Thoughts While Trying to Suck In The Part of My Stomach That Holds My Uterus

It’s a vital organ, isn’t it? Well, vital for having children.

My body is beautiful, my body is beautiful, my body is beautiful.

I think if I repeat it enough times, surely I'll start to believe it.

There are so many names for women’s bodies: pear, hourglass, athletic, slender, curvy, even rectangle.

But never a force of nature, never a miraculous work of art.

My mom woke up from childbirth with her uterus missing. My close friend needs to have both of her breasts removed. I have a couple of friends who take hormone injections that cause their ovaries to double in size, several others who have had chunks of their cervix scraped out for testing, whose periods require pain killers, whose pregnancies were accompanied by diabetes, organ damage, high blood pressure, or depression…

All of this for the sake of our extraordinary ability to reproduce. I still can't wrap my head around how the hell it's possible that one of my friends is growing two tiny human beings at once right now.

I have experienced the kind of hormonal acne that made me start and end every day in tears. Lately my uterus feels like it’s being wrung out like a wet towel for the week before, during, and after my cycle. PMS has been causing me to cry about completely fictional, fleeting ideas. I pinch at my body like it isn’t the eighth wonder of the world, like it isn’t the future home of an entirely different human being than myself.

A woman’s body is designed to carry trauma, to nurture new life, to constantly adjust and fluctuate and correct itself, to endure and overcome intense levels of pain. You'd think after all these centuries, we would've learned to love and accept it by now.