The Incomplete Woman
She was lying in the labor room of a government hospital as she saw a drug called methotrexate slowly drip into her body to kill off her unborn baby before it could rupture her tube, killing her. All around her doctors were examining women about to go into the delivery room, in different stages of labor. They were yelling at them to relax as they checked their vaginas to see how far their labor had progressed. She was all alone in the hospital and her worried husband was trying to sleep in the car. This is the point in time when the doctor decided to give her a lecture on respecting her spouse and referring to him as ‘so rahe hain’ instead of ‘so raha hai’. Her husband preferred her referring to him informally instead of using words like ‘aap’ or ‘woh’ as is considered more culturally appropriate.
She was in one of the rooms that are assigned to new moms once they give birth. She had just had surgery to remove a ruptured egg from one of her tubes. The nurse came to check on her in the morning and congratulated her and her husband on the arrival of their new baby. She turned to the would-be father and said. “Ye bachay ke mamoo hain?” She was trying to identify who to ask for money on the new baby’s arrival.
She was sitting at a dinner party where all the other women present were mothers. She was outnumbered at least 4 to 1 and had no choice but to sit and listen as the women around her talked about their children and their varying stages of development. They discussed the pros and cons of different types of feeding, their sleep habits and everything else under the sun. Normally she would have joined in and shared her experience of her siblings’ kids and her friends’ kids but not today. She just didn’t have the energy and she was feeling too triggered so she went and started playing with the children they were talking about instead.
She was in the baby section of a store looking at all the cute little things she might never get a chance to buy for her own little one. Her colleague looked at her worriedly as she asked for her opinion on something that she was thinking of buying for their co-worker’s baby shower. She felt tears forming in her eyes as she looked at all the baby related things around her. She wondered if she would ever look at baby related paraphernalia without her heart feeling like it had turned to ice and broken into a million pieces.
She had just returned from a visit to the doctor and he told her to get an ultrasound to see if the baby had a heartbeat and to come back to him immediately if it didn’t. She went back home, sat on the prayer mat and cried, beseeching Him not to take her baby away again. She couldn’t be pregnant a third time just to lose another precious unborn child. The next day she went into a full day managers’ meeting, the whole time worrying about how she would hold it together and not start crying until the ultrasound appointment.
She was or rather is me. Her experiences are nothing compared to the kind of horrors and turmoil almost all women who are not able to conceive face. These incidents may seem small and insignificant in the bigger scheme of things, but they are were hurtful and triggering. I remember that time, when I felt inadequate and incomplete. When I felt that my happiness or rather my very existence in this world was worthless,, perhaps meaningless without a child.
Whenever I find myself thinking about these incidents, especially the first one, I relive the trauma of it all over again. I feel the same pain and sense of loss that I felt on that day, which is why I will say that she is still inside me somewhere. That scared, traumatized young girl still sits somewhere inside me, making me feel inadequate as a mother and as a woman.
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