Ready or Not
My final period came and went with little fanfare. I opened a small bottle of prosecco to mark the occasion. I kept waiting to feel something, anything other than a dull sense of dread and sadness.
My final period came and went with little fanfare. I opened a small bottle of prosecco to mark the occasion. I kept waiting to feel something, anything other than a dull sense of dread and sadness. I guess that is something. It’s hard to fathom that my body will never go through this process again. Or rather, she will, but the hormone will float through my bloodstream with fewer controls, no primary outward manifestation of their role. My womb will be a ghost.
What will that feel like?, I wonder. Every woman I’ve asked tells me she has no regrets, she is thriving, she wishes she’d had surgery sooner. I find this both a relief and terribly sad. How unfair that so many are glad to be rid of this tiny organ, the size of a balled fist, the uterus, giver of human life. I keep thinking how it’s not her fault. The world and all its stimuli and toxins, endocrine disruptors and chronic stressors are not her fault. She is part of a magnificently powerful and simultaneously supremely delicate system. Capable of so much. So easily thrown off course for some.
I am still reconciling what it means to forever lose my ability to procreate. So much of my life I’ve felt little but relief each month, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve experienced an undeniable craving to…something. I’m not sure. Nurture. Experience pregnancy. Fall in love with someone built from my own cells.
I never pursued it, not explicitly, for a number of reasons. It’s complicated. I was not encouraged to have an unbiased relationship with this part of myself. I was told what I should think from the beginning.
Just before my father died, he extended a small, verbal olive branch, an addendum to his lifelong refrain of “never have children, they will ruin your life.” He said to me, “If you decide you want to have children, just be sure. You never know what you’re going to get. A sick child or a healthy one. A child to break your heart, or one to make you proud. You are going to love them the same, so be ready. Be sure.”
At least that is how I remember the message. It made so much sense to me. Just as I’d always understood why he felt that my brother and I had ruined his life, why he felt trapped and miserable as our primary caregiver, so too did I understand he loved us and put us first to the best of his limited abilities. The most generous gift he had to offer was his truth.
Still, I feel somewhat cheated out of making up my own mind. I spent so much of my life believing I disliked children. That they were gross and expensive and a waste of one’s resources. I suppose at times children are both gross and expensive - what human being isn’t? - and what they require of one’s time, energy, and commitment is tremendous. I also know that the vast majority of people love their children beyond measure and could never dream of regretting them.
I don’t think society makes space for those that do feel regret. It’s not acceptable to admit becoming a parent was a mistake, that an individual might have preferred a life less encumbered. I think that multiple, seemingly contradictory ideas can coexist. You can love a person without limits and still mourn a life that might have been equally (or even more) fulfilling through other choices. I never really got past this. And even when I thought I might, I stumbled into looming concepts of mass destruction, global warming in particular. I suppose this is why I was so willing to leave motherhood up to fate.
Some part of me always believed that it would happen.
I am not maternal. I love deeply and wildly. I can also be selfish and demanding. I long to nurture little things, mostly plants and animals. I crave solitude, spaces where no one expects anything of me. I doubt I would have been a good mother, naturally skilled in nurturing a child in all the ways I was and was not. I suspect I would have been adequate. I will never know.
At the time of writing this, I am two days away from a hysterectomy. Becoming a biological mother is not in my cards, an experience not meant for this lifetime. My purpose is for something else. And I do believe there are a multitude of ways to create. My life does not lack for love.
I worry I will lose my womb wisdom. The phrase, this mystical idea has slipped in and out of my attention for months. Maybe it’s always been there and I am only just now paying attention. There is something very beautiful about the idea of intrinsic, divine wisdom, the idea of innate knowing. One’s truth is just below the surface, awaiting excavation. Many believe there is something sacred in having a uterus. Losing that part of myself does feel like a deep and powerful loss, and yet…perhaps there are energetic ties that cannot be surgically snipped. Perhaps I will forever carry this part of my femininity, in biology, gender, and self-identity.
I am not saying this is or needs to be true for anyone else. I am only seeking what is true for myself. I have come to believe that wherever one finds comfort, we must grab on and hold on. The world is not a comforting place. So we find our solace and support where and when we can. If framing this part of my narrative in this way helps me feel at peace in my body, mind, and soul, then there is some amount of rightness in it for me.
Be ready, my father said. Be sure.
I believe I am making the right choice, for my health, for my body at this moment of my life. As for all the rest, ready or not, I’ll figure it out as I go.