What They Don’t Tell You by Laura Halferty
They don’t tell you that you’ll learn to dread the evenings after dinner. The darkening sky. The syringes laid out on the kitchen table. First, the tiny sharp needle with the drug that smells bitter. Then, the big, blunt needle with the drug that stings like ice water.
They don’t tell you that these drugs will make you feel like you’re walking through thick, white noise. That your body will become clumsy and bloated and your brain slow and clouded — a stupid, lumbering mammal.
They don’t tell you that you’ll hate your doctor’s office. The New Age music, the flyers for yoga classes, the books on meditation scattered artfully across expensive coffee tables. And the oppressive mantra, an unspoken fervent undercurrent: It will happen if you just believe.
They don’t tell you that a nurse will shove a cold, hard wand with an electric eye inside you three times a week, ramming it around while she frowns at an image on a computer screen that’s as dark and quiet as a crypt.
They don’t tell you that the closest thing you’ll ever get to a picture of your own child is a digital image of a misfit, loner egg and a well-adjusted, healthy sperm coerced together by a lab assistant in a pathetic parody of a blind date.
They don’t tell you that one day you’ll find yourself at a family gathering and you’ll look around at these happy, laughing people and realize that you’re the only one in the room who doesn’t have kids and never will. And you’ll feel an isolation so acute that your brain will seize and stutter on a scrap of remembered poetry: I should have been a pair of ragged claws I should have been a pair of ragged claws I should have been a pair of ragged claws …
They don’t tell you that you’ll end up divorcing your husband because being a defective disappointment is worse than being alone.
They don’t tell you that the world is, in fact, full of mothers and you better fucking get used to it.
They don’t tell you that one slushy Sunday afternoon at a skating rink, just as you begin to test out a tenuous sort of happiness, to trust in weightless gliding again, the skaters around you will melt and blur and the tears will come faster than you can get off the ice. You’ll fumble with your knotted laces, and stumble to the safety of your car. You were supposed to teach your kids to skate. Like your dead father taught you.
They don’t tell you that every single day for the rest of your life there will be at least one moment just like this one — a sharp, sudden pain there to remind you.
No, they don’t tell you any of this.
And they don’t tell you that one day, so far in the future that it seems improbable, all the things they didn’t bother to tell you will stop mattering so much.
Laura Halferty teaches creative writing, cultural studies, and literature at the State University of New York at Oswego. Her flash fiction has been published in Blink: Stories in the Blink of an Eye, Women Behaving Badly: Feisty Flash Fiction Stories (International Edition), and Feminista: The Journal of Feminist Construction; her flash memoir work has been published in Rawboned; and a number of my pieces on pop culture have been published in PopMatters.
