It was really hard to accept the fact that I wouldn’t be able to bear any children. No test ever  proved me incapable, in any way. But deep down, in my bones, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to become a mother. I had panicked a night before the wedding, telling my mother to call off the marriage. Maybe I was scared that after marriage, my most obvious fear would take its shape. I had never mentioned this fear to my husband. What kind of female is scared to produce children? I was ashamed of myself to even think that I am afraid to get pregnant. “Let’s make a baby”, my husband had whispered in my ear several times, under the sheets, in the shade of a tiny orange light in our bedroom. And each time, I told him, "some other time." However, a year after the marriage, when the family pressure set in, I had to try and I told myself a thousand times, that it is going to be alright. I imagined a tiny life inside me, growing to its best and at times, I visualised a bump forming over my flat stomach. But nothing helped to soothe the disquiet building inside me. “You should be proud of yourself”, my husband said to me when one purple strip became two on the urine pregnancy stick. ”You are capable of bringing life into this world.” But two months later when I woke up at the middle of the night, with a stabbing pain in my abdomen and spots of blood on the bed sheet, I finally admitted to my husband that this was what I was afraid of. “It’s all right. There is always a second time”, he had said, when I was relieved from the hospital after the curetting procedure. But the second time became third and third gradually turned into sixth. In the past eleven years of my trying to produce a baby, I lost six of them, some at the inception of their creation, a few half way.

“Don’t be demotivated”, my mother always told me, “everyone is brought in this world with a reason and the main reason that women come in this world is to carry the life ahead. That is our sole purpose to come to this earth. Don’t think yourself incapable of not being a mother.” But nothing that anyone said ever helped me. There were times, when I cried at the blink of an eye, as soon as I saw a diaper ad on the television or my elder cousins internally complaining about their children’s eating habits. I used to abandon myself and get cut from the social circle. I avoided public gatherings, social functions and family dinners, afraid that someone would raise this question, “not planning a child?” I had heard this question so many times, in different versions. “I guess you should start considering a pregnancy again.”  “Why don’t you guys try surrogate?” “Is your husband thoroughly diagnosed?” And each time, I answered these questions, I realised that something weakened inside me. My husband would always understand my feelings and try to console me. “Nothing is going to change between us. It does not matter to me, even if you don’t ever become a mother.” But he has always been a bad liar and I knew that he wanted a kid as much as I did.

However, life unfolds itself mystically. Who knew that I too shall pack vegetable sandwiches in the Tiffin box for school and spend evenings in the public garden as my child spent hours wallowing in the mud? She came into my life six years back, when she was just a year old. Her mother put the little life wrapped in a yellow blanket in my arms as her eyes took promise from me to keep her safe forever. Her birth mother is my husband’s second cousin. Six years back, he came to know that her cousin gave birth to a third daughter, hoping it would be a son this time. My husband learnt that her family was not economically stable to raise three daughters and that is when he had suggested we go for adoption. I had jumped upon the idea, as if it was a blessing in disguise and when we put this proposition to his cousin, she too readily agreed. Six years have elapsed and I haven’t once felt that she is not a creation of my womb. Isn't motherhood more than just tolerating morning sickness, sore feet and labour pain? When I reflect back to my life in the early days, I feel foolish. How foolish it was of me, to lament at not having a child, to cut off from people, as if I had committed some crime and I wonder how things that were so important to me then, feel of least weight-age now. I guess it all comes down to the gift of life, it does not really matter who has given birth. She is going to remain my daughter for the rest of my life. I take pride, more pride than I would have felt if I had given her birth.  I take pride in the adoption, to help survive lives better. I feel that the real purpose of my life was not just not to become a mother, as my mother had mentioned, but was to go a level above that and each time when she says the word, ‘ma’, I feel that life offers a patch work of opportunities in front of you.  All you have to do is quilt it into a life of your own.