Smaller Evil, Greatest Pain

Have you ever thought how much power your words, simple words, have? Like asking a question that for us seems to be simple or like telling someone a positive word that can change not only their day, but maybe even their life. Have you ever though of this? If not, let me tell you a story so that you will understand better.
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This is the story of a young woman that has dreamed all her life to have a child. Yet, like in any real life story, what one wishes may end up by not being the same thing with what life brings.
When she was very young, Mary has never thought that having a child might ever be an issue. She grew up among children and she loved them all, and her childhood memories were so very unique and beautiful that she knew she must oneday create that beauty for her baby as well.
Yet as she grew up she witnessed situations of young girls having unwanted pregnancies and she heard people talking with a mean passion about those unhappy situations. So as she matured she was rather stressed by the thought of getting pregnant too soon or unmarried. In her heavily religious environment and judgemental society, among neighbours and people that were more than curious about all the pain and all that anyone around does in the constant hunger for sensational and gossip, Mary knew that this is a very delicate issue. A personal issue it should have been, but the world she was living in made it much more complicated than that.
So, because she was a responsible human being and after much thinking, Mary ended up oneday by taking the contraceptive pill. Of course from a religious point of view it was a great sin, and also none of her friends gave her any advice on that . Also her mother was not open minded enough to talk to her about life. And having an unapproachable mother made it not easy for her to take decisions, but she made her choices thinking of choosing the smaller evil.
Years later, after getting married and when she thought it would be time to have a child, Mary gave up on the contraceptive pill. But that day has been only the first day of a life she would have never imagined.
After the time passed she realised that the dream she carried in her soul was slipping away from her, little by little. She understood that something was wrong with her. But at the same time she had to face the mean enquieries and curiosity of a whole cortege of family and friends who were asking her again and again the same idiotic question: “when are you finally going to have a child? Your bloodline will die.” To make things even worst, all her relatives, friends, neigbours and work colleagues were having babies one after another. It seemed like life was making a giant prank on her expense. And every time when she saw other women around holding their children in their arms she felt like dying more and more.
She hoped then that going to a specialist will solve the problem, but that did not happen. Instead she was sent from specialist to specialist and none was good enough to figure out what was wrong with her. Or maybe her dream was not yet meant to come true.
And she gave a serious thought to adoption, but as much as she loved children, not only that adopting was very complicated, but also even without having a child of her own she knew that the bound to a child of her own blood must have been something different and stronger.
After years of battle on her own , as none in her family supported her, Mary ended up by closing in herself and not talking to anyone anymore. She avoided talking to all the people that have hurt her in the past with their lack of sensibility and questions. She left her husband, she kept distance from all the family. She felt like her life was very much doomed and cursed, and so she ended up by burying that loving heart she used to have, to burry it so very deep that she could no longer hear that voice of unspoken pain that she had accumulated over years and years of failing and not being supported in any way.
To Mary this was a wasted life. Little it mattered to her that she helped others or that she cared for people’s pain becuase she knew exactly what pain is.
She used to keep inside long conversations with God and ask for forgiveness for all those years in her life when  she used the contraceptive pill, and she asked for forgiveness for what she considered to be the heaviest sin of her life, a sin that nobody could have erased to release her from the endless curse.
She used to sit in the park sometimes watching the children play, with a heavy heart, with a smile on her face but an endless sorrow flooding her being.
One day, talking about her life to someone, a stranger that knew nothing about her life, she was answered: “You are such a special woman that God still needs a lot of time to create a soul for your child. It takes longer for you than for other women because your child will be the most special gifted little soul you have ever seen, and many will envy you.”
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Here is where the story stops. Little matters what happened next. Life is open and Mary could have seen her dream come true, or maybe she ended up by dying alone and still dreaming of her little child and aching for every year when she grew older on her own.
It is often in life that we cannot come close to understanding someone else’s pain and life struggle, as we can only see with our subjective eyes and understand nothing but our problems. Often we have no sensibility towards other people and their pains.
And we often judge other people’s pain as “not as bad as ours”, because “our pain is the greatest”.
Is this a corect way of seeing life? If we are centered only on what we feel and need and experience and don’t think what sort of feelings we give others, what sort of a life are we living and what are we?

memyselfandela, 2013

June 25, 2013 | Categories: Black & White, Children, Dream, English, Feelings, Life, Love, Mother, Pain, Photography, Prose, Romanian, Sadness, Solitude, Song, Thoughts, Time, Woman | 4 Comments