I Don't Want Your Pink Balloons

Clara took a deep breath to gather herself—well, as deep a breath as she could manage given her compressed lungs—and for inner strength, she visualized a sumo wrestler slapping his legs to stimulate chi before a match.

Inner Warrior, arise! She thought fiercely, giving her cheeks a couple of quick slaps and shaking her head to wake herself into focus.

The sound of the cheek-slaps drew the attention of Marsha, who was sitting in the driver's seat. She turned to look at Clara with an amused expression and said, "You ready?"

"Not really," Clara admitted.

"Well, let's get it over with, shall we?"

Marsha got out of the car and came around to open Clara's door. With effort, Clara swung her legs through the opening, then shimmied her butt to the edge of the seat and managed to heave herself onto her feet, not without the aid of pushing against the car door for leverage.

Breathless already, she began to follow Marsha up the walkway to the house. She held her pregnant belly protectively with both hands as she shuffled along the icy path, which had been sprinkled liberally with sand to prevent today's guests from slipping.

There was a grouping of pink balloons tied to the rail of the front porch, and Clara shuddered inwardly. They were her mother's doing, she knew.

When was Janet Foster going to enter the twenty-first century and shed her notions of gender stereotypes? Clara asked herself with rhetorical exasperation. She knew the answer: never.

In a flash of remembrance she pictured the collection of frilly little dresses she herself had been paraded around in as a small child. She'd never felt comfortable in them, preferring the pants and shorts that her brothers had been allowed to wear. She'd watched the boys with envious longing as they climbed trees and rode their bikes effortlessly, while she struggled with the hindrance of excess fabric and lace that would snag on branches and get bunched up between her legs. On those occasions when her underpants were unavoidably exposed as she turned cartwheels and walked on her hands in the yard, she would endure her mother's looks of reproach, and the tutting of her unimpressed tongue.

The thrill of doing the acrobatics was worth it.

At the front door of the house, Marsha was already ringing the bell. A split-second later Clara's aunt Betty swung open the door and said, "You're on time for once!"

She must have been standing right behind the door with her hand already of the knob, or at the very least, hovered just above it, Clara decided.

"Aunt Betty! Thanks for having us," Marsha said cheerfully, "We brought chocolate chip cookies."

"You remembered my favourite!" Aunt Betty rewarded both women with a broad smile, revealing flecks of fuschia lipstick on her two front teeth. Then she waved a friendly arm, gesturing them inside.

"Almost everybody's already here," Betty informed them, "They're taking refreshments in the kitchen."

"Taking refreshments? Where are we, Downton Abbey?" Clara whispered to Marsha as she shrugged off her coat.

Marsha chuckled, "Come on, Clare. Lighten up. I think it's kinda cute the way your aunt gets all Old-English-y whenever she's hosting a party. She's just excited, right?"

Clara rolled her eyes and said, "Let's just hope she doesn't clink her glass and give us all an unbearable lecture this time."

Betty meant well, and loved to offer toasts at any gathering, but her meandering stories and sense of humour were usually lost on her audience.

My aunt is the epitome of awkward, Clara thought.

"Are you kidding?" Marsha said with a coy smile, "I can't wait to hear it. Your aunt has high entertainment value."

The house was festooned with every manner of baby shower paraphernalia imaginable. There were twists of paper garland pinned up in lazy swoops, a banner with "congratulations" spelled out in prancing unicorns, themed napkins set alongside trays of delicate cookies and tiny sandwiches, bunches of helium-filled balloons—all pink, of course—tied to chairs and at intervals along the banister leading up the stairs. Even Aunt Betty's small Pomeranian had been adorned with a floating balloon, tied with golden string to her collar. The dog wagged her tail enthusiastically, seemingly on board with her personal décor. She trotted around the room with a happy grin, sniffing gift bags and ankles and licking up the odd dropped crumb, the pink balloon tagging along at head-height a foot or so behind.

Heads turned and smiles broke out as Clara entered the kitchen. She was bombarded with hugs and congratulations, and several hands reached out to stroke her protruding belly. After the greetings, Aunt Betty directed everybody into the living room.

"Where's Mom?" Clara asked as people took their seats.

"Oh, she's running a bit late," Aunt Betty waved a dismissive hand, "Don't worry honey, she'll be here."

Clara had only a brief moment to consider how she felt about her mother's uncharacteristic tardiness to her own daughter's baby shower, before she felt the press of her aunt's hand on her shoulder—gentle-yet-firm—forcing her down into the Chair of Honour (for so it was written on the back rest). Clara hadn't noticed it until this very moment, and the sight was a distraction. It was so buried beneath gaudy piles of bows and ribbons that it could barely be recognized as a dining room chair. Curls of bright, scratchy colour crowded in on Clara as she sat down. She did her best to hide her irritation.

Is Janet trying to kill me, or what? She thought.

After all these years of knowing me, my whole life, how could she think I would enjoy this? How could she not know how much I hate ALL of this?

Clara began to feel the prick of angry tears in her eyes, and she blinked them back.

Obviously, she doesn't know me at all. She never cared enough to know who I really am.

She felt Marsha's hand squeeze her own, and the gesture reassured her. Marsha was sitting in the chair beside hers, which Clara noticed was also heavily endowed with gift-wrapping frippery.

Two Chairs of Honour, Clara thought. Well, at least that's something. At least she's acknowledged that Marsha's going to be a mother, too.

When Clara had first brought Marsha home and introduced her as her girlfriend, her mother had hidden her shock with the well-practiced politeness of her upbringing.

"Nice to meet you, Marsha," she'd said, and a few minutes later she had given her apologies, saying she had a headache and would need to cut the visit short. On the next occasion, Clara's mom introduced Marsha to her aunt Betty as "Clara's good friend."

Clara hadn't corrected her, and their relationship had entered into a "there's-an-elephant-in-the-room" era, which only now seemed to be disintegrating. Marsha and Clara's deciding to have a baby together was too much of a development to look past, and Janet seemed to be looking forward to meeting her grandchild.

Marsha wanted to be the one to carry their baby, but had been unable to conceive. After months of failed attempts at invitro pregnancy, and even a few rounds of trying it "the old fashioned way" with a mutual friend, Clara offered to be the birth mother.

She had become pregnant with the first invitro attempt.

Growing up, she'd never thought she would have a baby herself, having never really identified with her feminine biology. The maternal drive that so many of her friends had experienced was something she could not easily relate to.

So here she was now, her eight-months-along belly protruding before her obnoxiously as she tried to get comfortable in the mother-to-be Chair of Honour, surrounded by yards of her least favourite colour.

Aunt Betty, still standing, cleared her throat, and Clara could see she was preparing to unleash a speech upon all those present in the room.

"Ahem!" She signaled, and the room quieted at once.

"Ladies, thanks for coming. As you know, Clara is having a baby!"

Polite applause and encouraging little whoops erupted from all the friends and relations seated around the living room.

Clara groaned inwardly.

Here she goes...

"For many years, we had given up hope. My sister Janet and I used to wonder what young man we might fix her up with when the time was right. But as you know, Clara is... different," Betty raised a meaningful eyebrow, then continued, "One day she brought Marsha home, and told us they were a couple. We were quite shocked, as you can well imagine, but to be honest it wasn't a complete surprise. Clara has always been a little tom-boyish so it's easy to see how it might come easy for her to wear the pants in a romantic relationship."

Somebody chuckled nervously, and a few women squirmed uncomfortably in their chairs. Some gave Clara sympathetic glances, others exchanged wide-eyed looks with one another, and still others averted their gazes entirely, searching the room for somewhere safe to look.

Clara's cousin Roberta seemed altogether oblivious to her mother's speech—either that or she'd learned over the years that it was sometimes best to tune her out—and continued to push brownies and lemon squares into her mouth at an unprecedented rate.

A coping strategy, Clara decided, watching Roberta with a mixture of awe and distaste as the desserts disappeared with barely a chew.

How many did she have on her plate to begin with? She wondered with fascination.

Betty continued, "I never thought I'd see the day Clara would be having a baby! We can all see that her breasts are large enough to produce what I'm sure will be a fair amount of milk, but I find it impossible to imagine Clara acting motherly, cleaning up diapers and such. Trust me, baby doo-doo is no fun. I remember your mother, Clara, scraping liquidy poop off your cloth diapers with a tablespoon before throwing the nappies into the wash. That poop looked exactly like seedy mustard."

Marsha put down the square of ham sandwich that had been halfway to her mouth, and placed her napkin on top of her plate.

"Babies poop A LOT," Aunt Betty continued to inform her listeners, "but the good news is you can get waste receptacles now that basically shrink-wrap the dirty diapers, so you needn't catch even a whiff of them after the initial cleaning, of course. Also, there are little containers that heat up your wet wipes, so that no baby ever has to endure a cold bum washing."

Somebody needs to stop this, Clara thought. It shouldn't have to be me, but who else is going to do it?

She stood up with effort.

"Aunt Betty," she said, "Thanks for your warm introduction. How about we move onto the gifts now?"

"Shortly, Clara. I wanted to say a quick word about the benefits of modern nipple ointment."

The woman seated next to Betty coughed, and the force of it made the plate slip from her lap, spilling her small collection of tarts and sandwiches onto the floor. Aunt Betty's small dog hurried over to help with the clean-up, and her trailing balloon bopped her owner in the face, effectively delaying the next chapter of her monologue.

At that moment, Clara's mother Janet stepped into the living room.

"Hello everybody! Sorry I'm late. The seamstress I hired really left it to the last minute to finish this."

She held up a sparkly gift bag, and started towards the Moms-to-be.

Clara, already standing, moved to the side so that Marsha was more in-line to receive the proffered gift. But Janet handed it directly to her.

Looking around the room, Clara saw a dozen pairs of eyes fixed on her, waiting expectantly. She took the gift bag that Janet held out to her, and began to remove the tissue paper sticking out the top.

"Wait!"

It was Aunt Betty, hurrying towards them. She removed the frilly magenta bow attached to the bag and quickly affixed it to a paper plate. Clara saw there were already two long strands of ribbon coming down from opposite sides of the plate, and too late she realized what they were for. In a flash, Aunt Betty expertly tied the makeshift party hat onto her niece's head.

She just loves to torture me, Clara couldn't help gritting her teeth a bit as she watched her aunt back away with a pleased look on her face.

Clara opened the top of the bag and peered inside. Her insides clenched as she recognized a swath of familiar fabric, with tiny pink flowers on a pale white background, from one of the dresses she had worn as a child.

She remembered this one. It was the outfit she'd been wearing the day she'd fallen from the maple tree in the back yard and broken her arm. At the hospital, her mother had scolded her more than once, saying that if she only behaved like a proper little girl this sort of thing wouldn't happen.

Finally, Clara had enough and yelled out right in the middle of the waiting room, "If you just let me wear pants like Jimmie and Howard this never would have happened!"

Janet had been mortified into silence by her daughter's outburst, and Clara got the silent treatment until they got home.

Clara had no idea her mother had kept the garment all this time, and a mix of emotions stirred within her as she reached into the bag to pull out the dress.

Nostalgia for seeing something she had all but forgotten about, a piece of her childhood.

Anger that her mother would have the audacity to give it to her as a baby shower gift, with the memory attached.

Sadness at the thought that her family would never truly accept her for who she was.

Then, as she shook out the folds of the dress to see it in full, she noticed it was different than she remembered. Instead of a skirt making up the lower half, there was now a set of pants. The dress had been altered, essentially transformed into a tiny set of overalls.

"I thought maybe your little girl might like to climb trees, like you did when you were small," Janet spoke quietly.

Clara couldn't think of what to say, so she just stood staring at the little piece of clothing, a gift from her mother, for her own daughter.

Marsha spoke up, "Thank you, Janet."

Clara's mom turned to Marsha and replied, "You're welcome honey. And please, call me Mom."