Gutted

The early spring time Chicago sun is setting outside just beyond the 3rd floor apartment windows. Beneath them is a quiet, quaint neighborhood street lined with new fluorescent Cherry Blossom trees. The sun casts a soft, radiant, golden hour glow that pours through the opened windows and onto eager indoor budding ivy plants. 

New growth.

I look down the gray hardwood floored hallway and notice dust swirling through little beams of soft light. 

I stand at the kitchen counter. Feeling somewhere between both very close and far away. 

I wipe my hands on the damp dish towel, “I really need to wash that”, I think to myself as I hang it back on the oven handle. I look out of the kitchen window and notice the sounds of the birds and how their chaotic symphony has always been a sort of haunting and comfort for me. 

Spring has arrived. Life is anew. Growth and emergence is all around. 

And yet, I am alone. 

I wonder to myself… at this stage of my life, am I growing and becoming more myself or just silently going to sleep?

I hear the click, click, click of small paws and a breathy sigh escape my dog from the other room as I imagine him flopping down directly in a sunbeam.

I examine the soft, raw pink slab of salmon in my hands that I plan to make for dinner and I think about how delicate it is…was, before it was captured, stolen and had its own flesh cut away from itself. 

I think of my own precious body, tender, pink insides… parts stolen away, parts still unknown and I notice a softening in my being, in my body as tears start to well up in me.

I lean over the kitchen sink and sigh deeply. 

I have an appointment Tuesday at 5am for an intense endometriosis excision surgery. 

If you don't know what that is it basically means endometrial tissue has grown on the outsides of my organs and up into my body cavity. Simply put, it wreaks absolutely havoc on the female body and the average diagnosis time is approximately 7-11 years because, well, does anyone really believe in a woman's pain or trust her feelings about her own body?

I’ve been symptomatic for over 20 years. And thank God I’ve finally found a provider who's willing to help me because I truly cannot live this way any longer. 

In the past, after passing out in the ER time after time due to intensity of pain, providers would do things like just send me home with ibuprofen, or randomly remove my appendix, or just tell me things like “you’re stressed” or “this is just what women have to go through to, like, be a woman.”  

Unfortunately one of the only things that hopefully works for endometriosis besides trying birth control after birth control, IUD after IUD, or medications with intense side effects like weight gain, hair loss, bone depletion, suicidal ideation etc is to have your stomach sliced open in several spots, your abdomen pumped full of gas and then the tissue has to be physically cut out… excised. 

So the doctor will knock me out and then go in and basically ice cream scoop my guts out so that I hopefully no longer experience things like: random bleeding, prolonged unpredictable debilitating periods, pain that makes me vomit for days on end or pass out, lost days of work and pay, painful sex, insomnia, hot flashes, erratic mood shifts, food intolerances and chronic body inflammation just to name a few.

I was told by the male surgeon to “prepare for the worst based on the severity of my symptoms”.  

As he said this, his kind faced nurse with short blonde hair turned and held a long look at me over the rims of her glasses, a look that conveyed both concern and comfort. 

“Hysterectomies happen more often than not with our endo girls”, she said. 

You've miscarried in the past and you've been in pain for so long, the odds aren't great.” 

She forced a pitied, gentle smile.

“It happened just this morning to a patient. She was 44, we opened her up and we had to take everything… total hysterectomy because she was covered in endo …but she was older. 

You’re younger and you've got more time.”

The tan skinned, almond eyed surgeon leaned forward in his chair and looked at me, “Hope, do you want children?" he asked gingerly. 

A little stunned, I sat back and stammered.

“I…I don’t know. I don’t know that I'm ready to make that decision," I responded meekly as I felt my voice catch in my throat and emotion start to rise in my chest. 

Oh no. I was surprised that I was surprised at my reaction. “What’s happening to me?”, I thought, feeling panicky. 

At that moment my mind goes somewhere else. I think about my art and how I finally, just now in my life feel as if I'm starting to truly discover it and step into it and uncover more of my real, authentic, unapologetic self. How I’m just now starting to find myself, starting to feel free. 

I think about my body and the nightmarish Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) I have and the gruesome battles I've had with my own hormones and multiple chronic illnesses… Lyme disease, Chronic Inflammation Syndrome, Guillain-Barré syndrome that left me paralyzed from the neck down and unable to walk, unable to care for myself, unable to live in a world that wasn’t made for disabled people.

I wonder if it's even feasible. If my body could handle a child? How would I do it? How would I afford it? Who would help me? I don't have family, I don’t have a partner and I definitely don't have a plan. And then I think about the kids that I’ve worked with in refugee camps or in gang hot spots or who were recovering from gun violence in the children's hospitals I used to work in, or the weasley, knobby little 12 year old boys in front of me in line for a shitty DollyWood roller coaster last weekend when I was in Tennessee on a bachelorette trip. The boys turned to me after an hour of playing and laughing and waiting to ride due to a lightning delay and said, “Man, we wish you were our mom!” as they wrestled each other into yet another headlock. 

I think about how my best friend, unpromoted from the backseat of the Honda CRV on the car ride home from the theme park, put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I saw you with those boys today in line, they loved you. You would be such a good mother, Hope.” 

And how that kind, thoughtful comment absolutely decimated me.

There's the uncertainty of it all, and then the fear creeps in. 

Will I even be able to make these decisions about my own body a year from now depending on who's in power politically or what state I’m in? If I were to get pregnant and something goes wrong, would it kill me? If I can't be on birth control, what happens if I get raped… if I get pregnant …. if I meet someone, if I don’t…if… if…if.

My mind races. I don't feel safe in this world as a woman. And I am a white bodied one. I think about my black and brown friends. My poor friends. People I know who have no access to healthcare at all.

Many women don't even have the luxury to ask themselves these questions that I am struggling with. Some women are already dead because of this. Some women right now, this very second  are fighting for their own bodies. I imagine them bleeding heavily on their own cold bathroom floors, in the dark, panting and moaning and holding themselves in the middle of the night alone like me… grappling with the fragility of life. Their own…and potentially of another …or tragically, the loss of both. 

We are taught that women's bodies are so “holy” yet society treats them as if they’re disposable and we’re made to think that they aren't even our own…and yet, in this moment, mine feels so tender, so precious, so scared, so small. 

Nobody is entitled to my body but me. Sadly, that’s something that’s taken me a lifetime to figure out. But, what if I wanted that? What if someday I wanted a child?

I am reminded of a wise, gentle friend who, when I asked her “Did you know that you wanted children?”,looked off into the distance and after a long pause replied, “I didn’t want kids, I was an artist and had decided to dedicate my life to my art. I was loyal to my art and to my own sort of artistic suffering and wanted to live my life on my own terms. And then I accidentally got pregnant. And while I love my kids…sometimes I think to myself as I watch my paints dry up “what if”. Who would I be? And that is its own sort of pain and agony.”

Her comment steals all of the air from my lungs. 

“My god.” I think to myself.

I feel her. I ache for her.

Her paints are drying up, my insides are drying up, we have different stories and different lives and entirely different fates, and yet, in this moment in a way, we are the same.

The curly, pepper haired surgeon with crossed arms interrupts my thoughts and says, “If there is even a 5% chance you MIGHT want to have kids one day Hope, I'll do everything I can to leave what I can, to save what I can save”.

I start to feel unsteady inside. I look down at my hands to remind myself that I am here, in my body, in this stuffy, ill lit, patient room sitting on an outdated examination table, one with faded pink stirrups. 

I sit up and look down at the floor.

Avoiding eye contact, in an almost whisper I say, “I trust you to use your best judgment”. 

It’s an odd feeling though, this process. 

Being put to sleep and rendered unconscious, while some man rearranges and permanently alters my insides. He tells me I will experience vaginal bleeding when I wake up. This is not the first time I've experienced or felt a similar type of way in my life, or had someone tell me to trust them with my body only to later regain consciousness horrified…but I hope this time it’s different. I pray that I feel relief and gratitude for whatever the result is. Hysterectomy or not. Relief from the pain and relief from the burden of having to choose. Relief from the deep ache in my heart although this is not the first time I’ve had to sever parts of myself in an attempt to try to be whole.

In an odd way it feels like a sort of right of passage that I am walking through…taking some sort of weird side step towards motherhood by potentially losing the possibility of it forever. 

I shared with a friend that the grief feels heavier than any fear of the actual surgical operation. The grief of Mother’s Day that is approaching and will return every year, the grief of losing parts of my body, the grief of “what if”…the deep grief in the wondering and the uncertainty. The grief of living in a world that teaches women that our worth is dependent on our ability to reproduce. How twisted that thought is, how twisted my insides are…and the sad recognition that that outdated, harmful thought still lives in me.

I think too about how there are a million other ways to mother. And how maybe for me that looked like holding my friends' hair in college or reading to my siblings when they were small. Maybe it looks like loving my niece and nephew a little more fiercely or making them laugh a little harder or holding space for my friend who just lost her father or gently scooping my dog out from under the bed when he's hiding from a thunderstorm. Maybe mothering looks like creating a soft place to land and ushering other women along on this rocky path of life, offering guidance and wisdom and love whenever another sister or person is in need…just like so many women have done for me these last weeks.

Maybe it looks like adopting or continuing to stay in connection with all of the kids that I've worked with as a trauma therapist here and abroad who need their own version of a caring mother or who lost theirs in a war or on a dingy boat while desperately trying to reach freedom. Maybe it looks like a text that says, “Did you make it home okay?” or “Hey, I love you” or “here’s a song I know you’ll love” or  “I’m on my way.” 

Maybe for me it looks like holding so many things, but not my own child. 

I don't know. 

Everything feels so sped up and slowed down all at once. I never thought I would have to make these decisions so soon. I thought I had more time. I don't feel this old. I’m not ready. And yet, like sand slipping through my fingers, the hour glass turns. How did I become 34?

How did this happen? I envisioned it all so differently. 

I lean over the kitchen sink and the oven lets me know that the salmon is done. 

I burnt it. 

Tears pool in my eyes as I hang my heavy head. 

“Of course I burnt it” I think to myself and let out a cry that’s almost a laugh. 

“Oh, poor salmon. I am so sorry.”

My dog comes to lay at my feet as the sun dips just below the Chicago skyline. 

I wonder if the setting sun and burnt salmon is an omen, a sign of what's to come. 

The guttednenss of it all makes me hold my stomach.

Quiet tears stream down my face. 

And then a little voice comes to me that says, “You are safe here. In this moment and in the next. Let yourself be held by the millions of other mothers and all of the other versions of mothering. Learn to mother yourself now, Hope. So much living comes from loss. Let this ache be the one that heals you.”