Motherhood is a Fiction

It wasn’t until some months later, around March 2021, that I started to realize I am a “someone”. A human with some functions working in my body, and a self capable of expression. However, in the last quarter of 2020, under the weird rainy season of September, my eyes, ear, nose, and mouth were opened to the world for the first time. At that time, I felt my blood rushing to my head, and my feet were caught by a stickiness that was apparently the doctor’s gloved hand covered in specks of blood.

I was fine with stickiness at that time. I felt nothing wrong with it. But I would grow to become sensitive to it over time. Grains of sand on damp skin, egg whites just cracked out of their shell, and all kinds of mushy substances like glue or chicken porridge, however good they tasted, would feel wrong to me. It would take some years for me to learn to live alongside the mushiness of this world and enjoy the world’s offerings beyond its tactile qualities.

I was still hazy, I said nothing about the weird attach-detach sensation I am feeling until I was startled by the doctor’s strong pat on my buttock and back. I could hear myself loudly crying then, but still saw almost nothing I recognize. Blobs of black and white spectrum, like shadows upon a surface, were moving around me. Oh, what did I know about color? I had been happily half-dozing in pit darkness. Eyes closed for 41 weeks, simply sensing everything through pressures; Of air, fluid, blood, and emotion. Why did I choose to kick myself out of that pit, I wonder. Perhaps I had guzzled and bathed myself enough with oxytocin from around and within me to glide me down to meet the person I have created a love with. But half of it wasn’t my will. After 41 weeks, it just happened through bodily commands driven by pressure. Though who gave that pressure remains shrouded.

I was then swung and landed on the chest that bridge the set of my mother’s breast. Lain there for a few minutes before I was brought somewhere else to be cleaned and tucked into a tight swaddle. I heard her small voice saying hello and feel the friction of several fingers wrapping my body. I felt sleepy, and a little bit angry and confused. Feelings that perhaps I shared with her in the mid day of 22 September 2020.