Motherhood is a Fiction

So much uncharted water. After several apps downloaded, books with pregnant women on the cover skimmed through, and doula’s YouTube videos played on the background in my living room, I still haven’t covered more than 1% of the early motherhood territories. Knowing the whole world of motherhood seems like charting an expanding universe.

Usually, if you’re Asian, majority of the territories can be taught by the wisdom of a mother. Whether by our own mother or other mothers who’ve sailed the territories earlier than us new mothers. I’m an Asian, but a mother, that I don’t have. While other mothers and I, we’re like cats continuously observing each other’s gestures and taking note each others steps and responses for mysterious reasons. So, wisdom was tricky to get.

Much of the territories of motherhood were actually mapped within the fragile shifts of one anticipations around a happening to another. So to uncover some clarity to the world, mothers like I was just have to traverse through whatever coming towards us. And the moment I got out of the surgery room was one of those shifts.

“You’ll start feeling cold because your sedation will wear off. This blanket will keep you warm. When it gets too warm or you feel cold, call me,” Said the nurse before leaving me alone in the post-surgery room. It was 12 PM on Friday, I heard the loud Friday prayers as whispers. The room was big enough for 8 hospital beds, and one of the wall has large enough windows to let the sun eat away a patient’s gloom. But I was literally alone in the white post-surgery room and the silence was in competition with the sun to get the better of me. Too bad the sun had lost.

It never occured to me that a woman can be alone without her close ones, friends or relatives when in labor. The picture I gathered all my life was a swelling joy in a husband’s face and a momentuous change of character that happened in a labor room. But, alas, anything could happen. Even more so when pandemic with the scale of Covid-19 can happen.

My daughter came to the world without sensing the joy and cry of his father because no one but the doctors was allowed to enter the surgery room in the lockdown era of Covid-19. But my chest ache more with my imagination of a lost opportunity of a changed husband. From a husband that prefers to be busy with work than take a picture of a pregnant wife in her last moment of her pregnancy. From a husband that chose to raise voice to the loudest when felt burdened in the morning than swimming in the gentle current of life and hear his own misunderstandings. From a man that chose to say, “You should be grateful for this pregnancy, many other women can’t, even though they want a child,” to a woman coming from a moslem family that he hasn’t married yet.

These thoughts flooded the silent room for the 2 hours I spent there dozing and waking up over and over. The sun had probably lost because the silence had an ally. An ally which I nurtured and had grown for months, or probably years within me. It’s called Woman, and it was released from my body as it gets opened with the doctor’s knife. When my body has been stitched back, she remained outside, floating and fogging my thoughts. This Woman is a natural occurrence I never knew existed. Life is raw and full of wild cards but nothing beats the wild cards of women’s. The Woman out and about is one of those wild cards. Women are pulling those wild cards without an effort. Maybe that’s the reason why women are taught to control and compose themselves while men are set loose to become their wildest self.

Since that word came out of his mouth, there’s a rope of resentment tying my chest, intertwining my tongue, and lashing out to hurt back every now and then.

The white post-surgery room was an intro to a musical piece, and it ended with a very low note when I was moved to a dark alley, to wait and lain there alone for almost 2 hours without further notice. Ah, at least the Woman kept me company and kept my thoughts busy.