“Do you want to try to have kids again?” Dr. Jenson asked.
“No.” A weight lifts and presses simultaneously.
“If you are sure and only if you are sure, I have a recommendation based on what I see on your sonogram here.”
“I am,” I repeat feeling the same lift and press.
“Okay well, I think you will be much healthier if I took out your uterus.”

I open the door to my overheated car and sit, bare thighs against hot leather seats and let the burn seep in like a morphine drip. I have decided to extract an organ. The organ. The one that has defined me; the one that everyone waits with hope and fervor to produce. It did not. I did not. I will not.

I start the engine and drive forty-five minutes back to my house. I feel free. For the first time, free. A balloon carried by the wind. An unknown destination awaiting my landing. I had spent the last six years with a stork permanently overhead, empty beak. My neck. My shoulders, and torso. All are exhausted. The weight shortened my spine and today is the first time I am able to expand fully. There is air in my hair, I am gliding, a free bird. I have unbecome society’s definition of womanhood.

My story of motherhood is short. I succumbed to the pressure cooker that is a thirty-three year old woman surrounded by women who were getting pregnant and “trying”. I was in a school of fish, the last fish dragged into a fever I didn’t think I wanted ever. Even when Neil and I said we would marry, I sat him down and confessed two important truths. Truths for which I had felt abnormal about for many years and many people including my people called a phase. Being Bi is a phase. Not wanting children is a phase. You will come out of both and see that you are straight and want children because every woman will regret not having children. These prophecies were repeated to me over and over.

“I am bisexual and do not want children, like ever. You should know that before you marry me. Is that okay with you?”
“Yes,” Neil said back. Neither were the monster trucks to him that they were to me. He shrugged and we continued to eat dinner and watch What Not to Wear.

A similar freedom landed on my shoulders that day. Everything was out on the table. But then at thirty-three when my best friend, work wife at the time started trying to have a baby and got pregnant, and my ride or die friend who will never have children just like me was suddenly pregnant as well, I began to rethink. Will I regret this like everyone says? Am I a woman if I do not experience pregnancy and birth? So again, I sat Neil down and said actually I want to try to have a child. Again I received a shrug and okay as the reply. He is easy. So we went on a six year expedition of baby making. It was not the type of expedition we envisioned, and there were many times one or both of us wanted to stop and forget the objective, but we pushed on because by this point, I was in it to win it. I was going to get this body pregnant, damn it, at any cost! Then one day, my easy partner who lets me lead with most things, sat us down for a talk.

“I think we need to stop trying to get pregnant.”

It was a sentence of deep, weighted meaning. It landed like a sword piercing my heart. He is saying I can’t do this, I told myself. He is saying I am not good enough. They will say I am not good enough. I am not good enough.

This is the moment I became the woman in every mother’s life whom they would pity, feel sympathy for, want to fix, not know how to share their stories with. I became the barren woman who could not do the thing this body was made to do. I became childless. There are times even now that I will relent into this woman. Childless. Sad. Unsure where to fit in society.

So in August 2021 when Doctor Jenson asked me, “do you want to try to have kids again?” I exhaled for the first time in years. This was the first “no” that was a true “yes” to everything I really wanted to be. I am childfree. In unbecoming the childless woman, I became the childfree one who at random announces, sometimes even to strangers, that she is uterus free. This organ that had caused me so much pain, so much blood loss, so much everything was leaving my body. I am free.

December 17th 2021, I became a woman: emancipated. A woman; no uterus. A childfree woman. A woman. Me.