Tale of the past

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Every now and then, while sitting down for breakfast in the living room, my mom would tell me the various kinds of stories related to the time of her job life, some of those are filled with comedy, while others would hold the edges of tragedies. But the stories never fail to amaze me and I love to see the sparks in her eyes as she recalled the time of her past where the burden of housewife title wasn’t branded on her name.

A couple of days ago, I was talking about the recent tv-series House of the Dragons with her and how scary pregnancy was in the medieval era. The concept of having a royal womb and how it was expected from Nobel women to squeeze as many children as possible during their life-time ended up shortening it. During that conversation, my mother decided to fetch that one horrible pregnancy story she witnessed throughout her work life.

The year was 1997, after finishing her lunch at the office, my mother took the bus to visit the last working destination for the day. Upon her arrival, she heard the screaming of a young girl and saw a good chunk of crowd in front of a poorly constructed house. The curiosity ended up making her feet walk towards the mystery and soon it became clear that the girl who was screaming had the unfortunate fate of having her water broken at the age of fourteen.

The child was in excruciating pain and the screaming grew louder as the time went by. But instead of comforting the distressed mother, the people around her chose to scold the poor girl for screaming, while four other women pinned her down to the mattress to prevent her thrashing around the bed in pain.

But the effort went in vain as the girl would keep screaming and fight the force of four grown ass women on top of her. So the people decided to take another approach. They took a handful of the girls own hair and shoved it inside her mouth. It was purposefully done for two reasons, one to stop the girl from screaming and the other to use the hair as a gagging generator which would create pressure on the lower part of the body and help with the childbirth.

The cruelty of the situation finally pushed my mother to speak out and even though she didn’t have the power to alter the situation, the protesting words still left her month in the hope to change the unfortunate fate of that little girl. But no one budged from their places, and one ended up saying how things have been done here like this way for hundreds of years. From their perspective, the unfolding situation was nothing but another normal tale of their village pregnancy.

In the end, she couldn’t do anything but silently listened to the muffled screaming of the poor child and when it became too much for her to handle, she simply left the place, accepting a rather tragic outcome. At this point of the story, even I was pretty much convinced that this young girl probably ended up being dead. No way in hell she would survive such complications during pregnancy while not being able to get any medical help.

So I asked her if she ever visited that house after the incident, and she was like of course I did, I wanted to know if the girl made out of the labor alive. She ended up visiting the house the next day and to her surprise ended up seeing the young girl lying in bed, nurturing her newborn daughter.

A miracle that didn’t end up being an unfortunate tragedy.