Scraps of Grace (3)

(If you have not read part 1 of this story, click here )

https://sifaremmy.wordpress.com/2023/11/19/scraps-of-grace-1/

And as I recall it, the bile in my throat rose, and waves of nausea slammed my gut. Hot tears stung my eyes. I let it rip. I tore myself apart. I exploded, then days later got numbed by the experience. And as it is, I expected to be sustained by Jake, as I also wished to nourish him too. I expected that this event would bring us closer and knit us together; unfortunately, he let this load slide heavy on my shoulders, and thinking of it now, his actions may as well be within merit for the simple fact that this loss was entirely my own as I am the one who had carried the baby inside my womb. I am the only one who came to know it as a part of myself, so it’s just right that I am the same person who feels the void it has left beneath my skin, and with that, I refrained from prescribing ways he ought to grieve.

Hence, I let him have his way because grief is inarticulate, it is insane, it is not linear, and it is wild, but his actions were completely off the grid; they did not cut within the bounds of an arguably messy grief. He became completely stoical. He turned monstrous, and every time I was discharged from the hospital after each of the stillbirths, every time I sobbed over my babies little caskets with my breasts itching, engorged with my dead children’s milk, he would not hesitate but would always grab me in a brusquely indelicate manner. He would grope me in a rough way, and my body would switch to autopilot under the pretence of getting accustomed to his vile gestures. Nevertheless, while I am not trying to be cynical about this union, there is a possibility that does not escape me, and if confirmed, it would turn out to be a great disappointment. The thing is, I was being raped within the confines of the institution of marriage.

I got pregnant a second time, and he quickly rekindled the love he had for me, like before. But by now, I imagine you must understand the act that comes with each conception. However, this time, I blessed my womb. I came close to God. I talked to him in tears, sometimes through screams and other times through gasps, but most times through silence because language could not quite cover my plea, and in all these ways I knew that I did reach him. Thus, I would read the Bible and drink daily from the verse that read, “Out of my belly shall flow rivers of living water,” but maybe I suffered an overdose of optimism, which perhaps means that good things like troubles never come alone. Why? Because when I was in for some random antenatal checkup. When they put the wand on my belly, the ultrasound failed to detect the baby’s heartbeat. It was still; there were no movements, and in the next exact minute, my breath quickened. I could feel the clamminess of my hands, followed by big, fat, watery boogers that dripped down my cheeks.

And just like the previous ones, this news felt so strange, so wrong, and so unreal. And now, months later, despite a symmetry of togetherness in the events, I was still unable to grasp the happenings of my lot because the sentiments were the same—strange, so wrong, and so unreal—that in that exact moment, I affirmed that there was no God. I told myself this in a fit of mad rage. In principle, I had nothing against God, but from a practical point of view, there was the question of why he let me suffer yet another loss. A question of why he chose me as his elect and preserved me for this kind of grief. A question of deep-seated emotions that would often choke when I heard baby cries down the hospital corridors, when I saw the happiness of new mothers carrying their own. It was a question of how much misfortune can a man take, because if you asked me, I felt as though I was vexed by a pack of tragedies that, if borne by another person, would be enough to make mince meats of them.

Then, there, I found myself at the beginning of yet another journey where I was still engulfed in total darkness of my past, through which I had dire premonitions of my own extinction; to a point, I made up delusive fallacies and turned them into versions of truth and of my own death because life had given me big, major blows that made me resign to create every setting for misery, to spring forth its speechless, mindless, null, and hopeless predicament. But even so, my entire existence became void, and such life voids cannot be empty; they have to be filled with something—good or bad—and hope, it was, for it’s the salvation through self-despair, and as I was this time expecting twins, I had to cling to it, even in its abstractness, so however it made me feel, whatever its purpose was to serve, all did not matter, for the sole reason that it was a thing bigger than my awareness and much greater than my own consciousness.

So hope it was, despite my previous bleak pregnancy. Hope it was, despite the trauma I encountered between the months of conception, gestation, and the final rite, which is death. Hope it was, despite wrestling to be free of the memories of my sleeping babies, whose kicks and rolls shimmered down to be overtaken by the nightmare of their births. And, oh, how slowly they slipped out of my body, leaving me to deal with the shock that was infinitely larger than me? Surely it cannot be anything but hope, that held me so that I also hang on to the loose thread that held my marriage, because these children were to become the antidote to it’s redemption, and hope guaranteed that I’ll be able to get the previous Jake I had known to whom we shared good times, for only him alone was capable of restoring those sound memories that were there before the apocalypse struck. Besides, at my age, these men proved hard to find, and patience was already contending against me, for youth was my hope, but it was a hope yoked in emptiness, so in case I were to come around to think of a different marriage after this, then I would fine risk being saddled with a divorcee, if not a widow. And with this, I was prepared for…

To Read Scraps of Grace (4) which is the Final part of the story, Tap link below 👇🏿

https://sifaremmy.wordpress.com/2023/12/12/scraps-of-grace-4/