Motherhood is a Fiction

After the day I heard my own voice for the first time, my surroundings started to feel different. I used to be in a constant buoyant sensation. A sensation that might be similar to being brought around within a cupped hand. I still felt cupped with being swaddled for a while but the buoyancy was often exchanged with hard surfaces as I was placed on a bed for babies, scales, bathtub, carpet, and even a dining table. Some of the buoyancy left was felt when I was lifted off the surface, to be cuddled, to be sun-drenched, to be wondered upon while called “sayang”. Sayang means dear or baby in the Indonesian language. The kind of calling I would hear often from my mother, and our extended family.

Two people who wondered upon me so much in those very few early days were my parents. I think they wondered so much about my facial features since they often stroke my cheeks, chin, and my brows. Questioning whose facial traits between them I carry most. They wondered about the brightness of my general aura and my three hair whorls. And as the doctor said, “She was born with a tooth,” they wondered about my natal tooth like it was a signifier of a special human I would become to be. They wondered aplenty, although not as much as how they wondered about their own new life and how to navigate it.

They’re not alone. I wondered too, why did I start becoming thirsty and hungry? why would I begin to poo and pee so much? why did I cry 80% of the time and feel sleepy 100% of the time? Why did sometimes a teardrop on my skin? When I wasn’t swaddled, I wondered where I get my newfound space to move. I didn’t call it a freedom in those early days, because I never felt constrained before inside the body of my mother. I felt enough within my limitation, sufficed within my simple space.

After a short while, I heard a few doctors concluded some health aspects of my new body: I wasn’t too “yellow”, my ears and eyes were normal and each is a set of two, my fingers were complete, and I had a lip and tongue tie— and the doctors whispered to my mother that she can’t do tie surgery at the hospital. The whisper was as wispy as the wind to the point my mother thought it wasn’t that serious. It wasn’t for some people, but it was for her and me.

She didn’t know that I barely replenished my thirst and hunger. Her breasts were there like an oasis within a locked dome. The lock was in my lip and tongue. “Oh, you’re going home already?” Said the nurses. Before long the temperature felt different in every few dozen minutes. Temperatures of a humid, wet, a little bit cold, and a too warm climate. The temperatures of a country with monsoons and countless beaches. A paradise they said. To be exact, the temperatures of a city packed and scrambled with more than 10 million people at daylight with one additional human infant that was born a few days ago: Me.