 |
|||||||
|
|
The Insurgent A woman who used to live next door to me went insane with grief after her only son was killed. I was in high school at the time and the son was a few years older. The boy died in Iraq, but I never really asked how. It was the saddest thing that I had ever thought about and so I felt very uneasy around the woman. That poor woman lost her baby and I couldn’t imagine how badly that must hurt. A person could never be as bonded to anything as she was to her children. As a teenager I understood that a mother loves her child more than anything else. When I got engaged everyone started asking me when I was going to get pregnant. It never bothered me because I know it’s never going to happen. My would-be mother in law would whine forever about her longing to be called Grandma. I could just smirk and shake my head in denial. You won’t ever catch me in maternity wear. Women never seem to understand what it’s like to be destined for greater things than motherhood. In our new house I had my own writing studio and I just knew that this magical room would make me a success. I painted the walls mauve, for creativity. The room gave me independence, from the man of the house and everything else. How dare that silly woman suggest that it could be something so trivial as a nursery? I only ever wanted to be myself. If you’re someone’s mother then you’re just that, not yourself. They told me that I would have trouble conceiving if I ever tried, my uterus was appropriately barren. That is why I was not worried; I thought I just got the dates for my last period wrong because I do that all the time. I drink a lot too so that justified the vomiting easily. It was my fiancé who suggested I take a pregnancy test. His original idea was that I was drinking too much, and then the effectiveness of my argument against that changed his mind. When I spent the 11.77 I thought about what a terrible waste of money it was. I could have bought a dime bag of weed and a cigar to smoke it with, but instead I was just easing my sex partner’s uncalled-for anxiety. Buying the thing seemed like such a chore that I completely forgot to actually take it. The box is still sitting in a drawer in the bathroom, next to the razor that my proposed husband shaved with every day. The contents of the box were sitting on top of my desk in my room. I had left it there to wait the two minutes before the response. I never got up the nerve to look, and eventually I forgot about it. It’s possible that a month passed until I decided to experiment with the braless look. All of mine seemed to be getting too tight and my tits ached from the pressure. I complained of my breast pain to a friend and was informed that when she was pregnant she had the same problem. She advised me to start sleeping on my back and it worked. Another month passed and it was time for my vagina’s annual checkup. By the time I handed the nurse a cup full of my urine I was considerably concerned. I had to fight with every ounce of sanity that I posses not to just jam myself down onto the speculum and hope that it stabbed that flicker of a creature to death. I didn’t have enough strength or sanity to not throw myself down the steps on the way out of the office. When I got home I tried to throw it up. I even sat next to the toilet and stared at my own puke hoping to spot a fetus. It only looked like a flicker anyway. Now I have this awful thing invading my body and all I want is for it to be gone. I could not believe that I hadn’t noticed this feeling before. Just like a fucking pod person taking over and manipulating my organs. This parasite was eating all of my food and still making me fat. Starving it out would probably be the best way to get rid of it anyway. I could easily survive on booze and cigarettes so it was worth a try. I never did gain any baby weight. That helped a lot with the denial I think. Remaining thin and drunk is the way to ignore a pregnancy effectively. When I first used the excuse of “having some bug” it didn’t feel like a lie. I had some bug inside me, like a virus. I was suffering from prepartum depression. I could not bear to look anyone in the face. I already hated it for existing and so I knew I would hate it when it was born. Then, my family and my fellow would love it. And they would hate me for hating it. This thing was going to take everything from me. This parasite was fucking with my head. Amidst the thoughts of wire-hanger abortions I would look up at the walls of my studio and think about good paint colors for a girl or a boy. This powerful invader of my body wanted so badly to be born. I tried to push all of those thoughts down but somehow my perspective of the world changed. At the mall one day I picked up a soft sweater that was pink and fluffy. I had this thought about what a nice baby blanket something like that would make. It must have been the insurgent putting that thought in my head. When I called it that it kicked for the first time. Just about collapsing, I realized how much power it had. It wanted a name and a blanket and it wanted to be born. It was going to win. It became just like that box in the drawer, and it went unnoticed. The thing wanted to be near my fiancé all of the time. I think it was trying to tell him, cuddling was all I ever wanted to do. I tried to suppress it by shutting myself up in the room. But I could not write. The stick was still on that high shelf above my pen and paper. It loomed above me and reminded me that there was nothing to write about. My life was over, I had traded it in. The fact that it most likely still had some urine on it convinced me over and over again not to throw it away. It was a demented keepsake. The nerves or hormones or whatever really started kicking up eventually. Nothing could take my mind off of the bug in my tummy. My boyfriend was going away for 4 days to a friend’s wedding. I convinced him that I should stay home. I was determined to squeeze it out and then hand it off to some desperate woman who pined for her own baby. There had to be a ton of those loonies in this city. You always hear about them. Anyway, white babies go like hot cakes, don’t they? Then the thought of it being born and hearing the sounds it would probably make made me sick. Vomiting came as easily as riding a bike anymore. During the time that I was alone, I painted the room yellow. The color reminded me of being childish. Being a child is the farthest thing from being a mother. The 4 days were over and when my companion returned he knew that something was the matter. I wish I could have talked to him about it but I hated him too much for planting this bad seed inside me. My body was my temple and I couldn’t stand the thought that someone else could send in his little soldiers and take over. It felt like the ultimate disrespect. I shut myself up in the room and barely spoke to him. Eventually, my beloved understood the cause of my madness. On a Thursday morning I awoke in a puddle of blood. It was all over, it was exciting that I finally got my period. I made pancakes and ate them. Then at around 12 or 1 in the afternoon I was doubled over in pain. My assumption was that all the food in my shrunken stomach was causing some kind of shock to my system. I realized shortly after that this was it. All I thought about was the pain. In my head it was completely quiet but I could hear myself screaming. I was making a terrible mess all over and I knew it was going to be hard to clean up. At some point in the afternoon he came home and heard the sounds. He burst into the room and it made the pain so much worse. I was so ugly and this whole event was so disgusting that I knew he would never love me after this. First I couldn’t look at him and I just kept looking at the tiny speck of pink on the white stick I for some reason kept. I should have painted the room pink instead. Pink means love and I wanted it to see that for the first thing. I saw the horror in his eyes and the pang that struck my heart pushed the awful thing right out. I took deep breaths and tried to recover myself and I never took my eyes off of the man I wanted to someday marry. I thought about the future and how happy it would be if it wasn’t for this moment right here. I tried to escape the present and be in the future. It was quiet inside my head and then I realized that it was quiet in the room. His face was sad and shocked. I would have loved to see his angry face then. I felt as though I had just lost everything that mattered at all while trying to get rid of it, and the damn thing was born dead anyway. The outcome would have been the same whether I had told him about it or not. He left when he saw what I never said. I never did have to tell anyone what happened.
t o p |
||||||
 |
|||||||
