2009 06 22

It is most unfortunate that I cannot take my uterus out and hand it off to someone who might want to make some sort of use out of It, other than as a repository for unused sperm.

It has been burdensome to me since the day I rendered myself copy-protected. Hell, since the day it announced its presence. Though, sadly, life seems to be creeping up on me, and some things are no longer as burdensome as they used to be. I say sad only because I don't like the concept of change nor so much the thought of getting old, not because I - in some culture-induced crisis of hysteria - no longer find myself to be as much of a woman as I once was.

Bleeding for eleven to thirteen weeks a year does not, in my universe, seem like such a thing to be proud of, to look forward to, or to miss when it finally buggers off for good. I am mystified, to be honest with you, by the notion that it is a sense of definition for some women. I don't quite grok how someone could feel anything but relief when it finally stops - unless you define yourself solely via the conduit of reproduction. I've met people like that.

I have not, to my knowledge, put any faith in what media-driven culture has to say about how I should regard myself and my femaleness, since the day I realised (in my early teens) just exactly how many commercials, toys, and programs seemed devoted to telling little girls that having babies, mothering, and keeping house were their lots in life. Think about it. For those who can recall, think back to the television commercials of the 70s and how many of them were trying to hock various forms of baby doll or fashion-oriented accountrements.

Aside: For Christmas when I was 12, rather than begging for whatever it was that girls begged for at that time (probably Barbies), I begged for (and got) an electric train set (which I still have, though the transformer is not safe to use).

Don't get me wrong: I don't think mothering and having babies is evil, I just refused to believe that was all there was, or that I couldn't be something else - or even both. And now, years later, I find I am (and here comes that word again) mystified by the desire others have for these things. I do not yet (or possibly ever at all) feel any kind of biological countdown device going tick, tick, tick deep down in my female-induced biological racial memory.

People have wondered whether or not I feel regret for not having children, and rendering myself nearly incapable of ever having them, and I have to say that I do not; and if somehow that regret ever creeps in, I'll ride it out. I'm not one of those people who wastes time on laments based on wishing I hadn't done something.

Feel regret, loss, pain, whatever you need to feel, but life is as it is for me, and that's the life I will live.