And This Unto You

My mom says I was born tense. Tense and intense. When she tells the story of how I was born, amidst the drama and gesticulation, I feel a little sad to know that I am this child she speaks of. I was taken from the womb dead asleep, a planned caesarean woken up by the foreign hands of the outside world when all I knew was the comfort of my prenatal solitude. My body froze with fright, carrying the weight, it seems, of an entire lifetime of stress at the infantile age of birth. When she speaks of the way she could hear me screaming day and night in the nursery just a few doors down, and of her helplessness in coming to my rescue, I feel the aftermath both of her helplessness and of my own. It