Member-only story
The Woman Whose Future I Didn’t Want
And how she influenced the woman I became
“Unlike you, Dorothy, I want a life. I don’t wanna shrivel up and die an old maid.”
It was cruel, and I knew it was. But at the time, I thought she needed to hear it.
I might have only been a teenager compared to Dorothy nearing thirty, but I’d been watching, afraid of ending up like her.
The fear of becoming an old maid had started in childhood, reinforced by the card game we played, where the loser was the one left holding the Old Maid card. And it became even more real when an elderly, never-married boarder came to live in our house. My mother pointed to her as an example of the worst thing that could happen to a woman.
I didn’t want to grow up and become an old maid like Dorothy.
Dorothy had been part of my life since I’d been a toddler. Not as a big sister or a relative, but as part of our household. She wasn’t a boarder who paid to live with us; instead, she earned her keep by doing what my parents wanted and I saw how that made her into who she didn’t want to be.
As a child, I didn’t know that at thirteen she’d run away from home to live with her boyfriend, a man in his twenties, at his parents’ house. His mother was my mother’s aunt. When Dorothy…
