The wonder that is childbirth...

 My friend Dee is in the maternity ward right now, waiting to be induced before she welcomes her second baby in the world. She is in Harare and I’m keeping her company from Manzini via whatsapp. Lucky fish! When I was waiting to be induced in 2006, there was no whatsapp. I was however fortunate to have my mother and husband sitting with me in the ward, waiting for my gynaecologist, Dr Nyaumwe to come.

The labour ward is a traumatic place to find one. Women were screaming their heads of and it really scared the living day out of me. I wondered if I would also scream in the same way or if I would be braver. My mother, while sitting next to my husband, made the grave mistake of telling one of the screamers to be brave. In very colourful language, the woman told mum how sex was beautiful yet its rewards were painful. That was a very awkward moment.

Dee has been giving me blow by blow accounts of what she’s witnessing in the ward:

The noise which is here from other women is so traumatizing. God help me.

 Sha the people who are in labour now were induced in the morning. One has justdelivered amidst ear-deafening screams, the other has just been wheeled off to the delivery room. There’s one left and she’s performing like nobody’s business. 

It’s funny, people scream and wail but no tears come out. I got here while pain free so I’m taking in everything around me.

 There is one woman opening her legs so much that I don’t know where to look. I pray I don’t do that. I understand why some people opt for C-section now …to maintain dignity.

 A nurse has come to see the woman opening her legs and said, “iii vasikana, regai kushamisa shamisa zvinhu zvenyu” 

That woman who was opening her legs is now hitting everything she can lay her hands on and throwing herself on the floor, kicking things…the nurses are not amused 

When I went to deliver my son, I carried my bible with me and when the women were screaming their heads off, I read them bible verses that I thought would help them bear the pain better. I also offered to make tea for them and had to stop when one of them snapped at me and told me to mind my own business. What a meanie, I thought.  I had no idea what kind of pain it was because I had never been through it and the doctor hadn’t induced me yet. When it eventually came, I literally lost my mind. I actually don’t even remember anything that happened during the time that I was in pain, but I know I did not scream. So I was sharing this with Dee and she said she also didn’t scream. Some people just aren’t screamers and choose to keep in gangsta, like me J.

At some point during the chat I started to feel very emotional, knowing that while I was watching Robbie Williams and The Lighthouse Family on VH1, someplace else there were people in agony giving birth to future ministers, teachers, musicians, prostitutes or thieves. Unfortunately you can never tell how your child will turn out when you give birth. All you can do is bath in the glory of having brought someone into the world. It took me back to the time when I was doing court-reporting in Joburg. Sometimes there would this thug standing accused of incredibly atrocious crimes. The mother, who never missed any of his appearances, would be sitting in the gallery, teary-eyed and blowing kisses to her beloved son. Some mothers would bring cigarettes for their sons who committed gruesome murders so that they could use them to buy favours in jail and stay safe. It didn’t matter what they had done, they would still be someone’s precious baby. Dee commented how some mothers actually got angry at the offended for having their children arrested.

Motherhood is precious, but can also be heartbreaking. Everybody who gives birth to a loved baby has high hopes for it; visitors come and say prayers for the baby to have a blessed life. But in some cases, the babies will disappoint as they grow, whether by choice or inadvertently. Some do make their parents proud and make them cry for joy, like Chad Le Clos, Beyoncé and other less celebrated former babies that do well in life. And then there the opposites, but they won’t show their true colours at birth, so they allow you to rejoice too. At that priceless moment when you hold your fragile bundle of joy, flooded with tenderness, you never think you will have to deal with looking for bail money, or negotiate with aggrieved women whose husbands your daughter would have “snatched”, or the heartbreak of sitting in a doctor’s room and be told that your child is autistic L. At that moment when you hold a newborn baby, there’s no tomorrow, or day after tomorrow. You just live in the moment, praising the Lord for a wonderful gift that many yearn for and might never receive. You never imagine that one day you could be on your knees asking the Lord, “Why, Lord, oh why….?”