I have the same
emotional response to it as a
hundred million other women.
Nothing so dramatic as a
miscarriage, my infertility is subtle,
masks itself in bodily quirks like my
urine never having enough LH to
mark the pee stick in
double pink lines; quirks like
pains at the wrong times, or my
body’s refusal to make an
egg on time, or at all. Quirks like
my already compromised thyroid under
attack again. Every
invasive procedure, they
stick things up your vagina in some
sick, consensual form of rape where
you desperately need this
child, and so you endure it.
Every
period like a thousand deaths of every child I imagined from
infancy to adulthood, a hundred thousand potential
people I might have gestated–
all killed in a whirlwind of cramps and a sea of blood.