Two Lives

My mom died twice when she was giving birth to me. That's never something that you expect your mother to say, especially not something for her to stay so humble about. I feel like if that happened to me, my children would never hear the end of the miracle it was, that me and them were both alive. But she never told me that, not once. Not in the 17 years I’ve been alive.

I had a terrible childhood, from my perspective. The feelings associated with memories, no matter how they might have influenced who I am today, never leave. But I can never forget the days I spent as a child ruminating over how terrible my life was. I was the youngest of three children, and by a lot. My brother was nearly ten years older than me, and my sister six. Six might not be a large difference, but she had autism with behaviors that were aggressive, loud, and unpredictable—three words you could describe her as. And being a tiny child, I bore a lot of that aggression. The difficulties of my sister left my mom with very little patience for me, and me being an independent and rule-breaking child led me to be punished for things that many normal children were allowed to do. I'm never going to say my mom was abusive, because she was not. She just broke under the pressure of having such a difficult family to manage, and had very little time to deal with my misbehavior in a more collected way. As a child, however, I did think it was abuse. I would get spanked on my bum and pinched by my ear, not because she wanted to hurt me, I realize now, but because she didn’t have enough time to work through my difficulties in a civil way. Being physically hurt by my sister and sometimes my mother was not a productive childhood environment, and led me to wish, at eight years old, that I was never born.

“I had you because I wanted a mini-me, a little girl to help me and be my right hand,” my mom used to say. She got pregnant with me at 38, and had me at 39. She wasn't getting pregnant, initially, and even went to a fertility specialist after four months of trying. After her appointment, she went home and took a pregnancy test, just to confirm her fears. Turns out, she was actually four months along. The women of my family are very fertile, she would tell me. This situation is important because I was apparently the only one out of her three children who was not an accident. But why then, did I seem to have the worst childhood, out of all three? Why would she want to get pregnant after knowing that my sister had severe autism, even more so getting diagnosed with said autism at a mere two years old?

The women of my family, although as I previously stated are very fertile, also had a mild detest for having children. My grandmother, whom we call Nano, begged her husband to let her have an abortion every time she found out she was pregnant. Every time, he said no. She ended up with my mom and two boys, my uncles. Nano wanted to pursue her studies, and finish her education degree, but ended up with three children instead. My mom felt similarly, and often states that if she never had children, she would have been a psychiatrist. Now my mom needs a psychiatrist, and meets with him regularly to get advice—or complain—about her struggles as a mother.

Nano is the funniest person I know, and at 85 she still has such a lively spirit. The last time I saw her, a mere four days ago, we were sitting as a family playing Bullshit, and she would protest every time someone correctly detected her lies.

Nano’s husband died when he was 54, and she has outlived him 31 years. That same husband, who begged her to keep his children, left her alone to care for them after dying of heart failure. We don’t know how he died; my mom assumes it was a congenital issue. Maybe that’s why her heart also stopped while giving birth to me, but I guess no one will ever know.

I have always held a slight resentment toward my parents, regardless of my deep-rooted love for the both of them. The memories of my childhood bring back only fear and pain. My parents tell me I was a happy child—disobedient, but happy. But I can never remember those memories. I can only remember the bad ones. This forgetfulness, or selective remembrance, brings me sadness in itself because I really do wish that I could remember being happy. Maybe sulking in sadness brings me comfort, in some twisted way. Maybe categorizing my childhood as terrible brings me more gratitude to where I am now.

I was complaining to my parents, only yesterday, about how they always disregard my emotions about my childhood and replace it with a statement about my rebellious nature. “You would always make a mess of everything, and never clean it up. I swear, one time, you flooded the bathroom on purpose because you were mad I told you to wash your hands.”

“I don’t remember this, and I was a child, so I doubt I did anything on purpose,” I reply.

I never remember doing evil acts as a child, but I do remember getting scolded and punished for them. I tell my mom this, and she gets upset—no, distraught. She locks herself in her room and doesn’t talk to me for the rest of the night. She finally comes out and I ask her why she is mad at me for sharing my perspective about my terrible childhood. She responds, “Have you ever considered that I might be mad at myself?”

This statement shocks me, as I never considered my parents the regretful type concerning their actions toward their children. If I was a mother and my child told me that they had a terrible childhood, I would be distraught as well, I realize. And I would become depressed and feel an insurmountable guilt that I could never recover from until I died. Maybe that is what my mother feels. Yet that same amount of guilt overtakes me in the moment that my mother mentions that she died twice while giving birth to me. She flatlined for a few minutes, and the nurses ran in to give her an epinephrine shot. Soon after, it happens again. My mother describes it as a stone being placed on top of her body, and an elephant standing on top of that stone. She died, I think, and she never chose to tell me? Maybe she did tell me, and I just brushed it aside as one of her extravagant tales to get me to behave. She used to tell me that if I didn’t go to bed, the police would come knocking on my door. She told my older brother to ring the doorbell and yell out “Police!” if I thought I could get away with staying awake past my bedtime. If I didn’t eat my broccoli, she would make my brother dress up as the Grim Reaper and say I would get tortured if I didn’t eat my vegetables. Any time that would happen, I would cry. So when she told me that she died giving birth to me, if she ever did before this moment, I must have brushed it off as another way of her trying to get me to behave.

But that is not the point, yet I have no idea what the point really is. Her mother doesn’t want children, and begs my late grandfather to let her have an abortion. She has three children, and then my grandfather dies. My mom, being the eldest, takes care of her two younger brothers alongside Nano. My mom meets my dad, accidentally gets pregnant with my brother, then my sister. My sister has autism, and is a difficult baby. My mom is stressed, terrified, and pushed beyond her limits. Then she chooses to have me, and dies twice. I have a terrible childhood and don’t know of any of these past circumstances. I collect them slowly, asking my mom about what her life was like before me, and what Nano’s life was like before her. My mom doesn’t keep any of this information a secret, but just doesn't think to share this order of events until I ask her. Slowly, I piece the timeline together. The women of this family are very fertile, she says. The women of this family hate having children, I think.

It’s a paradox, and a strange one at that. Fertile women who don’t want kids. I don’t know what it means, but it fills me with sadness, hope, and a few other emotions that I can’t put my finger on. Stress, maybe. I want a big family to fill the void of loneliness I felt as a child. But what if my child grows up and tells me that they had a terrible childhood, too? What if I realize that my life could have been so different without kids? What if I end up regretting their existence?

My friends always tell me that they love their parents, but they want to go far away for college. I instinctively disagree. I could never be far away from my parents, I reply. I would feel so lonely, so isolated. My parents, I have realized, are the only people that will support me no matter what. And I finally came to the conclusion that I don’t think they regret my existence, either. I think that they resent the sacrifices they made for me. But that is what sacrifices are, is it not? Something you don’t want to give up, so you can evolve and change, and hope for something better.

I don’t know where this story ends, and maybe there are still pieces of information that I am missing to fill up this broken timeline. What I do know—what I have realized—is that my parents, my mom, never meant to hurt me as a child. She is not a narcissist, not an abuser, and she is an amazing woman. That is why my childhood hurts me more: she acted the way she did because of the situation she was in, not because she had any evil intent.

My mother died twice to bring me here. Maybe that means I am meant to live two lives: the one where I mourn what I didn’t have, and the one where I choose what comes next.