January 3, 2008
While My Uterus Gently Weeps


I resist making this confession because its inherent pinkness borders on the twee, but every month that I slouch closer toward menopause, the more forsaken is my uterus. It’s hard for me to interpret any somatic signal as pure text-for me there is always some subliminal message that cries out for interpretation-and my extreme period cramps are no exception. My womb, I find, weeps. It cramps and it keens and it sings this silent yawp of loss each time I bleed. This soundless yawp of loss grows louder.

There’s a scene near the beginning of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander that has become in my overripe imagination the visual for my uterus’s ululations. Centered in the screen is a doorway of heavy wooden double doors, the two doors slid apart. Between them a woman paces in and out of frame. She is Fanny and Alexander’s mother, she has just lost her husband, and she is screaming. Deep animal wails rend the stillness of the heavy Victorian home; she carries on painfully, excessively, uncomfortably. In the deep purple rooms of my mind, this grieving woman is my womb.

Again, twee. Histrionic, even. I recognize the preciousness of my anthropomorphizing, if one can anthropomorphize a part of one’s own body, and I’m not sure one can. (I hope if you correct me, you’ll be more gentle than usual; I’m dull due to Pamprin and I’m more tender than usual.) In general, I eschew making my female parts into emotive beings. It feels too much like something Freud would do, for one thing. For another, it’s cute, and I don’t like being cute, unless I’m being ironic about it.

But here I am doing it because my cramps are just that noisy. They wake me. They make curl up and hug warm objects to my abdomen. Warm irons look good to me. So do toaster ovens. My cramps make me move slowly and carefully, a lady old before her brittle-boned time. They take over, they hold me hostage. They embargo my attention. All I can do is listen to their din. And what they say is this: tick tick tick. Do not ask for whom the bells toll, my cramps say, they toll for me.

I am as passionately ambivalent about becoming a mother as I am about most major decisions in my life. When I was in my early thirties, I had the mad phat baby lust. I wanted me a baby. I would stare longingly at infants; they were fat and cute and I wanted one of my own. It was my hormones talking. It passed. Now that I think I am actually a healthy enough individual to do only a modest modicum of harm to my offspring, and most likely more good in the balance, I think I might be a bit too old to have a baby. I am aware that medically I can probably do it, should I want to-I’ve certainly proved my fecundity in the past. It’s a question of whether that’s a choice that really makes sense to me.

I consider having a child and I feel torn about what effects doing so would have on my life and on my body-these are not inconsiderable considerations. I consider then the love I would experience with a child and those previously considerable considerations lesson in the face of what I’m certain would be unparalleled passion. It’s a choice, however, and I have yet to make it.

So in the meantime, the tick-tock of the womb clock keens louder. It’s dirge-like in pace and tone. It sings a song of loss and of warning. My womb gently weeps, and I think.


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