"Mother's Little Helper" • The Rolling Stones (by Erin Dawkins)

“I’m surprised it took you this long to ask.” My doctor clicks his pen and begins to scribble something on paper that only he and the person filling the prescription can decipher.

I chuckle nervously and unpeel my hands from each other, the perspiration thickened like glue during our conversation. I’ve read things, I tell him. 

“Could it be menopause?”

“But you’re only forty-two,” he says, as if removing the worry that a child might feel after a bad dream. 

I look back at him and press my tongue into the area below my lower lip, as if to showcase the acne, dry patches, and redness that have taken up residence on my chin. I feel the same ignominy about my chin the first time he examined me months earlier, following a ruptured cyst on my ovary, the ultrasound wand navigating through unkempt public hair that probably put me in the hall of records at the practice. 

“It’s my kids. I’m not good for them. I’m not good like this.” I told him.

He lifts the prescription pad and pushes it away from his face for one last look. Then he hands it to me. 

“Here’s something. It will take the edge off.” 

He tucks the pen into his coat pocket. “Mother’s Little Helper.”

I accept the slip of paper and stand up. “Can I ask you something? Why did you say you’re surprised it took me so long to ask?”

“Well, from what you’ve told me you have a pretty heavy load there.” At first, I thought he was talking about my hips that had expanded like two full suns on the horizon from the minute I turned forty. “You run a business, you have kids, sports, you teach, you volunteer, run marathons, run a household. Shall I go on?”

The ride to the pharmacy to pick up my prescription was similar to the way I felt on the way to the airport for vacation. It was filled with relief, and hope, and a promise of new memories our family would keep in their happy head banks. 

I just hoped it wasn’t too late. What if they couldn’t let go of the ‘me’ they knew? What if in their minds, sadness was a way of life? How would they know not to take on too much? Would they be able to find happiness without the expectation of loathing? 

I paced in front of the pick-up counter, picking at a thick piece of skin near my thumbnail. Though the pharmacist’s head was down, he was deliberate in his lethargy as he followed me back and forth with just a thin sliver of his eyes. 

“Ma’am.” He finally called me without announcing my name. “It’s ready.” 

“Questions?” he asked.

Behind me in line was an older woman, crumpling a piece of paper in both hands. I felt an explanation would have drawn disappointment from her.

What a wimp, she would think. I did this with twice the kids and half the help.

“No,” I replied. I picked up my bag and walked away from the counter.

Erin Dawkins (she/her) received her MA in English with a specialty in Creative Writing from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Her fiction has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine, Five Minute Lit, Half and One, Sky Island Journal, Still Here Magazine, Blood+Honey Lit Magazine and forthcoming in Mouthful of Salt, and others. In 2025, she received an Author's Fellowship from the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing.