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No one longs for the trauma of being thrown into existence. We're thrown into it, anyways. It's a never-ending cycle of never asking for it and then having the audacity to bring someone else who didn't ask for it either.
It had been almost eight months since I decided to throw someone into existence against their nonexistent will and three and a half since I realized that, in the grand scheme of things, none of my mistakes truly mattered as long as my life met its end in due time. How naïve.
I remembered being thirteen and crying to my mom, screaming how much I hated life and how I didn't even ask to be born, maybe my karma was to come soon.
November 20, 2024, 7 a.m. I was alone and it was raining that morning, just like it had been for the two hundred seventy five days before that, but this time the rain was actually perceived by other people. My whole body hurt. Parenthood, motherhood especially, hurt; that's what I had learned from those months of grief, body aches, side glances charged with thinly-veiled disgust, doubt and expectation. Was it supposed to be better with time and age and a partner by your side? Or are mothers condemned to judgment and pain no matter what? If it's that so, then why? I didn't have it in me to ask my mom about that.
The rain was pouring outside. My abdomen, stretchmarked, swollen and heavy, tightened around itself with every sparse thunder as if slowly waking up the child inside, communicating that they would have to come out soon. That was also going to hurt, but even then it wouldn't be the greatest pain.
My mom arrived home late in the morning, already prepared for what was inevitably going to happen as if she knew it would happen that day. She had been seemingly ready for several weeks at that moment. Mothers were supposed to be ready for things beforehand but I wasn't, and at the moment I took that as a premature indicator of failure.
Pain kept increasing and the contractions, like the thunders, getting closer and closer. Some hours later my water broke, a gush of clear pinkish primigenial liquid dripping down my thighs and dampening my bedroom’s carpet.
In the absence of everyone else, in his absence, mom was by my side just like she had tried to be for the past three years. She held me tight against her chest, almost towering over me, and carried me to the bathroom to scrub off of my body all traces of dirt and mucus and amniotic fluid and impurity before reaching the hospital. At sixteen years old I had already reached my full height but I was still as short as I had been when I was fourteen. Sometimes my brain felt like I was still fourteen, sometimes existence glitched and I felt like I was forty. A grief induced brain short circuit and the strongest hormonal cocktail known to mankind was not a good combination.
As I laid in the bathtub, water fell from the shower and my mom scrubbed anywhere she could. Even in the process of becoming a mother myself I was her baby; that was what she told while rinsing my hair and smothering my forehead in kisses in a successful attempt to relieve the labor pains.
In the absence of everyone else, mom was the one who drove me to hospital.
In the absence of everyone else, mom was the one who wheeled me all the way inside the hospital.
In the absence of everyone else, mom was the one whose hand I crushed amidst the contractions as the hours stretched.
Around 10 p.m. the doctor told me to start pushing and with the effort the thoughts that had been haunting my mind suddenly hit all at once: I miss him. Why isn't he here? Why did he decide to do that? Why did he think my heart was worth breaking? This is all his fault. I hate him. I love him. I can't do this. I can't keep doing this. Mom! I want my mom! She's here. He's not but she is.
The world was falling apart out there, my world had been falling apart for years now, but it never stopped life. It wasn't going to stop the inevitable.
Not all pain has purpose, but the one who designed life before me surely thought this specific pain did since not even the painkiller flowing through my bloodstream was able to numb it. Purification or punishment, I'm still not sure since my insides felt like they were on fire, as if expelling birthing my child was a way of burning away the primordial sin within me to bring me back to life. It was a loop of pushing and pushing and pushing for what felt like hours and then the loudest cry breaking it. The doctor said I had a son. “David,” I said as loud as I could manage even if my mom was the only one who heard me. That was when I knew a new wound had opened, one that would never scar or heal.
Once he was cleaned and placed in my arms, I stared at him in awe. It was the biggest I-think-my-mother-was-right moment ever, over and over again.
Even all red and blotchy and with the fluffiest tuft of black hair, I saw his face in him, that was how I knew he would be my one and only child in every single universe in which history managed to come that far. Was that what mom felt when dad died and she still had to look at my face every single day? Probably.
It's truly amazing how a person's whole existence can be the result of the feelings between two individuals. Dave's existence was love. Some desperate love from a young, fast, intense and ephemeral idyll amidst the apocalypse. Maybe the nature of that idyll was to be replicated through his life and that was what condemned him. Had the tragic end of my parents' longer-lived idyll condemned me too somehow?
This is the boy who will bleed to death in the same arms that held him just seconds after being recklessly thrown into existence. I wonder how many times I will fail him in this universe, in how many universes I have failed him already and if he will ever forgive me for it.
My mom was instantly by my side again, cradling her daughter and her grandson. And now I wonder if she ever knew that as much as her failures and mistakes mattered she would always be forgiven.