Perpetual pregnancy

(710 words)

I have to be careful that I don’t hold grudges, that I don’t be bitter, that when the world changes and when I change (every day, everything changes), that I don’t have any residue.

I don’t want to prove anything out of a personal motive, I don’t want to repay or try to punish those who have done wrongs and crimes. The day of vengeance and pay will come but my role is not to avenge or judge, it is God’s role. What is my job here? It is to be pregnant.

This job is not so simple, where there’s no respite. A pregnant woman too, is not supposed to stop being pregnant. I’m a surrogate mother. I have to raise embryos for people who pass by my path. All of a sudden, some kind of connection is made then, fertilization, and here God entrusts an embryo inside me. I feed, grow and keep it, it becomes part of me.

Such a pregnancy takes anywhere from a few minutes to a few years, different every time. And in time, I’m ready to hand the newborn to its rightful owner… Except for the most part he doesn’t want his baby. I try to come from the right or the left, go in a circle or an angle, it doesn’t matter. I already have a large group of orphans around me.

I got the job before I was even born. For years I tried to escape it, like Jonah who had been sent to bring the word of God to Nineveh and preferred to board a ship headed the opposite direction. Like the pizza delivery guy – he’s got pizza to deliver, he’s got an address, and that’s all he’s got. But if someone slams the door in his face, the pizza stays in the scooter’s crate, cools down.

And really, why try to give people things they don’t want? Often, they really hate it, and naturally they reject not only the delivery but also the deliverer. Maybe I’d like to live like the rest of the people, take that burden off me? Just having fun with people and laughing, without caring about them. But you can’t be impregnated, pregnant, in labor, and pretend it’s not happening – impossible.

Sometimes (rarely) people agree to take their baby in and other times they are even willing to take care of it, though they are always a bit grumbling, setting conditions and limitations of if and maybe. (I try not to complain, every pregnancy and birth – by definition – is difficult.) Still, a successful delivering a baby doesn’t help, because there’s nothing like a successful or even semi-successful birth to trigger another pregnancy immediately, and the one who received one baby wouldn’t want the next.

Maybe a day will come when people will be so frightened and with their backs to the wall that they will reluctantly accept what God wants to give them? I’m not sure that’s going to happen because I think the era of feeding people through manipulation or threats has passed – whoever doesn’t want to eat? It’s okay. He will starve to death in his corner, quietly.

One day, though, God will build his temple again in the land of Israel. It will be a different temple – a big maternity and neonatal hospital and I will be one of the first to be admitted. Until then I have to learn to accept myself without complaining, to accept my role without rebelling, to experience the crimes, the rejection of babies, without being bitter, without wanting to run away.

Sometimes I have to be mummified in the bowels of the whale and accept that as well without it seeming like I’m going to go crazy. I’m the pizza guy who has to give up the tip and sometimes get a kick and roll through all the stairs, with the pizza, out. I’m a fish that swims with Jonah in the ocean, and a lot of the eggs in me need to come out one by one. Some are fertilized, some are not yet.

Like the wild salmon, when the great pregnancy is over, I will lie on my side, in the shallow waters of a small crick, on the majestic mountainside, in silence.

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