“I thought of the face of the Virgin Mother in scenes of the Annunciation, and had a new understanding of her inward gaze, at once present and far away.” Fiction by Ayşegül Savaş.
I once heard a woman say that immediately upon finding out, she’d felt the dawning of a strange inner power. It seemed as though she could undertake any task, could live through any hardship. This was a strength not of muscles, the woman said, but of light. In this new form of herself, she felt more alive than she ever had before.
That evening, I attended the birthday party of a former colleague. He lived in a northern suburb with his wife and two children. I cycled to the party, as I did to most places. It was a pleasure to be testing my strength under these circumstances. I had no doubts about my decision, even if my situation—single, in a foreign country—might appear difficult from the outside. Perhaps, I considered, this was the power that the woman had been referring to—this certainty that I would manage.
After we introduced ourselves, the man asked me whether I belonged to the American or the Greek school. I told him I was neither Greek nor American.school of thoughtPointing to my beer, he said that the American school believed, out of superstition, that keeping a pregnancy secret in the early stages would insure the well-being of the baby, whereas the Greek school favored telling as many people as possible, to call on the protection of the community.
In any case, he continued, I would place you closer to the waters of the Aegean than to the lakes of Michigan.For the time being, I had no intention of informing the man I had slept with. It had been a brief affair, and I could readily imagine his distress at receiving the news. I didn’t have the patience for it, nor was I interested in any sort of commitment he might halfheartedly propose. I wanted only to enjoy my new state.
So it was with Zoe that I first shared my news, excepting the man at the party. Perhaps I wanted to talk to a woman in a similar state, as if she could offer protection through her kindred position. Over lunch, Zoe told me at greater length about how she had conceived, without any intervention, thanks to a careful diet and daily meditation, though she had been told by several experts that it would be difficult.As for me, I’d hardly given the matter any thought. It was an accident, even though it had recently begun to dawn on me that my time was running out. Still, I hadn’t proposed anything to the men in my life, had not considered I.V.F.
My mother had already decided that she would stay with me for the first few months after the birth. On the phone, I recounted every new discomfort I felt, and my mother cooed and soothed me. No wonder, Zoe said, that birth and creativity spring from the same chakra. The world was opening up to us, setting us on our paths.
In the emergency room, I was asked to wait. One woman was brought in on a stretcher, escorted by two policemen. When she went to the toilet to provide her urine sample, one of the policemen went with her and the other guarded the main door. Another woman arrived with a gym bag. Soon a nurse came to her side and asked if she was ready.I was trying to intuit whether I was still in the other dimension, but it was so hard to tell, to untangle one thing from the other.
For the rest of the week, I waited for it to begin. I’d been told at the hospital that it might take some time to start on its own, and that the safest course would be to end it as soon as possible. I was prescribed three different painkillers, each one stronger than the last, so that, should I decide to take the medicine, I would feel very little. The operation would also be pain-free. I would fall asleep and wake up and it would be gone.
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