The Great Rebirth Mushroom
One morning when I was twenty, not too far into my second year of university, my then-boyfriend told me he woke up in the middle of the night to me weeping in my sleep.
My period hadn’t come.
I got a pregnancy test.
In the weeks leading up to the abortion, I missed my seminars. I felt constantly nauseous and the fear of needing to run out of a class to puke left me too anxious. At one point, I broke my vegetarianism because chorizo was the only food that didn’t make me feel sick. Most days, I lay in my bed feeling weak and depressed. Perhaps I could have asked for the pill that invokes a miscarriage, but I was frightened. I didn’t want to remember something traumatic.
In the surgery room, I lay down and looked at my left hand. There was a little needle sticking into my vein. The next thing I knew, I was being gently guided into another room where I could recover from the anaesthetic. Even though I was so dazed from the drugs, I can still recall feeling disbelief about the fact I could not remember everything that took place in the surgery room.
Perhaps I had wanted to remember every aspect of something so important then?
For many months after, I was depressed. Depressed for one reason or another, but this event certainly affected me greatly even if I wasn’t so aware of it at the time. I hadn’t realised how much I wanted children until the abortion. If only I had the wealth! And an established career! It got to the point where I became so enveloped by loneliness that one day my mum messaged me saying, “why don’t you get a cat?”
And so Momo, my little mushroom, my tiny baby cat, came into my life.
I find it interesting how people consider their pets to be their children. Yes, I see Momo as my cat-child. She was born roughly around the same time my own child would have been born. And the first time I realised this, it got me thinking about the Buddhist concept of rebirth. Rebirth is like what physicists say about the nature of energy: it is never created nor destroyed. It simply moves from one place to another. So, in my eyes, I was a mother-that-never-came-to-be; I lost a child but then a new one was passed on to me. That in itself is a kind of rebirth, even if Momo is not literally the life essence my child would have been. I love my cat like she is my daughter, and I believe she loves me like I am her mother.
To be honest, if you were to ask me to describe the concept of rebirth in full, I would be unable to. I could merely reply with one simple phrase: observe mushrooms. Mushrooms are the great recyclers of our planet. To me, they are empirical, natural, tangible proof that rebirth exists. Nothing is permanent. Why should death be then? Why should we live for a little bit then be dead forever? Energy: neither created nor destroyed. Just recycled. Mushrooms, fungi, they break down dead matter, feed off it, which in turn gives back nutrients to the soil.
And so the Great Rebirth Mushroom gave back; it let one life flow on to the next and it coordinated it perfectly so that the woman who lost one life gained another.
