Scraps of Grace (4)

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

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

And with this, I was prepared for a positive birth. Thirty hours of labour, the pain of transitional contractions coming in full blasts, then short bursts. With the endurance of having my legs propped up, I kept pushing. I pushed and pushed, only to hear one of the nurses say they could not find the baby’s heartbeat. I did not believe it, and if true, I still had to push the second baby alive, and so in my mind, I was whispering, “Please, God, let it breathe. Please, please,” but instead of a cry, there was silence—one that was deafening. Muteness hanged in the atmosphere, and nobody put words to what was happening; it’s as though they were waiting for me to register and confirm the events for myself. And as I was still contemplating the air, a nurse placed both babies on my chest, and with my arms, I embraced them. They were beautiful. There was nothing wrong with them. They were sleeping, but they lacked one thing: breath, and as the latter thought sipped through my mind,air snapped like a whip, choking me.

Then my weakness struck sharply. My tears began to sting. My soul was perplexed. This will not go quickly. This one will not be hastened towards eternity. Through heaven, I had ascended. Through gravity, I fell. Do not console me. My body was devoid of understanding; all sympathies were awfully incomplete. My world was shattered like never before. It was an indescribable pain, and then someone I do not remember must be a nurse, whose face I could not bring to a picture, shouted at me,” Stop crying! These walls have other women who have lost babies too, so you are not the first woman to lose one, and neither will you be the last!” These words, oh these words. How they seared themselves into my subconscious; how they lurched pain within me, shoving reality down my throat with the force of a hammer. They affirmed the truth that I will never be able to be called a mother. That my bosom will only take hold of death certificates and not birth certificates, and oh, how these same words interfered with my faculties so much that I got thrust right inside a maelstrom of existential crisis where life was no longer the same; life—my life—became askew. It changed forever.

I lost my job because I was hardly ever at work, and according to my boss, if there were no babies, then the resumption of work should occur as soon as possible. Furthermore, there are not so many things a woman can become when she is a housewife, with her life revolving around her husband, who is also a narcissist who shamelessly monitors all her communication to unearth faults. But be all that as it may, nobody understood the toll it took on me to continue with life again, not even my husband, who was mistreating and adding to my sorrow. Doing the ordinary things, like waking up, was hard. Eating was even harder, and brushing teeth was the most difficult. Nothing imbued the normalcy that preceded these events. I just did not recover from the loss, and even though I managed to cope so that I sometimes appeared straightened up, a part of me remained maimed because these were infirmities that impinged on the substance of the soul, something medical science wasn’t equipped to deal with because it had no cure. And as it is, such pains do not leave; instead, they reverberate in many ways beyond the baby’s death through little things like the sight of other people’s children, and boom, you are forced to relieve your dreary experience of birth as if in real time.

Shish sobs now cut the air loudly, and I, who have continued to be inside her nightmare since her narration, have become sure that I am not in the least imagining it. I become convinced that I am overtaken by a sorrow that is not necessarily mine but which, as it were, I partook in. I want to let her know that I understand it now, but my words refuse the need to be summoned. They fester below my throat, forming a painful lump that is difficult to swallow. In my mind, I believed that motherhood was meant for her, but this motherhood was also a trial for her, not of the flesh but of the spirit—the heart longing to be called mother by a present baby. However, to me, she was still a mother, even so she suffered extreme pangs of pain; I still envied her fate because this same fate was denied me, and the only time I got close to it was when I was in and out of my fleeting relationships, looking not so much to having a husband but anyone who would give me a child, so that when my tummy began to swell, I was shocked to find out it was only fibroids that bloated my tummy, forming the shape of someone who was pregnant when I was really not.

Six months later, Jake’s murder case is closed. Shish leaves for the States to start a new life, and as soon as she migrates, something dawns on me. Something about her previous silence and detachment. Proof that her silence was never silent at all. It was a confusion of muted sounds. It was never a need for privacy, nor did it mean that things were going well. In fact, her silence only relayed that she was screaming for help. I should not have let my ego control me, and just maybe. Maybe I could have done something, but something happened, and these things already wreaked havoc. An apocalypse of some sort that made me contemplate the institution of marriage. How marriage, the word, can be a blissful grove, enchanting yet illusory. How it’s walls: crispy deceptive hold so many emotions; they are forever witnesses, yet they cannot betray. They cannot be revealed. They only know how to hide so that you cannot ferret out botched suicide attempts, emotional breakdowns, and a catalogue of weapons of abuse. And even with its shambles, it’s still a marriage. A haven that hides mutual disdain where the victim creates art and represents the truth with the utmost beauty, with gestures so graceful that no soul will be aware of the peculiar realities of their situation, so I thought.

However, now in the mornings, as I go about my daily business, I say to myself, I will do it again. For when she came to me after five years with tears in her eyes, she startled something within me that has been lying dormant within my system, so that what rose in me was a type of love I did not know I had until that moment got prompted. Proof that I truly loved her without reservation, gravely almost, like someone deeply conscious of the obligations of love who knows it to be a dangerous passion, fraught with risk, and thus to confess now would be unfair. After all, it is a world of secrets, and now I have one from my best, who is, in truth, my only friend, and that is the nature of friendship. To love sometimes in weakness.

The End . By Rehema