** Be warned this is long one folks. **

It is that time for the year. Mother’s day is in the air. The preschools and day cares are making the kids do cute stuff for their moms. The television is thick with jewellery, perfumes, cell phones, chocolate advertisements, all sending out messages that you have to give something to your mother or grand mother or god mother or some one else’s mother. They don’t care about motherhood, they just want to sell.

This is my third Mother’s Day. I got portraits of hubby and baby#1 as a gift for the first mother’s day. Considering hubby’s aversion to dress up and get pictures taken that was a monumental gift! Our second baby arrived a few weeks after my second mother’s day. My parent’s were here, so hubby and self were able to take off for a nice quite lunch.

All this noise about mother’s day made me take a trip down memory lane. Quickly rewind to year 1999. I was a totally different person then. Newly married, young, immature, cocky, arrogant, selfish, stupid, naive are some of the words that can be used to describe myself. Hubby wanted to have a child because there is no time that would be the best time to have a child, so we might as well have one and get it over with. I was not ready. There were so many fun things to do. We had to travel to Europe, circumventing the Kailash, what about Egypt?, hike the Machu Picchu, great barrier reef, Japan….soooo maaaanyyy things to do and see. Besides how long was it going to take to have a child? You pick the right time of the month, do the thing you have to do, the sperm is going to find the ovum, millions of people have been doing this for ages, even animals do it, how difficult can that be?

I learnt it the hard way that it can be very very very very difficult. We started trying roughly around May 2002. We had been married for three and a half years. I was still immature, cocky, arrogant, selfish stupid and naive (young was starting to get debatable!). I didn’t have a problem getting pregnant; as a matter of fact I got pregnant three times. The difficulty was in keeping the baby.

The first time I miscarried at 12 weeks. There were no symptoms. We had announced to the whole world the minute the home pregnancy test came out positive. Here I was sitting on my high throne, expecting, demanding special attention from every one and taking maximum advantage of my situation, thinking that every thing was going on well and the baby had already died. There was no heart beat at the 12th week ultra sound. I was still clueless. I thought that the baby might be developing a little slowly, may be the baby needs one more week. It’s a funny thing how human mind works, till you believe that there is a little life inside of you, you hold it so dear and do all the special things. You find it so hard to let go even if there is scientific proof that things are not going well. But one fine minute you wake up, smell reality and this ‘life’ inside of you becomes ‘a thing’ to be more precise ‘a dead thing’. Words can’t describe how much that realization hurts. I wanted the thing out of me as soon as possible. I had a painful D&C and things were over.

8 months later I got pregnant again. We made no announcements. This time we scheduled an ultra sound at 6 weeks. The doctor said that the heart beat was there but the baby is too small for 6 weeks gestation and wanted us to come for another ultrasound in two weeks. I came home and started eating like crazy. Whatever I put in to my body goes to the baby, so I spared nothing but the kitchen sink. Some times it hurts to think how naïve I was. At eight weeks it was a horrible de ja vu all over again. There was no heart beat, the baby was frozen at five weeks development. It was like God was playing this cruel joke with me, “You prayed for a heart beat, I gave it to you. But you never mentioned for how long you wanted the heart beat to last”. As if one D&C wasn’t hard enough to go through, I had to go through two this time, thanks to the doctor’s screw up.

We changed doctors. We did all the tests. Hubby and self were certified as perfectly healthy people with no obvious defects. Did the news bring me happiness? No, I was looking for some defect that on diagnosis can be treated and we will be good to go! Now we had nothing to work on. 8 months later I got pregnant again. Oh, this is the most horrible of all my experiences. The implantation was in my tubes. Imagine an orange inside a straw. That was what happening to my tubes. The straw was threatening to burst. I had serious pain and high fever. Why I didn’t go to the doctor immediately? Well, in the past I have had stone formation in my kidneys and the symptoms are very similar. So I was sitting in the bed, drinking plenty of water and hoping to pass the stone. I was getting to a stage were even breathing hurt me like hell. I bore this pain for two days (hey, I have amazingly high tolerance for pain), and finally gave up. At three in the morning hubby and self ran to the emergency. We didn’t have to wait even for a minute; they put me on a wheel chair and I was taken to the ultrasound room and was wheeled to the operation theater with in two hours! Me being the naïve one asked the doctor if by any chance they can take the implantation from the tube and put it in to the uterus and save my baby. Duh!

I was lying there in the post-op in a semi-consious state. I could feel the commotion around me, but couldn’t focus on anything but the throbbing pain in my heart and a sense of worthlessness. All I want to do is just die, silently without waking up from this coma, then all my troubles will be over. Meanwhile my BP and pulse kept dropping; they had to transfuse approximately 2 liters of blood – no effect. Suddenly I felt a strange realization seep through, may be my life is not over, I may never have children, but there are other things that are meant to be done by me and I could almost hear the nurse saying, “BP stabilizing, pulse recovering”! Finally I regained consciousness.

4 months later I was pregnant with my baby #1. She came as a surprise. It was tough, all through the pregnancy, I was as detached to the baby as possible. I did all the right things I had to as a mother, but was mentally prepared incase I loose the baby. Every visit to the doctor was a major milestone, I would give a smile only after the doctor put the Doppler on me and let me hear the heart beat. Baby #1 came out without giving me much trouble. I knew I could bear the pain and deliver her without pain medication, but I still took epidural. Well I had already gone through enough shit, is some one going to build me a temple or what? Within 10 months, we were blessed with baby #2. She came 15 days early and was even more easier to deliver. She practically walked out of my womb!

The journey to motherhood really rocked the strength of our marriage. If at all I learnt something it is this – babies come when they are meant to, you can stand upside down but still you cannot ‘make’ it happen. The second thing I learnt is, men and women deal with pain in very different ways. Mentally it was definitely as hard on hubby as it was on me, he was the one who had to hear from the doctor that I had lost almost 2 liters of blood due to internal bleeding and that it will be a lucky thing if they can get to the tubes before the tube burst causing an internal infection. He was the one who had to be left in suspense in the waiting room, “Er, your wife, we don’t know, she is supposed to regain consciousness in 20 min, we don’t know why it is taking two hours”.

The most pathetic part was that some people around us thought that THEY were the victims in the whole game! I don’t even where to get started with the amount of confusion they caused in our lives. So people, never take it upon yourself to solicit worthless free ‘advice’ to other people in sensitive issues like this. You never know how much pain the couple are going through already.

From my personal experience and through my friends, I have seen it all – miscarriages, ectopic, birth defects, IVF, still births, D&C done at 20 weeks due to chromosomal abnormalities, babies born with heart defects and parents had to see their barely born babies go through multiple major surgeries, surgeries while the baby is still in the womb….., each one wondering if they are better of or worser than the others. It is tough, no one knows why all this happens. But we just have to keep trying and hope things work out. I know how difficult it is to put it in to action because I have been there and I have done it. Behind every woman who has become a mother, there is a big story. Sometimes it is a happy one and sometimes it is a sad one.