flashquake Fiction - Motherhood by Jonette Stabbert

flashquake
Motherhood
by Jonette Stabbert

Visitors to my home could never quite accept that both my children learned to bark before they could speak. My dog was very attentive to them. In fact, the dog was probably a better mother than I was, although I had been prepared to nurse her one puppy, delivered by Caesarian around the time of the birth of my first child. Woofie had at first failed to respond to sucking prompts from her infantile canine, but eventually allowed it to latch onto a nipple. I pumped off my extra milk and used it to make pancakes on weekends, which the family raved about, until they learned about the secret ingredient. This made my brother and father angry with me for years.

Whenever family visited, they found it unnerving to hear varying yips, yaps, barks and howls emanating from the crib, instead of the common baby sounds like "oo-uh" and "mama" and "papa." They felt uncomfortable about our plans for more children. It is fashionable nowadays to stop once you have "one of each," meaning a boy and a girl. They didn’t like it when I told them we were trying for a cat this time.