I.
“My legs are swollen and I have lots of small nodules on my neck and body. They’re a little itchy. It’s already getting very hard for me to squat and when night time comes, I have difficulty in breathing. Near my right thighs, I can feel the heartbeat of the baby. It’s difficult to sleep at night because I have to pee at least three times every night."
That was a letter from my mother eight weeks before I was born. It was addressed to my aunt, who was living overseas, to tell her about the pregnancy. Unfortunately, it was the last piece of correspondence they had before my mother died of childbirth.
As I write this post, I also have eight weeks to go before delivering my baby. The due date is sometime in late April. My belly looks like an artificially inflated balloon. My centre of gravity has moved much further forward, making bending tough to do. But so far, unlike my mother, I haven’t had any swollen legs, I can still squat, I have no difficulty breathing, and I don’t always have to get up to pee at night.
It has taken me a while, mentally and physically, to get to this point. I had always seen 34, the age when my mother died, as the age beyond which I should not attempt to get pregnant. I was scared of dying from childbirth despite a significant reduction in maternal mortality in the last decade. When I turned 30, I thought I was not going to have a biological child. There wasn’t any good reason to have one. After all, I was adopted, so if I wanted one later, there was always that option.
Things changed when my mother’s letter came into my possession. It was part of a collection of letters spanning 20 years of her life. The letters painted an ambitious young woman from Indonesia who wanted to make it overseas. She tried to find work as a teacher in Australia, but for some reason, she didn’t succeed and returned to Indonesia in her 30s.
By that point, there was intense pressure for her to settle down. Societal pressure rushed her to marry a widower with a 12-year old son. As a woman in the 80s, marrying meant integrating with a large family where she was expected to conform to tradition.
It was pretty clear that she didn’t like the situation she was in. In the same letter she said: “If my baby is delivered safely, I will try to find a job for myself, even if it’s not a teaching job. If I’m not allowed to do so, I will ask for a divorce, better than being resentful my whole life. Before the divorce, I will create chaos in the family, so they can all feel my wrath."
The thought of her being lonely, frustrated and pregnant, without much core family support makes me tear up every time it crosses my mind.
Despite the difficult circumstances she was in, she had a lot of hope for our lives after pregnancy. Of course, she couldn’t have imagined that only one of us would survive to see the future.
II.
I also grew up feeling lonely, despite being adopted by my aunt’s family who had embraced me with open arms. I went about my life thinking nobody ever understood me. I was so different from my siblings that I started to wonder how similar I was to my biological mother. My adopted mother’s personality was distant, and I found it hard to connect with her, especially in her later years.
On the other hand, I identified vehemently with my biological mother’s anger in her letter. That was how I felt in my 20s. A colleague described me as “having a fire in her belly”. I could get vengeful, and I felt a deep sense of kinship with her. Both of us were born in a country where we were doomed to lead unhappy lives, more so because we were women. Progress was being made in the society, but it had not been enough to make a difference in either of our lives.
Selfishly I wanted to recreate this relationship, no matter how illogical it sounded. I knew I had the option to create a new relationship, to create a bond that was broken the moment I was yanked out of her belly. I wanted to have a daughter, of which I would name her Lily. My mother’s name. It sounded so beautiful to my ear.
So we decided to try to conceive, but it took some time. It was disappointing every month to see a negative result on the pregnancy test over and over again. Surprisingly it was a UTI that ultimately led to a successful conception. We found a good gynecologist who advised us to get expensive but accurate ovulation tracking kits. It worked: last year we finally got pregnant.
There’s just one slight problem with the pregnancy.
III.
At week 12 of the pregnancy, we found out the gender through a chromosomal test. Lily-to-be was going to have a penis. I was devastated, what should I name him? Lloyd? Leon? Lilo?
That was a difficult week because I felt I couldn’t really talk to so many people about it. Many of those I did end up talking to didn’t give me any space to grieve for Lily-to-be. Some of my friends had two girls and they wanted a boy but deep down I didn’t really care, I wanted a child who I could call Lily.
Looking back, I wonder if the story I have been telling myself about Lily has been incomplete. I’ve been thinking about it solely as a mother-daughter relationship rather than a parent-child one. I’ve never seen my biological father since I was several months old, and throughout my childhood, I never had a good male role model. Yet, I am blessed with knowing so many wonderful men today, including the one I am married to.
So where to go from here? The choice to have a child was mine, and we were successful in conceiving. Maybe I didn’t get my first choice, but I got my second choice. It still is my choice. Things not going to plan does not always end in a bad outcome.
I took a long deep breath, and whispered this line for myself: the key is to want what you have, not to have what you want.
We’ve decided to use Min’an’s name to come up with the boy’s name. Most likely he’ll be called Max. Hello Max!
Max will be a covid baby. Since the pregnancy was a little bumpy (I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes), this post was postponed for a while. He’s actually scheduled to be out in less than eight days via c-section.
Thank you to Manas Sahoo, Tatjana Rebesa and Sathishkumar Jagadeesan for reading drafts of this post. Thank you to Min’an Tan for editing it kindly.