Becoming flesh and blood

I was 18 years old when I learned the ghastly circumstances of my birth.

Two weeks before I was born, my mother was due for a prenatal checkup. All day long at work, she was feeling fine, save for a slight headache. When the doctor checked her blood pressure, she had my mother rushed to the ER. It was a case of preeclampsia. I was barely eight months in the womb. According to the doctor, had my mother skipped the checkup that day, which she nearly did because of the headache, there’s no telling how bad things would have been.

Meanwhile, at home, my father had no idea what was happening. He thought my mother was still at work. When it was past evening and she was still not home, he began to worry. An hour later, he was worried sick and went outside looking for her, asking anyone he knew. Before he drove himself nuts, he realized something, rode a jeepney, and headed straight for the public maternity hospital. (In case you wonder, a phone was a luxury my family didn’t have at that time. In fact, we never had a family phone growing up, and we always had to use our neighbor’s phone as our number.)

My father signed papers regarding the risks of my mother’s condition. He was to choose between his son and his wife, should the situation reach that point. And it didn’t help that in the ward we were in, two or three premature infants died from complications that week. Two weeks later, my mother’s blood pressure leapt, and my heartbeat began to falter. The dreaded moment had arrived. Left with no choice, the doctors decided to induce my mother, a process which she described as the most painful thing she had gone through her entire life. She felt that we were about to die together, and all she could do was ask God to spare her child and think of me with all her strength—I, who was still without a face to imagine by—as though keeping me alive with her very thoughts, or giving me all her life by willing it.

My mother told me how loud I cried when I was born—a sign of a healthy infant, the doctors told her. Though I was premature, I didn’t need to be incubated. My father also told me with pride how the nurses identified me as his son at the viewing nursery without name tags.

Our small family of three had pulled it off together, my mother recovering well, my father still in tears with relief and happiness. But the celebration was cut short, because an ant got under the sheets and bit me down there. It swelled bad enough to prevent me from peeing. My mother joked about me being tied to a plank spread-eagled while the doctors did the circumcision. She said I looked like a human lizard (premature babies tend to have gray skin in their first few days). After a near-fatal week, such an incident was nothing.

We were bonded by a near-tragedy early on, which I didn’t learn about until later in life. I was only told about it when my parents saw that I was “rebelling,” dropping subjects, coming home drunk, and being secretive about my activities. I had a little sister a year after I was born, a little brother the following year, and another little sister 12 years later, so I thought we were just like an ordinary family, and me an ordinary child. The truth was, we were anything but.

Somehow I feel like I owe my life to my parents, though I didn’t ask for it. But I realized that it is something that isn’t worth philosophizing about; after all, nobody in the history of mankind asked to be born in the first place. Such questions should rest on those who decided to bring forth life. Why create life? Maybe the reason for love and sex, deep down, is as simple as escaping loneliness and emptiness, which are shreds of what nothingness is like, that dark universe. Any suffering seems less painful than those—that possibility of living and dying alone, leaving nothing behind, and knowing nobody will remember you when you are no more.

I never knew for sure what choice my father was thinking back then, what choice he would have made. I never asked him. I didn’t want to know either, perhaps out of fear, for I was convinced at the time that he hated me for nearly causing his wife to die. I shudder at the thought of him raising me as an only child and facing life without his beloved. But my father told me that they were the darkest hours of his life, where he had cried the hardest and knelt for hours at the hospital chapel and cursed God for inflicting on us unreasonable pain. He spoke to me about all this so tenderly, as if letting me know his choice through the tone of his voice.

But I once asked my mother what she’d do back then, in the guise of a school essay I was writing. She told me she’d do what a mother would do. I gritted my teeth to push a sob back down and hugged her, and I was a child once more. She didn’t say anything and just let my head rest on her shoulder, as though what she was set on doing back then was ordinary, that she’d make the same decision no matter how many times it would be asked of her. I didn’t feel like saying anything at all, either. What was there to say? How could I thank a person for willing to die for me? What made me, a fetus, who hadn’t given anything yet to her or to my father, worth more than her flesh and blood? I felt the warm blood running under my flesh, which sometimes felt worthless to me—twice I had been close to throwing my life away.

I am more careful now.

In a way, this newfound guilt of seeing them in that situation more than two decades ago moved something in me. I soon started feeling remorse about having led a brooding life up to that point, hardly smiling, laughing, or appreciating life. I had not been happy enough to justify that sacrifice they were willing to take: They believed my life was worth more than theirs put together. I wasn’t even born, yet to them, I was already a human being.

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Nicolo Nasol, 29, was born and raised in Cebu City. He is currently working as a freelance writer and editor.