Labour Pains

produced for the 2020 South African Writer’s College — short story competition

Weeks after the winners of the competition have been announced, I thought it would be great to share the story I entered into the competition, with those on Medium as well. This is a fictitious drama story yet, with a hint of truth.

A global pandemic sweeps in, causing terror and death while a friend lies in hospital fighting for her life from the hands of depression. Also, I hate the father of my unborn child — as recorded in my diary.

I swear it was not even the hormones speaking, but I really did dislike him for choosing to turn his back on me at a time where I needed him most. Maybe for him it was as easy as carelessly following a bad generational habit he may have picked up from his absent father and his father’s also absent father. Maybe, being overwhelmed and unprepared drove him to repeat that sick cycle, totally neglecting that fact I too was overwhelmed and unprepared. But I am no shrink.

It is quite perilous how random acts that we never consider can disrupt the alleged balance of things. Like meeting a stranger at a bus stop after work whom you indulge with, in an unsatisfying round of meaningless sex, only to wake up one day with your life utterly disrupted. It’s sad. This was the sharp pain of the reality which stabbed my soul, the pain I had spent months trying so hard not to feel. That of course, among many other pains which threatened to break me into a thousand pieces.

But from where I come from, breaking is not allowed! Bruise maybe, but never, ever break. It is an unrealistic expectation from a place unknown. The sentiments are, that a woman, particularly — a black woman is imbokodo–a hard solid rock that never breaks. I think it could have been an ideology meant to make us (women) feel proud, but I feel that this ideology locks us up in places where we cannot dare to even admit when we are not entirely okay. So, I tried to avoid the inevitable end of denying reality: the road that often leads to insanity. I clenched my teeth and toughened up so many times. I now can admit to myself that I was far beyond my breaking point — I was shattered.

One day, about three months into the pregnancy, I picked up a bottle of wine I had left behind the expired pasta and dry ingredients in the pantry. A 2016 Cab-merlot blend, which I had last enjoyed with the father of the unborn. That red wine was no more the mood-setting aphrodisiac it once was. It looked more like the antidote to my state of melancholy; something for numbing and that was exactly what I needed.

So, I drank up.

I do not remember tasting the grapes, the berries, or the burnt notes of the vintage oak; especially with tears and snotty mucous all making their way to the bottle top before I could even place my lips over it. It was my doing that had brought me to a place where I felt pathetically defeated. I felt lifeless, although, ironically, I was carrying life inside of me.

I drank and kept on drinking. I started thinking of the last conversation I had with the father of the child. I remember unsuccessfully reaching out to him to be a little more involved in our well-being. He of course dismissed me, constantly reminding me “you’re not my wife”, as if that meant something. I also took my phone and reread the messages he had left me a few weeks back. “You’re pathetic, you’re weak and you’re an embarrassment”, “no one would want to have a baby with someone like you”. Over and over, I read those messages repeatedly — almost to nail them to my cranium, for the words to cause enough damage for me to remember the cause of the damage itself. Sort of like the sadist’s ritual of self-infliction.

Those were his words and I had to remember them. For even on the day that I would give birth to an extension of his bloodline, I would never forget.

Constantly cosmos shift randomly beyond my tempo and it always catches me off guard. I am so scared because the randomness of life does not fit my schedule anymore. I am grown now, and I have a schedule too, yet here I am unable to tick a single thing off the goddam to-do list. I am not moving. But whether I am stagnant or completely dead, I am unsure. It is a state of unconsciousness that even I am not at full wits to comprehend.

Three months before giving birth to him, my son — the answered prayer of all my longing, I was finally ready to forgive myself. I had plucked myself out of the sorrow I had experienced during the first trimester. Pity is unnecessary; it certainly did not serve me in any way. For the first time, I was genuinely happy with no real traces of doubt or anxiety. My baby would join me, and together we would be a family. Completely fitting in my arms, fitting in my heart, completely.

He was growing at a-hundred grams every week and my hips felt it. His kicks were growing stronger and those are precious moments I can never forget. I would sing for him and I know he would listen, because in the middle of all the kicking, if I simply dropped a note in a melody, he would stop kicking. My romanticised belief for this was that he loved my voice. So, he would stop to listen — I hoped.

And then, one month.

There was only one month to go. I was moving fast through failed plans and having to juggle all the balls in the air, hoping that not even one of them drops. I feared at the thought of having the baby meet me, unprepared. Overwhelmed again by the absent father, the fact that I was 998 kilometres away from home and to make it worse, all this right in the middle of a global pandemic. The world had turned completely. We were all under lockdown in our homes and I was all alone. One time I remember looking at my pregnant self in the full-length mirror in the bathroom. I noticed the eyebags which rested beneath my tired eyes, “you’re up to your neck in it,” I admitted aloud to myself for the first time.

No friend was close enough to help somehow, no family within reach. No husband, no partner, not even the damned man I had laid with to conceive the child.

Haunting hollow, sad sorrow. The recollection of it all still raises a lump in my throat.

The sorry story of how I never fully enjoyed the whole nine months, ended with me in the profiting position of total surrender. I gave my all to the Knower of it all and I have never made a better decision yet. I stepped away from the to-do list of many unchecked items. I stopped rushing myself to become complete and started to embrace that I was still a beautiful work in progress.

When I gave birth, I was reborn.

The mother I was becoming, the mother I am now, is one I know I had no hand in the making of. Divinely, things fell right into place.

The subtle self-sabotaging insults from the plains of pity were replaced by the Victor’s anthem, which begins when one surrenders.

The lockdown is lifted. Sanity returns.

My son is born, and I no longer hate the father of my child. Yes, he still is absent, but I am present. Right now, my son lies in his camp cot, sleeping peacefully under my care and this warm room, the birthplace for this memoir, is filled with the density of love.

The hellish fires, which preceded my labour pains never consumed me; they refined me. And now I am ready to be everything this heavenly soul will need in an earthly guardian.

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