12 Different Dresses

The problem wasn't that she'd spent the last three hours trailing around town, being herded into shops and forced into dressing rooms with piles of frills and lace and bows. No, the problem was that she was doing it all with her mother.

Monica hated the way she walked a few steps in front of her, only whipping her head around every so often to make sure her child was still following obediently behind, not wanting anyone to consider whether the two could possibly be related, never mind having them realise they were in fact mother and daughter.

She'd stare at the ground as she walked, her body slumped over to hide her face from everyone else – not that she'd make eye contact with any of them anyway, as no doubt they'd all be staring at her stomach, wondering how such a small child could have ballooned so big and whether she'd, in fact, eaten the family she seemed to lack as she walked through the town seemingly alone. She wished she'd had the confidence to continue walking, straight past the stores her mother dove in and away from her forever, but she knew if she was reported missing, it wouldn't' be difficult to find a short, dumpy child who couldn't tie her own shoelaces properly and cried if she wasn't home by tea.

Her mother would begin to acknowledge her again once inside the shelter of the store, snatching dresses off rails and throwing them into her arms until there was more material than Monica – something not actually that difficult when, in her eyes, the dresses looked more like huge tablecloths. Everything from their sheer size to the material screamed "vintage floral nightmare" and, if not locked away in the back of her wardrobe, would have been better off catching the crumbs at her grandmother's tea parties.

Things didn't improve inside the dressing rooms, either. She hated the feel of her mother's bony fingers digging into her back as she was pushed into the nearest cubicle, her mother drawing the curtain behind them and enclosing them in a space neither wanted to be in. Salty tears would prickle her eyes and she'd blink rapidly, trying to make sure the tears didn't fall on the dresses she was being stuffed into so as not to give her mother another reason to jeer. She was already hearing the "lifestyle suggestions" as her mother always referred to them as, her mother's hot breath tickling her ears as she hissed how large she was getting, how she wasn't going to look pretty for Ross' sixteenth birthday party if she didn't suck herself in and how the other girls would only laugh if her buttons popped or her zipper slipped.

"I'm only saying this for your own good, Monica", she'd say as she tried to stuff her daughter's limbs into various holes in the horrid garments. "You'll thank me for it when you're nice and thin."

She failed to see how a single word of what she was saying was for her own good, not when her self-confidence might as well have been non-existent. She let her arms droop down with her head, letting her mother continue to grab hold of her as if she was nothing more than a ragdoll, puppeteering her this way and that until she looked at least somewhat like the daughter she wanted her to be.