have a baby of your own, Mae, and I respect that,” Andrea went on. “But what if you gave one of your eggs to us? To me and Rob?”

Wtf yall aint be back in each other life for a year you already making a very serious request! but then again she asked for an egg, not for her to carry the baby so i guess ill let it pass

The way you just appeared in my life out of nowhere—poof—made me think there was a reason for it.

Smh

When she turns thirteen in a couple more years, she will receive the ritual and become a Mother. It is the greatest privilege, the only way to know love, says Mother with the red hair. It is the fundamental reason for life.

the mere act of not wanting a baby is wrong. It’s almost akin to rejecting ourselves, because we have to reject a fundamental part of our womanhood in order to reject having children.” “I don’t agree,” I said carefully.

“I want that.” Just not your version of that. More like a cute one bedroom apartment and a nice nest egg, and sure, maybe a partner, if the right one came along. But maybe not. “Maybe you’re looking for something that doesn’t exist,”

I don’t think a man is the answer to all my problems. I don’t want to be less happy just for the sake of not being alone.”

Emily didn’t seem to love Micah so much as tolerate his company. She was the powerful one; everything revolved around her. And it seemed like she was perfectly happy with that arrangement.

“I honestly think he’s so afraid of losing me that his erection would wither at the sight of another woman.”

He smiled, his eyes catching mine and making me blush. “That’s so sweet of you,” Andrea said, with a pointed look in my direction. The look read, We’ve found your future husband.

This is a set up!

“New developments have surfaced in the case concerning the Mother Collective, a Vermont-based commune colloquially referred to as the ‘cult of motherhood.’ As the excavation of the grounds has continued since the cult’s raid last May, four bodies in varying states of decomposition have been recovered. All have been identified as male. Of the two victims originally found in critical condition, one has been released from the hospital. Five women who self-identify only as ‘Mother’ are standing trial, and two of their legal identities have been confirmed. One, a forty-three-year-old woman named—”

I had some semblance of the stability I’d lacked my whole life and tried so hard to find … and all it had taken was opening my heart and trusting the people around me, the simple acknowledgment that I didn’t have to go it alone. What had I been trying all those years to prove?

damn sis are you dumb or are you dumb wtf did emily say!

Andrea had taught me that connectivity was everything. How had she learned it, in bouncing from foster family to foster family? How had she been so much more enlightened than I, when I was the one who had abandoned her and had by all accounts come out on top, at least in childhood?

My heart was thrumming erratically. It was impossible to distinguish panic from pleasure. “Sorry,” I whispered, tears crowding the edges of my eyes. He didn’t bother to respond. It was a sick, twisted game he was playing, and I liked it.

GIRL!!!! rape rape

It was only when he came inside me, hot and pulsing, that I realized two things: I had never come that intensely with Ryan, not once; and Tyler hadn’t been wearing a condom.

That was Rob who rapped you and you dont even know it smfh

“Maybe next time you move a little slower,”

No this bitch did!

“She’s awake,” one of them shouted in the direction of the hallway. She tucked a NewLife doll close to her chest, crooning and swaying as if rocking it to sleep. There were heavy footsteps in the hallway, and a man burst into the room, flicking on the overhead light. Rob.

Damn it was at this point that i realized that this is probably how Emily got pregnant?!

Andrea performed the Feeding three times per day for three days. During the ritual, my gag was removed only for the time it took to swallow ragged chunks of the placenta she’d frozen after Olivia’s birth and thawed for me now, believing it would make us one. Believing it would somehow make the thing inside me more hers as it grew. More like her dead baby.

Fuck no!

It did discriminate, though, I realized. It celebrated womanhood only as it pertained to a working uterus. It excluded trans and nonbinary people, men, people who couldn’t have kids or didn’t want to. It was the antithesis of inclusive, the opposite of feminist.

The author was stretching with this one