[ WP ] Step on a crack , break a mother 's back

Life is really unfair to mothers. From the moment young girls hit puberty, their bodies are racked with pain, their days inconvenienced once a month until they become pregnant. After that, it's 9 months of all sorts of horrible things that would make Alexander the Great whine like a baby until this helpless parasite shoots out her private parts. After that, she's stuck with this leech for the next 18 years or so, giving up her life and her identity for this thing. 
 
 Mothers have become some sort of monolithic entity, no longer individuals. Mothers are no longer people, merely backgrounds for jokes and occasional praise from some athlete or celebrity. 
 
 And now this. Now this curse, by or from whom no one knows, has made mothers the target. It's bad enough mothers are society's butt-monkeys. It's totally random. No one knows which mother's back will be broken when someone dares to step on a crack. 
 
 It's nice that the government has finally done something about the state of the roads and sidewalks, you know, in between the wars and money-making ventures and things like that. It's really nice, but that does n't stop some dumb kid, either as a joke or completely by accident, from stepping on a damn crack. 
 
 And now, here I am in the hospital, unable to move. I ca n't talk, I ca n't speak. I ca n't communicate in any way. Just stuck here with my thoughts, just me, over and over again. I ca n't afford one of those computer thingies, like what Hawking has. Single moms ca n't afford that kind of shit. All because some asshole stepped on a crack. 
 
 My sons, now adults, talk over my body, limp in the hospital bed. They speak of putting me out of my misery. They speak of overcrowded hospitals, filled with broken mothers who have a better chance than I do - many are much younger. I hear them say these things, but what they mean is that I am a burden. They do n't think of my burdens. They do n't think of the pain and misery I've had to go through first as a girl, then as a woman and after that as a mother. They think only of themselves. That is fine. I have nowhere else to go. Nothing left to do. I have done my part. And in then end, when they write in that little section of the newspaper about what I did in my life, they can save money on print as it reads `` Charlene Rose, mother of 2, died Thursday afternoon. She will be missed.''
