Where we are born.

It’s 4.30am and I’ve been awake for an hour. That’s a common occurance these days, sleep and pregnancy aren’t great friends but most nights they tolerate each other. Tonight….not so much.

Even though outwardly I will myself to go back to sleep, I do secretly enjoy these midnight wakenings. Winston (the bump – did I mention his name before?) tends to wake with me so I hold my belly and let him kick away. The peace of the night is a lovely time for this, it’s a blessing of pregnancy, maybe of motherhood. I feel like I have a buddy with me all the time, no more lonely sleepless nights. I hear this changes with pregnancy two and three though, you just want sleep then they tell me, I’ll wait and see. I hope I’ll always enjoy my baby connecting with me this way.

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about where we are born. I had a bad dream Monday night which involved ISIS and beheadings, I woke up scared and upset. The next morning I walked through Stephens Green to try get a bit of beauty back into my mind, it was a gorgeous morning and the park looked heavenly. I thought about the women waking up from the dream of my reality, into what had been my nightmare. Why where they so unlucky?

This thought occurred to me again tonight. I felt Winston kick away in my warm bed, in my warm home and I thought about the other pregnant women in the world feeling the same thing but in very different surroundings. I don’t know if I should ask how they got so unlucky, or how I got so lucky? The main thing that saddens me is that it really is about luck. How our lives are mapped out depends so greatly on the situation you are born into yet at times I feel like we lack the responsibility that this unfairness should bring.

I remember on my first pregnancy a pregnant woman from Syria was rescued trying to cross the sea into Greece. She had been the water for too long and, at the time of reporting, they were unsure if the baby had survived. To think that woman tried to change her luck, to deliver her baby in a better place, and ended up floating in the Mediterranean Sea. We know it’s not fair but we, I, let it happen. We sit here, I sit here, and we sympathise and we donate. We feel awful and we wonder what we can do to help; but we are selfish and once it is not happening to us, we are quietly accepting of it happening to others. 

Tonight as I write this on my laptop in my warm room, in my warm house, I am sure there are women in homeless shelters holding their bellies. Women fleeing religious persecution, in cities under the rule of barbaric terror groups holding their bellies. Women who have the same hopes and dreams that I do, but without the freedom to make them the reality that I can. Women who take a shot at freedom and end up in the freezing waters of the sea. Who send their children in boats to Europe, and find out they arrived dead on the shores.

To my mind this is simply because of where they were born. And I’m just sitting here writing about it. My own lack of action embarrasses me, I hope my child will do better to effect a change in this world, but I guess they may have different plans for themselves. What a wonderful thing about living in Ireland – they are free to do what they want without paying the price of their life.