On Pregnancy and Life
Versi inggris dari “Hamil dan Lahir”. Pernah diterbitkan di NTU Tribune (koran kampus).
Tulisan ini bisa dibilang adalah hasil keahlian dari seorang editor. Edisi bahasa Inggrisnya bukan hanya merupakan terjemahan mentah dari versi Indonesianya, tapi juga “diobrak-abrik” sedikit dan diberi bumbu untuk membuat tulisan serasa lebih gurih.
Kerjaan editor memang harusnya begitu!! ^__^ (Bukan cuma sebagai “kuli tanda baca” yang kerjaannya merapihkan tanda baca doang)
Bagi yang kurang kerjaan, sila bandingkan antara versi ini dan “Hamil dan Lahir”.
Catatan: Agak beda dikit dengan versi NTU Tribune. Ada beberapa titik-titik (…)Â yang bebek apus.
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Like almost every child in this world, I was also questioning (wondering) where babies come from. And I had a beautiful theory – from my innocent thought, which for sure at that time still had no idea what the fertilisation process is, or the intensely pleasurising activity preceding before it: “A child comes from hope.”
“When a man and a woman are blessed to become husband and wife, they shall love each other, and then pray together for a coming of a child.”
Because of that, we are often hear a lot people say that the couple’s hope of getting a child hasn’t been granted yet, – or they are still hoping (waiting) for a child to enter their life.
Um, why do we use these euphemistic expressions? It seems so ambiguous and made me think that a child can just be slipped into a woman’s womb like junk mail into a post box or something.
Finally, I knew that a child is not for us to wait for but it is for us to work out. =)
Perhaps it was caused by my naive thinking, that I didn’t recognize any case of a woman getting pregnant out of wedlock, out of “accident” or even any stories of “unwanted child” that so often crops up in tabloids. It’s like, by my line of thought, why if a child comes from a granted prayer, it must come from GOD’s approval, doesn’t it?
Thus, all wives that are expectiong a baby would only be the blessed ones that go zealously to churches, temples, mosque, etc, not to mention being blessed by entire family – as at the time, when I was a kid – the title of MBA (Married By Accident) has not been conferred (too) often.
This concept of mine – a child comes from hope – suddenly changed when I was watching a local news on the TV. If I remembered correctly, it was about a flirtatious high school teacher, famous to be close to his students – Too close in this case, if you get my drift.
The news anchor/narrator (or whatever you call the person who reads the story on TV when only the video feed is shown) was telling all his wonderful audiences that the teacher “loves to touch the girls. He loves to touch the cheek of the girls and even one of them has gotten pregnant…” Can you even imagine how wild my imagination went when I heard that one?
Oh… so you can get pregnant if a man does as much as touching your cheek!!! And my imagination went into overdrive from there. I concluded that a touch from a man can cause… something… to really go through into your skin and then end up in your tummy. (The concept of “Womb” was alien to me at that time). After that, it gets bigger and bigger, and lo, a baby is created!!
Wow… talk about dangerous… no wonder parents always say to their daughter, “Be careful, don’t sleep with a man!!!” (Or something like that. The words differ slightly from parent to parent, but the context remains more or less unchanged)
Wait… does it mean that if a man and a woman sleep side by side, on the same bed, then something will crawl slowly in the midnight from the man and will infiltrate the woman’s tummy, and then… Whoosh!! The female’s tummy expands?
Afterwards though, when I was in high school, my auntie said, “It’s OK to sleep side by side with a man as long as you are REALLY sleeping!!! If you are not, good luck to you!” Hm… there’s some truth in that.
By the way, comics or cartoons often tell us that a big bird (some kind of crane?) will bring the babies right to your doorstep. This story, for me at least, is quite funny. Do you think that many children still believe in that?
It’s funny for me since, as you know, that a lot of animal, including birds are already in the endangered category… almost died out because of us humans intrude and ransack the ecosystem etc etc. So, where is the logic in humans having an increase in numbers if the species that’s supposed to deliver the tykes to you is dying out? Yah, may be that’s why we should not consider cartoon movies so seriously.
Let’s move on. When I first understood the Caesar operation as a delivery method, I thought that was the only way a woman can give birth. Why? The reason was very simple.
My thinking was… after a baby grows in mum’s tummy, he/she should better be out of it before the mum’s tummy explode with the poor baby still in it. So, the easiest way would be to open mum’s tummy and then close it up again immediately. Something like how zippers work.
The details of the process? Must I care? I mean, there’s got to be doctors ready to give the mothers the needle. A poke here, one there, and mom’s belly is ready to be opened painlessly.
Another theory came from my primary school friend, and it was more cleverly imagined than mine. He said that pregnant mothers contains of a kind of liquid in the stomach, and when the time comes to deliver the baby… with full confidence he said, “They come out the same way as urine.”
“Heh? How come it’s like that? If it’s only liquid, so where is the baby? Do we have to freeze it in 0 degree celsius and use a mould to shape the baby?”
“Listen to me first! After all the liquid is out, of course mummy’s tummy is smaller. Then the doctor is supposed to make sure that he gets all the liquid and not even one drop goes wasted, so the baby will be a healthy and complete baby (Else it may be missing a finger or worse). After that, the doctor shall keep the liquid for awhile and then… abracadabra… by itself, the liquid will turn into a baby!”
The way he told me the theory sounded like those food recipes – after it’s cooked, leave awhile, then it’s ready to serve…
It might have crossed my friend’s mind that after the doctor collects all the liquid, he will put it in an incubator. So the function of the incubator is not unlike that of an oven when you make bread. Put the liquid, let it expand like a dough; part of it will become flesh and bones, and the rest would remain as liquid, i.e. blood. Maybe he was inspired by the fact that the incubator in the hospital and the oven in his kitchen are both square.
Sigh… that’s how it is when very young intellectuals gather to discuss things that their parents refuse to explain, I guess… Complicated huh?
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