C-Section

They say Caesareans are painful,

mine hurt a bit more than hurt.

The kind of hurt you feel

when something is taken out of nothing,

breathing bones, trembling flesh

hollowed out of my emptiness.

It was the most beautiful something

that could possibly be born out of what I’d have liked to forget as nothing.

Would I go back and undo it all, if I could?

I don’t know. I can’t quite tell.

Has it ever happened to you —

your worst regret and your best reason to wake up

have cohabited?

Mine is thirteen years old today.

And as he prepares for a lifetime of grown-up feelings and adult aspirations,

I make sure he doesn’t become the dreaded half of his becoming.

I need him to know that desire doesn’t knock before it changes intent,

that love is not an insurance for the distorted notions of a perverted mind.

I need him to know monsters don’t live under the bed,

but within the sheets;

breathing down your neck, warm and sweaty,

in cold air that smells like resigned fear.

I want him to know monsters need not beget monsters,

that he could become what his mother had hoped his father would be.

That his mother’s vanity and valour were inheritance,

just as much as his father’s ego-battered testosterone

and his broken ideas of what a man is supposed to be.

That a marriage certificate is not a permission slip for ownership,

that love is made; not demanded,

not grabbed, not extorted.

I want him to know, 

Caesareans hurt a little less

when there is something left inside

to empty out from.