A Love Letter to My Uterus on the Eve of my Hysterectomy

To my womb

A Love Letter to My Uterus on the Eve of my Hysterectomy

To my womb

You grew in the womb of my mother, who grew in the womb of her mother, in a great unbroken line tracing back to the first living creature on earth. Our wombs are the link that tie generations together.

You have held my blood, my babies, my dreams and my pain. I have loved you and hated you and admired you and cursed you.

When I first noticed you, it was the week before my twelfth birthday. Brown blood in my underpants. But unlike others, my feeling wasn’t fear or disgust. No, when I found you, I was thrilled and proud. I found the pads my mother had subtly placed in my drawer months ago, knowing the day would come soon. I announced it with pride – I have my period!! I wasn’t a little girl anymore and now I had proof. I have always loved being a woman.

I grew, and the rest of my girlhood fell behind me, full of moments of bled through school dresses and the shame ridden terror of leaving a stain on the chair behind me.

At 18, I left my family home and moved states to be with my first love, a time of delicious discovery, of experimentation and newness. Here, I birthed a new facet of my womanhood. And, while I discovered my sexual power, I also discovered my bleeding as a feminist experience.

A first-year arts student, in 1995, my women’s studies teacher was a second wave feminist of the 70s ilk. She pointed me to the Adelaide Women’s Liberation Library – a repository of feminist ‘herstory’ where I discovered a treasure trove of women’s writing – or Womyns writing, as they called it. This radical feminism was all about consciousness raising, finding your cervix, painting with menstrual blood, using sea sponges and reusables instead of sterile ‘sanitary’ products. Disgust of our blood was the patriarchy at work they claimed – we must embrace our bodies as a feminist resistance! And so, I bought sea sponges from the pharmacy, every time needing to squeeze and rinse them in the sink – increasingly difficult in the crowded university toilets. I went back to tampons.

Two or three years later, at 20 or 21, I began to ache for a child. In me grew a knowing that childbearing was a rite of passage that I was desperate to experience. I wanted to be pregnant, feel a child move inside me, feel the raw power of birth. I wanted to let my womb take control of me, direct my life, turn me into a powerful goddess of fertility.

And, in its generous, perfect, and productive way, my womb provided me with all I dreamed of. Instantly I was pregnant, all my dreams fulfilled, my belling swelling with the magic of a child inside. And when the day came for my child to be born, I surrendered to my womb’s rhythms, breathing deeply close eyed for hours in the warm pool in my living room. Four pushes and he was born, perfect on the living room floor.

My womb recovered in time, but too slowly to my mind and in the years that followed, my womb and I drifted apart. My mind, my heart and my sex took the lead in my life, but the womb, you were always there, always in the midst of it all. As a student and later as a teacher of women’s studies, my womb was always at the centre.

In the early 2000s, as a philosophy major, I fell in love when I discovered the Australian corporeal feminists Liz Grosz and Moira Gatens. At once neither essentialist nor post-structuralist, these women argued that the body, the corporeal, the embodied ness of our subjectivity is inextricably linked with our experience of the world. In short, my womb, my bleed, my body, with its estrogen and progesterone rising and falling in a monthly rhythm that takes me from joy to devastation, from energy to exhaustion in the space of fourteen days is inextricably linked with the way I exist in the world. To be in a different body would be to be a different person with a different mind. My womb is a key part of my being, I am a womb having person.

Later this would raise questions for me about what this theory means for transgender people, this focus on my womb as the core of my being, but in effect this is not a binary position – it doesn’t posit two and only two ways of being. Rather it says that there are infinite ways of being embodied in the world and each and every one of those ways is created through a mix of the subjective specificities of the experience of being that person in that body in that place. There is never a mind and a body, two distinct items, there are always only mind/bodies. That still sits well with me, even after all these years.

Later, my research looked at how bodies were constructed out of ideas, how we came to understand our wombs in the way we do today. I was surprised to find there is a history of the womb – it has not always been understood in the way we see it today. For example, Galen, a 12th century male physician argued that the female reproductive tract is simply the male turned inwards – a inverted version of the perfect male body. Unsurprisingly, I disagreed. I traced the history of battles held over control of our wombs between midwives, and obstetricians, between women and the psychiatrists that classified hysteria as a disease of the womb, to be treated by hysterectomy. As women, we lost control of our bodies long ago and that power has not returned.

My womb has bled monthly for 32 years, save for three long pregnancies and one terminated one. Heavily and wholly, my bleed has anchored me into a rhythm that has been the timekeeper of my life.

Twice more my womb delivered me children. Each time, I am immensely grateful to have fallen pregnant immediately on trying, each time delivering drug free, strongly, and powerfully. My womb has given me the greatest gifts of my life. Three perfect children, 9lbs 10lbs and 11lbs, my babies were big and healthy, all overdue and all bursting with life.

Birthing them was the most amazing and empowering thing I have ever done, and though it’s not polite to say so publicly, it is the thing I am proudest of, the single most impressive thing I have done in my life. The moment my child shot from my womb I felt strong and profoundly aware of my divinity. I was woman! Hear me roar!

I wish this moment of greatness for every person with a womb carrying a child. This feeling is our birthright, and I will never case to be grateful to my womb for having delivered that feeling to me.

But, as the months and years passed the time before my periods became darker and darker. Rage would fill me, spilling out in all directions, severe and debilitating, growing from a few days a month to two weeks until I bleed, half of my life. I was diagnosed with PMDD, the extreme form of PMS, caused by an allergy to my own hormonal fluctuations. My blood began to pour from me in extreme amounts – I was diagnosed with adenomyosis, and endometrial hypoplasia, a pre-cancerous thickening of the endometrial wall that can become cancerous at any stage. I had a decision to make.

I am 43 years old now, and before my 44th birthday arrives, my womb will be surgically removed. I will retain her power, but I will no longer bleed monthly nor will I be able to bear another child. Tomorrow will mark the end of my fertility.

There is a touch of sadness but more than that, there is an immense sea of gratitude to have lived such a full and through experience of womanhood. I am so grateful to my womb for its bountiful gifts, the children, the births, the pregnancies, the blood, the cycles, the depth of power and knowing it has held for me.

I ask it to go gently and easily into the surgeon’s hands. It is ok for it to be released from my body now.

I ask for its wisdom and power to remain inside me once the physical womb has been removed.

I ask for my healing to be complete and simple and I ask for the gift of additional strength vitality and energy once my healing is complete.

Thank you, womb. I have loved you and now I let you go.

Image: Wendy Bennett