Dilini
(Like mother, like daughter)
I was born in Sri Lanka in 1977. It was a time when they called Sri Lanka a “third world country.” It was also a time when you had to be married to get pregnant. But what if you weren’t? What if you became pregnant while unmarried — because the father of your baby was already married to another woman? And divorce was not an option, bound by the laws and the society of those days.
You loved this man so deeply, and you did not want to abort the child. You couldn’t — you simply wouldn’t. But having an illegitimate child was no option either. You and your baby would have lived in poverty. Education was uncertain, and the child would have been bullied relentlessly. In short, you would have been condemned to life as an outsider, shame marking every day for both of you.
That is why you made the hardest decision a mother can ever make. No mother on earth should be forced to make such a choice. You decided to give birth, dearest mother, even though you knew you could not keep me.
As an unmarried woman you were a second-class patient in the hospital where I was born. They could do whatever they wanted — and they did. They entered false information on my birth certificate, to conceal the truth, to erase the traces.
You breastfed me while staying at your sister’s place. But there was no room for us to stay longer. After three months you brought me to the orphanage — the hardest day of your life. Yet there they told you that you could stay with me until adoptive parents were found. Our farewell was postponed. But after only ten days you had to say goodbye, and I know it tore your heart apart to leave me behind. My sudden loss of you has left a mark on me — on my nervous system, on my very body. Even if my mind forgets, my body always remembers the loss and the missing. I can soothe the pain, but never erase it. It is a lifelong wound.
Leaving me behind was the deepest loss of your life. You returned to my father; you could not help it, the bond was too strong. After three years you became pregnant again. This time you fought harder, because you already knew the pain of surrendering your child. But nothing had changed. Was our father sad that he could not keep me and my brother?
After my brother was born, you stayed with him in a Catholic shelter for two months — until they told you to leave, because Danish parents had been found. You had to go immediately. Again, another deepest loss in your life.
You gave birth to two children and breastfed them for a short while. But the laws, the politics, and the society were not on your side. You were forced to give us away. You were forced into childlessness — you are childless not by choice, but by circumstance.
I am childless by circumstance. Like mother, like daughter.
Sometimes I wonder which hardship is harder to bear: to have children and be forced to give them away? Or never to have children at all? I have never given birth, never seen, felt, smelled, touched, or heard my own baby — but you did. And then you lost your babies forever. I don’t know which is worse, and maybe it doesn’t matter. There is no consolation: I have to live my life as it is, and you have to live yours as it is.
You too.
