Mittelschmerz.

I do not intend to complain about my anatomy because I love the soft curvature of my lower back, and I also love the freckles on my knees splayed out like tiny energy particles, my skin a planetarium housing my jumbled up /cosmic/ beautiful insides. I love being a girl—the gentle euphoria of drug store lip liner and a dashboard rosary, a yellow flower tucked sweetly behind my ear, summer in my esophagus, honey as an aphrodisiac on my inner thighs. I love my rounded nails and my airy Marc Jacobs perfume and my blonde curls and my obsession with the fact that they made a Lana Del Rey reference on the highway sign that insists that you not drink and drive. BUZZED DRIVING IS DRUNK DRIVING / GET PULLED OVER AND YOU’LL HAVE SUMMER TIME SADNESS!

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I love heart shaped lollipops, I love vintage leather, I love collecting memories in a thick, frayed journal so my life doesn’t pass me by. I love decorative bows and psychics on the side of the highway and holding space for the tiny pieces of paper inside of fortune cookies. I love cookie dough ice cream and body oil and thrifting as a meditation. I love hot yoga and Marlboro lights and matching silk pajamas and scream-singing in the car and Amy Winehouse. I love being a juxtaposition.

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I laugh at how not seriously I am taken in my field by my male counterparts. I love surprising people with my mind.

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What scares me, really, is the possibility of my womb—the unpredictability of my entire reproductive ecosystem and its uncertain future. For a lot of my life, I have fought so hard with the concept of bodily autonomy—fought to secure agency for myself, freedom from the patriarchal requirements for how I should look. First, it was the fact that my father didn’t want me to get tattoos. Then, it was the fact that my meanest boyfriend thought that I needed to always wear a bra so that I could hide what belonged to him from the other people in the grocery store—like I was frozen meat he had to make sure nobody else would consider buying. Even after I inked my arms and dumped the controlling prick, I was not free from the confines of my female form. I got pregnant, accidentally, in 2019 and the fetus lodged itself in my lower right ovary, rather than my womb. I paid the debt of my femininity in many sleepless nights and lonely hospital stays, being injected with chemotherapy-level drugs while the man who had gotten me pregnant tripped shrooms and told me that it was my fault for making him want me. I also suffered the hormonal consequences of mental devastation that could only be held by my poetry, anguish thinking of tumultuous what-ifs surrounding what almost existed, and a strange grief for the baby that I knew I wasn’t ready to have. I felt defective because it wasn’t up to me—my body couldn’t hold the baby if it wanted to / a house is not a home. It would’ve been a hard decision to have made, but at least it would’ve been mine, had things been different. I often wondered if it was because of how hard I was partying at the time, the Marlboros and whiskey and Strawberrita cans that I flippantly imbibed. For my entire life, I wanted nothing more than to keep living—an impulse so strong that it created an intense phobia of mortality—but I struggled to cope with life on life’s terms, so I kept my arsenal of vices closer than any friend. After the ectopic miscarriage, there was a real sense of shame for how I treated my physical form—the sickening notion that perhaps I was supposed to be a vessel for someone else’s life and I fucked it all up with weakness and pollutants because my waking hours were hard to grapple with. I felt selfish. Who did I deprive / what did I ruin?

Women take months off of their jobs and spend paychecks and pay checks on all of these vitamins and fertility supplements when they are trying to conceive. They stop drinking coffee and soda, eat organic, breathe deeply—they engage in meticulous exertion to make themselves a habitable place. They also have to be a temporarily habitable place for their male partners when they’re getting fucked. To be a woman is to brace oneself for entry; disturbance, intrusion. Men do not have to be the same kind of careful nor do they have to be the same kind of wide open and vulnerable.

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I stopped sleeping with and dating men after I got sober, because I realized that the hole in my heart was meant to be filled by another woman. This wasn’t out of malice or resentment towards the male species—just clarity. However, I still experience excruciating pain in my lower right ovary, mittelschmirz, as the Germans call it, every time my period is going to come. It reminds me of all that is uncertain about my body being a host to grow something in. That is not to say that my future child would be a parasite. All of that is to say—I don’t even know if I can have kids, or if I could withstand reliving the trauma and the fear of what happened when I was 20 years old.

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I often wonder: how could I reform myself, as I am still very much a vessel of exposed nerves and bad habits, to properly bear a child?

 

The idea of giving up part of me, giving up the agency and sense of belonging to myself that I worked tirelessly for, for someone else to live…is terrifying. Just recently, a woman in Georgia, Adriana Smith, was kept on life support despite being declared legally brain dead because of Georgia’s anti-abortion laws. What if there is a medical emergency, and the political climate is such that the life I worked so hard to have, the person I fought so fiercely to become, is sacrificed so that my unborn baby can live?

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A woman who I went to grad school with wrote a lot about motherhood and how hard it was for her to find an identity outside of it—how all she wanted to do was to be seen as something more than a mom, or maybe just something besides a mom. She essentially lamented that she didn’t know that having a child would reduce her to a shapeless figure outside of parenthood—a milk duct. Sometimes she would look at pictures of herself after having a baby, and not recognize the person staring back at her in the image, and even worse, not remember who she was before having her young daughter. I’d listen to her read aloud and silently wonder how there could be so much distance between versions of her that were only separated by a couple of years. Then again, I should’ve known the feeling better than anyone, because I was drinking at the time that I was getting my masters degree and I would wake up feeling infinities away from my blacked out self, someone whom I was only separated from by an evening.

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On the cusp of one year sober, I feel that I am meeting myself for the very first time and there is still so much about me that I don’t know, that might take years to relearn, without the added pressure of someone to care for.

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And yet, despite ALL of that, I find myself journaling, thinking that one day I’m going to let my future daughter read the pages if she feels alone and needs to feel understood. I find myself sitting in a sushi restaurant telling my partner that I feel passionately about building a family of our own with her, because I do. I don’t view embryo as art project or extension of self—I don’t believe that it would be for the wrong reasons. But I’m 26 and my ovaries hurt—the pain is palpable, palpable enough that I wonder if I’m preemptively grieving something that is never going to happen.