pain for pain

As if my dreams haven't already been vivid enough, they get better in definition and worse in aftertaste during my third trimester. It's nothing that I'm not used to, but not with the the twenty-four hour discomfort that comes with a life growing inside you.

Usually I ignore these dreams, occasionally story-telling them to my husband, peppered with laughs and 'the fuck's. But this time, the words "I" said still ring in my head long after I awake, after getting pulled so violently by an elderly man trying to sell insurance. I don't like getting pulled, especially to handicap toilets.

I haven't gone to work since mid-December, my last Afternoon shift before I was rushed to the hospital for breach. My calmness that night doesn't surprise me, not when I'd been in the same place for worse before.

The first term they used: threatened miscarriage. I was still calm, even with my red-soaked underwear on the floor and even more blood getting on the doctor's gloves. That night I curled myself up in a strange new bed, separated from my husband for the first time since we were married. To make it worse, it had started raining, and occasional lightning lit up the room. 

A nurse came to my bed to ask, This is your second pregnancy right? I answered with the truth that anyone who is reading this should know, and she patted my hip, a comfort. Another nurse came with the things that my husband had driven home and back for, and the first thing I took out was the giant polar bear. I slept with my face buried in it. 

There were familiar things scattered over those eight December days. Walking barefoot to the toilet, drips being shoved into my right hand, reciting my name and number again and again. But the lack of tears was new, the husband constantly by the bedside, kissing my forehead before leaving, the mother crying before I was wheeled away to surgery were new. How I would do anything to keep this one safe was new.

There's nothing much to do when your legs are numb while your phone is rooms and levels away. Nothing much to do when your legs are spread for pain and with the urgency to save child. Staring at those lights in the surgery theatre, I both remembered and realised things. 

That this was my karma, knowing one of the causes of breach was exactly what I did years ago. And why should I give him the privilege of forgiveness when I had never and will never give that to myself? Even with the overdue money finally paid back years after, even with the happiness and safety that I finally found with someone else. 

Only now I've learned that coercion is not consent. Deep down I do not forgive both the partner and the friends who cry playing victim. It had to take another trauma in the same place of the previous trauma to realise such a simple thing. And today I awoke from a dream that reminded me of my unusual fear of unisex toilets. Not sure if I'll ever get over that, what more the initials tattooed on my stomach.