Pregnant

If you had a chance to meet anyone, dead or alive, who would you pick and why? This question was always asked in my English classes, being composition prompts or journal topics. I never had a good answer, probably just naming some celebrity to thank her for the songs she put out.

After some thinking on the bus this morning and all my twenty-two years of living, I've found my answer. I want to meet my mother when she was pregnant with me. 

I want to know what she went through with me forming in her. What pantangs she disobeyed, thinking it wouldn't affect anything. When she was pregnant with my elder brother, she refused to eat rice, saying the smell made her nauseous. He grew up with some kind of condition where he's almost phobic of rice.

With all the differences between my brothers and I, I wonder what she consumed when she had me. Alcohol, cigarettes? Sometimes I convince myself she must have taken some drugs, for me to have grown up this way, unable to look at anything without exaggerating its ordinariness.

Was she tender with all forms of life, thus my care for snails and insects of all things? Did she walk straight all the time like a wild boar, thus my obsession with lines? Did she go swimming when she was a few weeks pregnant and nearly drowned, thus my wariness of water?

I can't help but wonder if she had some kind of depression having me. I know she was angsty with my elder brother, which probably explains his anger management issues. But what kind of thoughts did she have with me? Did it ever cross her mind to kill herself along with me? 

I want to meet my mother when she was forming me, because I wonder what she had to be like for me to be this way. Or what she had to go through with this eccentric life banging against the walls of her womb. I'd like to know if it was her pregnancy habits that made me like this, or my already existing flame that burned her from the inside, causing any of her high or depression or anger.