After I was born, my mother had many, many miscarriages. I vaguely remember her being rushed to the hospital or her coming back home with a heart of gray and dark. I grew up thinking her dislike of me was due to what I took away from her when she housed me. I emptied her womb so much that no other soul found fertile ground in there for a decade until a brave soul (my brother) decided to join our lineage.
It took me a few decades to forgive myself for this theft, to understand that I took what was rightfully mine as a fetus, that she had fewer resources for new life due to the hard life she had lived as the only daughter of divorced parents. A father who remarried and moved far away. A father she loved dearly, who had left her malnourished in love.
When I was about seven or eight, my maternal grandmother told me that my father had initially wanted a firstborn son. Given the cultural map of those times, I’m sure my mother’s worth also depended on whether she could bear a son who could carry forward the family name. It’s a beautiful curiosity, then as to why I decided to keep my last name when I married. I didn’t even consider appending our last names to make a joint last name for myself. I’m not sure if the unconscious need to show my father that I, too, can carry his name drove this, or whether I was dissuaded by my ex-mother-in-law, who had decided that the last name she borrowed from her husband was of a pure Sinhalese breed that shouldn’t be mixed with a Muslim.
They say no two siblings have the same parents. Although I was far from a son, I had eager parents, at least when I was younger. I have many, many photo albums to show for this. I had a mother who made mini pizzas with me in our small blue oven. I had a father who took me to the art gallery. We, as a family, played board games on weekend nights.
My brother, on the other hand, got tired, laissez-faire, older parents. Although, as an arranged-marriage couple, they never had much love between them, even the little I had witnessed growing up had dried up by then. Nevertheless, our parents tirelessly maintained frequent restaurant outings, their tight grip, and their borrowed religious authoritarianism because this was and is how they cope with life.
“Although you said your baby didn’t ask to be born, some spiritual schools of thought say that souls carefully pick their parents so they can learn exactly what they need to learn in this lifetime,” I offered my friend. As a new mother, she was guilty about having second thoughts about having a baby and beating herself up because she had chosen to bring an innocent child into this world, when the child had no choice in the matter. “And now I’m confused if I made the right choice,” she said.
This kind of spiritual thinking is my balm, to know that I chose my life, my lessons. And I’d also like to think that my brother chose his timing well, so he could have a ten-year-old sister to lean on when our parents acted out. He followed my lead and kept to himself when they fought; he didn’t give in to any triangulation baits, and we formed a coalition way before I knew the word coalition. Our survival strategies and tactics were tainted by our different personalities, but we always had a mutual understanding. This is what they call a soul pact in spiritual school. The souls who took respite in my mother’s womb before my brother knew I didn’t have the capacity to anchor them then. For that, I’m sorry as the firstborn daughter.
