Living her life

Yesterday I thought a lot about my birth mother. I wondered if she was still alive and if so whether the pain of my absence still tore through her sometimes. I hoped not. I hoped that she could feel my silent thank you and know that she had enabled a miracle for me.

There's really only one comfortable place in our house for me these days - the recliner. As I sat there throughout Mother's Day, getting up now and then to fix Deaglan a snack or spend five minutes on the floor building a robot with his blocks, I felt acutely how unlike this life hers most certainly must have been while she was pregnant with me.

How as a very young and poor Muslim wife she likely spent her free moments pleading with her God to make this one a boy. That after the beatings, abuse and shame she endured when her husband saw that their first born was a girl, she would have given anything to just make this one male.

But it was not to be. Because after me, two more baby girls followed. And with them came a life more miserable than the one she had already known. I can't imagine what it would be like to have to live on the streets - the cruel streets of a poverty stricken land - with a newborn and a toddler, having no money, no food, no shelter, a damaged reputation, and the heartache of having been forced to leave your older two with the very man who resented you enough to almost kill you for giving birth to only girls.

And yet here I sat in my $600 recliner, in a place where gender only makes a difference if you are trying to plan out your nursery, expecting another boy. Here only but for the grace of God and her courage.

I wondered if life could get any more unfair.