At the end of the first week at my new job, Tina from Sales makes me go to a lunchtime baby shower with her. I can’t think of many things that could be worse–maybe a pap smear, maybe a water park, maybe a plane crash–but she tells me I have to go, that it’ll make a good impression.
There are about twenty women in the conference room, which is decorated with blue streamers and blue balloons. Some are seated already, a semi-circle with the mom-to-be in a rocking chair at the front, but most are at the potluck table.
We get in line behind Carla from Communications, who is filling her plate with desserts.
‘She’s just glowing,’ Tina says to me, looking at the expectant mother, who I think works in Finance. ‘I just love babies,’ she says, and I scoop something from the bowl in front of me onto my plate. The table is covered in all things boy: trucks, trains, cars, baseballs, airplanes. ‘Look how happy she is,’ she says, and tucks her chin to her shoulder like she’s cuddling herself.
I’m not sure she’s glowing, but she does seem happy to be having a baby.
We only have 30 minutes for lunch, so a woman with curly hair who I think works in Marketing tells us all to have a seat and says we’re going to play a game called Funny Story. She goes over the rules: the mom-to-be will pull a name out of a bonnet, and the person whose name is pulled has to tell a quick funny story about being a mom, or, she says, if she isn’t a mother, then she should tell a funny story about her own mother, or, she says, laughing, if she isn’t a mother and doesn’t have a mother, then she can tell any funny story that has a mother in it. At the end, the mother-to-be will choose the funniest story.
I’m relieved no one knows me yet, that my name won’t have made it into the bonnet because I never RSVP’d. I’m probably the only one in the room who is not a mother, who doesn’t have a mother, who doesn’t want to be a mother, who is the Marketing woman’s worst-case scenario. I start to eat.
But the pregnant one, the one with the t-shirt that says BABY with an arrow pointing down, says my name. I look up, mouth full of broccoli salad. Everyone is staring at me. Tina winks.
I’ve never been good with people. I work in IT. But Tina smiles at me expectantly and I panic and start talking, telling the first story about mothers I can think of. I tell the room that when I was ten, my mother, who would die in childbirth a few years later, told me her family always knew when my grandmother was pregnant again because they would find her sitting at the top of the stairs, crying.
The Marketing woman puts her hand to her mouth.
I remember that it’s supposed to be a funny story, so I quickly clarify that she cried because she had fifteen children. ‘Fifteen,’ I repeat with a laugh. Everyone has stopped eating and I just keep going because they are all staring at me and there’s more to the story, so I tell them that after the 15th baby was born, before she was even crawling, they were honored for being good Catholics and flew to meet the Pope, and on the way back, just hours after being blessed, their plane crashed and everyone died. ‘Not the baby,’ I add quickly, because this is a baby shower, and I don’t want them to think I would tell a story where a baby died. ‘Just the parents. All fifteen kids stayed home,’ I say, and I realize that I should have said that part earlier.
Tina looks at her plate.
‘Here’s the funny part,’ I say, because that’s the point of the game, and though I may not be an extravert, I have seven siblings and equate competition with survival. As the timer goes off, I tell them, speaking quickly now so I don’t get disqualified, that nine of the fifteen kids became priests and nuns. I’m laughing now, because, come on, that’s funny, right? Not funny haha, but funny unexpected, funny fucking absurd.
The pregnant mother puts her right hand on her belly. She might be crying, but I look away before I can tell for sure.
The real funny thing, the thing I don’t say because my time is up, is that the baby, the 15th one, the one who wasn’t yet crawling when her parents crashed into the ocean, told me once–as we sat together at the top of the stairs on the morning of my tenth birthday–that she wished her mother had said, ‘Not without the baby,’ when she was invited to meet the Pope. Then she would have been just a beautiful photograph on the wall, a memory of a baby that, if not for tragedy, could have grown up to be anything, maybe a writer, maybe a doctor, maybe the owner of a bakery that made only pies. But instead, she told me, and she laughed, even though she was crying, she grew up to be a mother.
“Worst-Case Scenario” made me cringe, howl with laughter, and nod with knowing. This is clever social commentary on motherhood wrapped up in a hilarious bow.
Deesha Philyaw
An irreverent take on motherhood that raises poignant and heretical questions: does becoming a mother mean sacrificing one’s dreams? To poke at motherhood while being laugh-out-loud funny? Now, that’s a rare feat!
Avi Ben-Zeev
Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has appeared in The Sun Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, and X-R-A-Y Lit, and she has stories in the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Bath Flash, and Oxford Flash anthologies. You can read her work on her website (emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site) or follow her on X or IG (@emilyrinkema).
Business Stock photos by Vecteezy
Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 