I hope you’ve reached safely and are doing fine. I can only hope and pray, as I have never been to the neighbourhood I have sent you to. How are things there? Have you seen the sunrise yet? How’s the food? Have you made friends? Do write to me some time.
I am at work now, but I felt like talking to you. I want to tell you so many things, but I’m not sure words will be enough to explain how much I miss you. Even though you were with me for a very short time.
I used to hear people say the best things happen when you least expect it. The very moment when I first experienced your presence inside me, I couldn’t share with anyone how happy I was. All my life I have been very alone. I would ask God for someone to call of my own, someone who would be obligated to be my side till the day ends, someone whose world would revolve around mine, someone I would open my eyes to every morning, that one face I will see before I die.
Being a mother is the best feeling in this world.
You used to talk to me through my veins. I bet you are as demanding as your father, as impatient. You remember the times when you were hungry and drove me crazy for cheesecake in the middle of the night? And the day when I could eat nothing but Hyderabadi biriyani to save my life? The number of times I went crazy for a bite of Hershey’s cookies & cream or just a slice of pizza bolognese.
I used to eat like an elephant whenever you started jumping inside out of hunger, only for you to decide that you didn’t like the food and kicked to make me throw up! You were gradually taking over each stratum of my soul, my body, my ovaries. Just like your father: Too imperious, too challenging.
Now I know you have such a short fuse, but sometimes you should have worked with mommy, no? Like that morning when I skipped breakfast and you decided to make a fuss right in the middle of a meeting and mommy had to go faint. Just like your father: Too tenacious.
Yet, every crazy craving, every heavy-handed bout of nausea just increased my love for you, knowing that I was actually heading forward with a life carried inside me. My dear boy, I don’t know why sometimes it is so hard to keep the best things hidden. Meanwhile, I was furious -- and scared too. I was no longer in any contact with your father. Your father fell back in love with one of his old friends and decided to cut me off his life way before I diagnosed your existence.
Yes, son, I was never married to your father. But trust me; even though you emerged unplanned, my love for you was no less than any mother. I tried to tell your father that you were coming, but couldn’t reach him the first five weeks. He blacked me out from everywhere. There were times when I felt like running away from the country to live with you, where a label of an “unmarried mother” is not a great sin. But I couldn’t. The world is a very hard place. And people, even harder.
To what extent could I have saved you from all the names people would call you? I admit, it was my fault that I didn’t take proper precaution and paved the way for you to enter this world. I feel like a bad person for becoming too intimate with your father before marriage and letting all this happen. I was 25, with no financial security to promise you a life worth living without a father figure. I was helpless. Your mommy is not strong enough to fight alone against everything, you know?
When you formed as an embryo in seven weeks, your father decided to help me with an abortion through his girlfriend. I wanted to share my inner thoughts and desires to keep you in my life with your father, but he didn’t communicate with me directly, instead sending his girlfriend to help. Mommy was so scared to get you labelled as a counterfeit child that she decided to go for the procedure as papa didn’t even leave the option to talk about anything.
Then that unusual day happened. It was a very rare occasion that brought these two women together that day. Two women, who absolutely have nothing in common but a man, a mutual love for the same man, your father. It was a getaway call for a love trio.
Once in a blue moon, it happens in this Earth, when a love turns a woman too frantic, too passionate, too Delphic, too unthinkable to believe. Your father’s girlfriend medicated me with Misoprostol (RU486) pills, a non-surgical method to send you back where you came from. She asked for you and your father in exchange of 12 pills which were inserted inside a seven-week-old unwed mother.
It was not the RU486 dissolved in my ovary that night. There, in the $72 a night deluxe suite where she medicated me, a seven-week-old-unwed mother was getting dissolved. In the dark of a pale mid-night, a forlorn soul was getting dissolved. In the ivory of clustered love, an untold story was getting dissolved. There, in a galaxy far away, my worst fear was getting dissolved. There, in the bleeding mistakes, my pride was getting dissolved.
I bled for 36 hours inhumanly in a hotel room your father paid for to get over with this trouble of unwanted pregnancy. I was alone, and it was only you who were still talking to me through my veins. I was craving for a hug from your father, a little touch to help me cope with the cramps going through my body. But as the dawn showed up, no one was there.
It was then that I suddenly I felt strong. I felt like I had overcome my worst fear of being criticised or pained.
I decided to buckle up, to bring you into this world. Maybe the hormones were giving me the courage to think of the unthinkable. I finally got the courage to pay a visit to a doctor without thinking of all the bad comments and judgments I may receive for being an unwed mother. This was the time I saw you for the first time in the 3D sonography.
You were there, safe, untouched, and unaware of how my idiocy almost smashed you off with oozed blood.
The doctor judged me for having pre-marital sex, lectured me for not being cautious. The sonographer lady sympathised with me, but somewhere in my heart I know I didn’t want to let you go anymore. I would fight and do whatever it took to shape a life for you. I would show your father, my family, and society that we both survived despite all that had occurred.
The concluding part of this long form will be published tomorrow.