The Weight of a Life 
 Madari Pendas  

I’ve seen my future son on multiple occasions. He visits me, only in my dreams, and presents his baby body as if it were the whole message. Self as symbol. A sort of playful well here I am; What else do you need? Pale. Floating. Round. He hovers at the foot of my bed. No wings visible. More apparition than angel. He is a part of me I can recognize from any advantage point. He has the same long crooked nose, dark under-eye circles, as well as my deep glower. A pastiche of my worst bits. His face does not reveal if he has a father—maybe his contributions are to the boys character. His father may have visited my room at night, presenting his desires at the edge of my bed. But he is mine. I always seem to know him. Dream recognition— a type of pre-loaded knowledge. In this phantasmagoric world I am always a mother, and nothing else. Not a writer or traveler or even someone who’s ever yearned for anything else. That glowing boy is alwaysmy son; however, I am not sure what he needs from me now. 

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My favorite English teacher in high school, Ms. Alvarez, called motherhood a yarn of regrets. Something that unravels, unspooling on your lap. You never know how long yarn is until it is spread out across the floor. When she said this, she stopped class and looked at the clock across from her. It was broken. Stuck at 12:18. Her large brown eyes fluttered with fatigue, resting half-open as she considered what she had said. I wanted to be like her; a woman who had read everything and held opinions as if they were designer brands. She looked back down at our textbook. We were studying Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Ms. Alvarez raised her stare, looking beyond all of us. She seemed surprised by her own admission, as if it had come from a new place within her. 

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I’m psychic in a minimally advantageous way. I see scenes of the future only while I dream, and usually only for brief instances. Glimpses behind the veil. I’ve seen future lovers visit in my sleep, opening their legs as I fall over them; snippets of the Berlin M-line; a Hokkaido ski shop in the periphery that I’m perusing with my husband. These visions endow me with proof of life. I do survive. Since I was a child I was convinced I’d die by suicide; even on the happiest, most fulfilling days, there was a dull ache in my skull. I remainder that tomorrow I’d have to be me, again, and that the ensuing days wouldn’t be as happy or fulfilling. When I can see the future, that I have one, I can rest. The chronic pain will not drive me overboard, to that fragile place where I start imagining my own death. The peace of it. The silence of it. How ideation often calms me—an out. That fear/desire is always there, operating at a low decibel. When I saw my son, I wondered if he is what keeps me going or if he is the only part of me that continues. Is it his future I’m seeing? Or my salvation?

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During her pregnancy, my friend saw death at every interval. She existed at the intersection of life and oblivion. Divinely creating. With a developing fetus inside her, she realized how easily life could stall and end (for no apparent reason); as well how much power strangers had over her now. If someone wanted to kill me, they could do easily now, she explained. It was only at the mercy of others’ restraint that her son’s cells could continue dividing. To become a mother you, thus, must face death. 

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For her it was also important to protect herself from spiritual attacks as she believed pregnancy rendered her spiritually vulnerable. Those interested in her heightened creation power could use her; but she was also a target—the envy of those who hadn’t themselves made life, according to her.  

“People want those energies; their drawn to it for some reason,” she said. “You’re a god for nine months. Who wouldn’t want your power?”

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If I’m already seeing visions of my son do I really have a choice in the creation of his life? Is he, and has he always been, fated?  So much planned parenthood. If I were to get a hysterectomy, would his spirit keep visiting me? Or would he choose another vessel, transforming in their image? Maybe he isn’t linked to my biology, but a spiritual child. Maybe a student I help, or child I adopt in my late forties.

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In December 2023, I saw my son’s birth. At the time I was living in Paris, teaching English part-time, and had no cause to think of him. In fact, I had a life my mother had urged me to live—cosmopolitan, abroad, and alone. My weekends were spent exploring the arrondissements with a chocolat chaud. It felt like I had escaped what my mother and Ms. Alvarez saw as a malediction. 

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In the dream, I was in a hospital room, everything tinged blue, and everyone’s face was a blur even when they stood motionless. They would speak or gesture but the gaussian blur on their heads remained. They were in constant chaos, so rattled by this birth that their sense organs scrambled, no longer perceptible or able to perceive.  

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“What’s going on?” I asked, but my voice only had enough force to push a hank of hair out of my mouth.

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I never wanted this, or any commitment longer than a few years. I have always wanted to be able to escape, should I have to. And then, suddenly, there was a wet, swaddled baby on my chest. Melancholy swelled in my abdomen. It replaced the space the child once occupied, and seemed to billow, expanding as if my body had no limits. I was no longer made of real, material things, but air. Nothing of substance. Even my thoughts were bubbling over. Oh he is here. And then a large gap before the next thought. Take him away.

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There wasn’t just a baby, but a teen, young adult, middle-aged person, old man, and then a corpse on my chest. He channeled through all these changes, expanding and the shrinking across my torso. He looked less like me with age, and more like whatever life had afflicted on him. Alcoholic eyes with a half-collapsed smile. Dark freckles for day laboring. A hunch that resembled a pillow. His life crushed me. I couldn’t breathe. None of the support staff checked on me or looked at my face. They fawned over the baby, checking his vitals, pulling at his foot, congratulating him on the fabulous work of being alive.

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Help, I cried from within my head; for someone to lift this world from my collapsing chest. Help. 

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One of the other reasons I feel so reticent about motherhood is because I want to pay back my own mother. In aperfect future, I give her, in her (g)old(en) years, all the attention, material wealth, and affection she doted on me when I was a child.  Repayment. Equalizing labor. She struggled while raising me, financially (we were on Welfare for several years) and emotionally (she was a twenty-something girl who had come to the U.S. with dreams of singing professionally that never materialized). She sang Celia Cruz songs to me while we waited for the #26 bus. La vida es un carnaval. I wondered if she saw parenthood as a performance; was I the only one who knew she was a mezzo-soprano? How can I make more people when my mother is greying rapidly? Hunching more each year? Wearing thicker glasses after each ophthalmologist visit? Caring for the ones here is more necessary than creating a new life.

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If I had a baby I’d forget about her, leaving her in the care of an indifferent state, Florida, and exploitative world. If I have no children, I can always accompany my mother to her social security appointments where we will all be shocked at how little money she is receiving from the U.S. government (despite all the years of labor), and as my mother looks over the number again—her light eyes shrouding over the figure— I’ll touch her hand and she’ll know to breathe again. There will still be apples and bread in the house.

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Do my son’s visit imply failure? Will I eventually be selfish—choosing to make my own family to care for me over repaying my mother?

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I knew the child was real—or would be real, one day—by how I felt after giving birth. The sorrow did not resign once the infant had been taken from my arms. In fact, it radiated across my bones, blazing through the sinew and muscles in my body, melting me from within. It wasn’t a flash—that would eventually, dim, but rather a seeding fire. A pain that could only dull, but would linger with me for the rest of my life. This pain couldn’t be fabricated or invented from nothing—we don’t dream of things we’ve never experienced. I was tasting the new wounds to come.  

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When Florida criminalized homelessness, at first, I imagined my mother lumbering over a full shopping cart. Her hair was disheveled, and her skin pockmarked with a leathery texture.  She appeared to be mumbling to herself. Except when you got closer, you realized she was singing. La vida es un carnaval.

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When Florida started rounding up unhoused people, I saw an elderly version of myself. In my hand I had a government issued phone, but my contact’s list was empty. There’d be no one to offer me a pillow or a safe place to shower. I had to choose.

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I can see the fullness children bring to a home, the camaraderie and genuine connection to present events they engender—the investment in a better future. Your own little team. 

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When I lived with a host family in Paris, I saw how the two children, Maya and Antoine, invigorated each holiday with enthusiasm and curiosity, how they made dinner a time of questions and explanations of new trends. When they spoke of their future dreams, it was easy for one to dream again; to feel hopeful. They animated each day with a magic that gradually dissolves from adult life.

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I had considered myself more evolved for demurring from the “traditional” life. As if by rejecting what everyone else wanted, my own life would have less obstacles, less competition. I would not have to really participate, fully, in life. I could hide away in obscure hobbies and esoteric books. Money would never have a complete hold over me. I wouldn’t need to buy diapers or pay for private school or reflect on what values I am inculcating in them. If I got fired, my unemployment would only affect me. No one else would have to sleep in my Nissan Sentra or believe a bag of Sun Chips was a real dinner. Without babies, my cramped apartment sufficed. With no one calling me Mami, I didn’t have to heal all the lacerations in my heart. I believed the stakes would, always, be lower.

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Some days I think avoiding motherhood is the only way I can still be a child. Weak and overwhelmingly needy. 

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 I imagine my son running alongside me, calling for me to slow down—he is losing sight of me and I of him. Some days I pretend he is more sign than signifier. He reaches me, and we sit at the peak of a hill, waiting for the sun to go down. We will paint ourselves with night. I form a horrible question. Son, will you come to me in my sick bed? Care for me? Forgive the etiology of your existence? Mosquitoes farm us; and the human voices of the area are replaced by cicadas and scavenging animals in the brush. Please take life seriously, son. If you have a home, I will have a room. If you have bread, I will have crusts to nosh on. If you have a life, I will have something to observe. It is best to not see. His hand feels like a dandelion. Our fingers skitter across one another’s. A breath of touch. Bodies reunited. I need so much from him now.   

​​​​​​BIO

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Madari Pendas is a writer, poet, painter, and cartoonist. Her work has appeared in Craft, The Columbia Journal, The Masters Review, The Maine Review, and more. She is the author of Crossing the Hyphen (2021) and She Loves me, She Loves me Not (2025).