#it was mothers and grandmothers telling girls how to be good obedient wives and that they had to serve a male

[swagging-back-to]

shoutout to the woman who adopted me trying to get me to hook up with a 30 year old male when i was 18 justifying it with 'i dated men way older than me when i was your age don't be a prude'

[deztinywarriors]

The Linked Charms - Episode 7 (Multi Liverpool players)

[jellybean-daydreams]

Womb to world

Explanatory Paragraph My mum is a great mother to my older sister and I. She had three other siblings and wanted her children to also have many siblings. When my sister was born she developed a mental disability that caused her to stay at the mental age of five. My mum blamed herself for not giving birth to my older sister better and causing my sister’s sufferings. She also pities me for not having a ‘real’ older sister or someone that I am able to look up to and be friends with. Ever since having me she has tried many times to fulfil her dream of having many children and so that I wouldn’t be ‘alone’. In order to write this piece I interviewed her a few times and translated what she had said since she’s not a confident English speaker. I’ve also consulted various pregnancy websites in order to properly document the progression of a foetus. The piece is dedicated to my mum and my lost siblings. First trimester: Weeks one to twelve At six weeks the embryo develops a brain and spinal cord. A heart begins to grow. Arm and leg buds are visible. Its eyes and nose are forming. It is about five or six millimetres. It looks like a tadpole. Dusty dirt roads twist and turn, tracing the veins of the Cambodian countryside. The roads are yellow sand sprinkled with small stones, pebbles and trash. Follow a particular road and it will lead you to a small town with rows and rows of dilapidated straw houses. Keep going and you’ll find a well. Take a few steps back and you’ll notice a cosy little home. It’s a hut really, with wooden flooring, bamboo thatched walls and a cheap roof. Inside you’ll find two shy newlyweds. Together they run a small illegal lottery. The year is 1990, she is twenty-three and pregnant. It is her first pregnancy, she is so excited, ecstatic even. She doesn’t mind the morning sickness whenever anything sweet or aromatic wafts her way. And takes care with her every movement. They’ve run away from the city to live happily ever after in the countryside, away from judgemental eyes. It is a classic romance story where the boy is from a middle-class family and girl is country-side poor doing her best to swat off poverty. He falls for her deep brown eyes and cascade of black hair. She likes his boyish grin and his shy attempts at chivalry and romance. His mother disproves of the girl. ‘You can do better than her. Look at her skin, it’s a disgusting tan. She has no money, what can she do? She is nothing, let her go and you will love again’ she says. She is six weeks into her pregnancy. In six brief weeks, she was ready to love her baby, a minuscule dot. A dot that was erased and suddenly gone. Her husband doesn’t show much emotion. He looks like he doesn’t care, but he wasn’t ever an expressive man. During the pregnancy the reality of a future son or daughter hadn’t settled on him. She is horror-stricken. The feeling of loss will envelope her and for months she will be in a deep void of sadness and despair. Release. There is a brief window, an opening where she is able to escape her pain. She has started to busy herself with work, trying to forget about her past sadness. She starts to clean the house rigorously. The taste of food returns to her as she cooks with a new found strength. She does whatever she can to stop thinking about it. Her mind on every and any other task and eventually she is better. But she doesn’t forget. A miscarriage is when a foetus is spontaneously or is unexpectedly expelled from the womb before it has developed enough to survive on its own. They are more common during the first few weeks of pregnancy. Almost one in five women, who are knowingly pregnant will have a miscarriage before their pregnancy reaches twenty weeks, after twenty weeks it is termed a stillbirth. Week twelve At twelve weeks the foetus will start to move by stretching, kicking and twisting. Its bone marrow starts to produce its own white blood cells. Its pituitary gland makes its own hormones. The foetus’s placenta is filtering oxygen and nutrients to assist in its growth. It is around five to six centimetres and can suck its thumb. Across the equator past a sea and a few countries, there is the island country of Australia. Keep heading downwards south easterly and there’s Melbourne. In one of its suburbs in Springvale is a cemetery. Tread lightly to find a gravestone that marks the death of an unborn foetus. This foetus would have been her sister-in-law’s future daughter. Unlike her own loss, this foetus at twelve weeks would have had hands and feet. It would have had shape. It would have been a person. A ritual prayer and small ceremony was made to honour the foetus. It is performed in the hopes that in the next reincarnation it would be reborn again and come to a full term. It is performed in the hopes that it will not leave half-way. So that it will not leave the mother. So it will stay. It is believed that it will take many reincarnations for a mother and her lost child to be reborn as mother and child again. In a lifetime a person will have to perform many good tasks for good karma. How many life-times exactly is unknown but there is a strong belief that mother and child will eventually be together. In Cambodian culture miscarriages are not talked of. They are tragedies that are respectfully left silent, for if they are talked about then neither the mother nor child can move on. Vegetables and etiquette There is an old wives tale in Cambodia, that says that if you crave sweet things when you are pregnant than you will have a girl. An angel would have descended from heaven and taken form as your future daughter, the angels in heaven only eat sweet things. In their small village out in the country, word travels fast. Grandmothers, mothers and aunties all share their words of wisdom to the new couple. They tell the couple, ‘don’t chop your vegetables the wrong way’. If you’re cutting a cucumber you should chop it from the top to the bottom that way when you give birth it will be easier. They say a pregnant woman should always sit in a respectful manner, keeping her legs together at all times. She shouldn’t open or close things half-way, that if she were to open or close a door she should do it all the way. She should not sit in doorways or at the bottoms of stairs, or she would be blocking the exit for her baby and have a difficult birth. The couple listen to the advice and follow it to the dot. She is especially obedient having already miscarried. Along with her husband she goes to the village fortune teller to see whether her child will be a girl or boy. The fortune teller is a revered elder of the village. He is renowned for his ability to communicate with the spirits and see beyond. He says that she will have a son. Third Trimester: Weeks twenty-nine to forty At forty weeks the baby is perfectly folded up and is ready to come out. The baby will weigh around 1.4 kilograms. The baby will move the most during this time. Its lungs will develop further, the bronchioles and alveoli increasing. The uterus is very cramped. In the dirty desolate countryside doctors are an uncommon sight. Even rarer if you are poor. She worries about her baby still, she’s heard stories of how other women have pregnancies where their babies face the wrong way sometime in the fifth or sixth month. She’s heard that sometimes babies are born feet first, where the mother and baby both die. In the absence of a doctor there are midwives, ឆ្មប: ‘yey mawp‘, directly translated as ‘old lady who assists in birth’. She’s heard that there are unskilled midwives, who push up and down on the mother’s belly too much killing the baby. She hopes with all her heart that her midwife is skilled, that she will not lose another. Her midwife’s first instruction is that she should pick a fallen gourd bud and stew it to drink before the birth. The midwife says, ‘the drink will help the baby come just as easily as the bud fell to the ground’. The next instruction is that she should pick flowers from the Bodhi tree. It is said that Buddha’s mother had given birth to Buddha underneath the Bodhi tree. Queen Maya was travelling to Devadaha her childhood home way to give birth to her son. Along the way her procession passed Lumbini Grove, which was filled with blossoming trees. Entranced the Queen asked her courtiers to stop, so that she may leave her palanquin and enter the grove. As she reached up to touch the blossoms, her son was born. That is why women believe that if they eat the Bodhi’s flower they too will have easy births. On the 13th of January of 1993, she endured the long and difficult birth of her first daughter. The long birth caused a swelling on top of her baby’s head, a sack of water that would not deflate and disappear for many weeks. Her baby would sleep for most of the time and was rarely hungry. She would later find out that there was something wrong with her baby. Second Trimester: Weeks Thirteen to Twenty-eight At twenty-eight weeks, the baby’s muscles will develop more. It will spend more time holding to its umbilical cord and sucking its thumb. It will also hiccup or practise its grasping reflex. The baby has fingernails and is about the size of a small doll. Sometime in April three years later she is on a plane with her family of three. Her hair has been cut short to just below her ears and she is secretly pregnant. It feels like a boy. The baby kicks so strongly that sometimes it wakes her up in her sleep. Her morning sickness isn’t as bad either. It is the first time she will be on a plane and she is afraid, but she will be bound for Australia where life will be better. The plane lands and she is safe. The first few years of her Australian life will be lived with her brother and sister-in-law. She has hidden her pregnancy well, disguised herself in loose clothing to hide her form. It is not until she is changing that her sister-in-law notices ‘Sister you aren’t pregnant are you?’ Just a little over five months into her pregnancy and her in-laws are astounded. It is as though the baby had snuck onto the plane in the womb, her brother-in-law jokes. There are fortnightly visits to the doctor, regular tests and check-ups to track the health of mother and baby. In an ultrasound it will be the first time that she will see her baby. The outline of the baby is so beautiful and adorable to her all of her fears that she will lose the baby have vanished. She will have a daughter. Third miscarriage Miscarriages happen when a foetus hasn’t developed properly. They are more common in older women since the chance of a chromosomal abnormality increases with age. She is thirty-seven and a proud mother of two daughters. Her eldest is thirteen but has the mental capacity of a five-year-old, a delayed cognitive mental disability she suspects occurred due to the difficult birth. Her youngest is ten and perfectly healthy. She pities her youngest since she feels she’s failed by not giving her a ‘real’ older sibling. She wants her children to enjoy the company of each other, like herself and her three siblings or her husband and his thirteen. ‘Baby guess what?’ she exclaims to her youngest. ‘What?’ ‘I’m pregnant!’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘I had a dream. I was standing outside and staring up at the sky. And then an angel came down and gave me the moon. The moon became my baby. I woke up and I knew I was pregnant.’ ‘An angel gave you the moon and that’s how you get babies?’ her daughter curiously asks. ‘Yes.’ At the ultrasound, she is excited to see the face of her next baby. But there is something wrong. Her baby doesn’t have a neck or much of anything else. It is just an egg. A few weeks later she will lose her foetus. In Cambodian culture after each birth or miscarriage each woman must undergo a week-long traditional spa treatment to restore her body. She should boil a massive pot of specific herbs and spices, then sit with her torso or most of her body above it cloaked in a towel to soak in the steam. In the pot she should there are a number of ingredients. Boiled leaves, roots, branches of a Kaffir Lime. A green lime or fruit that is bumpy or wrinkled, typically found in south East Asia with a distinctive double leaf. មើមព្រង់ល: ‘merm pro-lie’ a prong tuber similar to ginger but with a yellow inside. Lemon grass, salt and alum salts. Once or twice a day the woman should undergo the steam treatment for the duration of an entire week. After the steam, she will not shower but wear thick clothes and sit in a warm room to rub a mixture of white wine and the crushed tuber from earlier onto her skin. The entire process is to restore the woman’s body to its youth so that her skin becomes tighter and stays youthful for longer. Alongside the process the woman should not have sex for three months or sickness will befall her. Fourth miscarriage: the last and final A recurrent miscarriage is when a woman experiences three or more miscarriages in a row. It occurs in one in every one hundred women trying to conceive. Each miscarriage increases the chance of another miscarriage. It is 2009 and she’s about six or seven weeks pregnant. She’s taken great care with this pregnancy, just like every other pregnancy. This time, she hopes she’ll be fine although she might be slightly complacent. It feels like it might be a boy, but if she were to have another girl she wouldn’t mind either. The elders would say that having three daughters is like having ‘three roses’. That night she dreams, she dreams about her unborn baby. She’s nursing the naked baby and he’s beautiful, with a light pale skin tone and long pale limbs. He’s the most beautiful child she would have. Suddenly he stops nursing, gets up from her lap and walks away. He walks away with his back towards her, not once turning back. She calls for him but he doesn’t seem to hear. “Come back my child! Come back, come back!” He just keeps walking, away. She wakes up and she’s scared. A few days after her dream she is lying on her bed watching TV, her nightly ritual before bed time. There is a pain in her lower abdomen. Something similar to an intense stomach ache. A visit to the toilet and all looks fine. When she returns to bed the pain hasn’t disappeared. It hurts, much worse than before, excruciating even. It is a struggle to reach the toilet again, as she claws at the walls grasping at nothing. There is blood. She isn’t worried though. It is common that mothers who have had children before have a little bit of blood in her later births. It is a small amount of blood or ‘spotting’, similar to the remnants of the last period. She sits on the toilet in pain and agony, tears stream down her face. There is something wrong. The pain intensifies and spreads. Then there is no more. Something has fallen and with it, faith and her hope in the child have fallen as well. It is a long wait at Dandenong hospital before she even gets to see her doctor. She has been there overnight with an IV drip and no food. There are few doctors in the hospital since they have all been reassigned to help with the great bushfire that started just a few days before her accident. She is weak from her ordeal. When her family comes to visit she puts on a brave face although the pain and weakness are still etched in her face. Her movements are slow and lethargic, there is a frailty to her. Her doctor makes a brief appearance and is gone before her family can ask any questions. But he is followed by a nurse who stays for much longer. Her youngest daughter is eager to ask the nurse why there was a miscarriage. The nurse doesn’t have the answers. She isn’t the doctor. So instead she has a generic reply. ‘Sometimes these things happen. Sometimes it looks good and then all of a sudden it goes bad.’ The days that were Her husband listens to the radio in the dining room while her daughters either watch TV or searching the fridge for snacks. She is close to fifty and nearing her final years of fertility. Her period is a few weeks late. ‘My period is late, I wonder if I might be pregnant!’ she exclaims to her husband. He scoffs. ‘I could still have a baby, you never know.’ she says ever hopeful. Her period would come and she would reminisce about her babies. The ones that stayed and the ones that went.