I’m lying on my back, and there’s a wand up my wazoo.
It’s not a fun-times wand, I have to point out - it’s got a camera on it and it’s giving me quite the wakeup call. My sonographer is heavily pregnant. I most certainly am not.
I’m there, in more technical terms, to have a pelvic ultrasound. I’m 50, and it’s time to get a grip on the pain I get with my somewhat irregular periods. It turns out it's a bit of adenomyosis, nothing out of the ordinary, not bad - just there - enough to cause trouble. Adenomyosis is kind of like endometriosis but with some differences I can’t quite grasp - in lay terms it explains why one ovary is ‘sticky’ and doesn’t want to move in response to the wand, causing the same throbbing angry ache I get each month. I wince as the pressure increases - but it’s good to be reassured this is bog standard middle-aged woman stuff. I'll try a hormonal IUD with some trepidation, and hope to put an end to the business until perimenopause really kicks in.
Anyway. That's not the point of this story. The point is a kind of existential collapse in the 10 minutes the wand is doing its investigating. I know so many women come to the moment I’ve had today much earlier than their 50s and that this is a particular and jagged grief of which I’m just now coming to a visceral understanding. Of course there are many iterations of fertility reckoning for women - and this one is mine.
I know so many women come to the moment I’ve had today much earlier than their 50s and that this is a particular and jagged grief of which I’m just now coming to a visceral understanding.
Lying there I flashback to my mid 30s. I had lain on this same bed and same room having chorionic villus testing on my 18-week-old foetus, involving a large needle through my abdomen and into the amniotic sac. I had miscarried a few months earlier. I was in a new relationship with a beautiful man with zero assets. I was worried about work and doing serious renovations on my home to turn it from a slum into something fit for a little family - my home with its brand new hefty post-divorce buy-out mortgage and an absurdly limited budget. I was consequently terribly anxious. The test was terrifying for the risks it brought to my whole-of-heart-and-mind drive to have a child.
Fifteen years later, the healthy baby is now a teenager and that’s another story entirely.
Lying there today there was a weird embodied sensation of time collapsing around me. I felt like the then and the now, the fullness, and the emptiness of my womb and all that has happened in between swirling around me. The wand was probing for a long time. I like to think I'm pretty resilient - fine with pap tests and boob squashing mammograms, but this wet, hard thing, pressing around and shining a light on the very centre of my being was profoundly confronting.
Lying there today there was a weird embodied sensation of time collapsing around me.
I couldn’t look at the emptiness. All the dark spots and patches were like staring into the abyss of deep space, or down into a grave. My thoughts turned to how there's this time from perhaps mid 20s to mid 40s which, I realise now, a steady state. Exiting adolescence your body is now on a track. You’re now a fertile adult and there’s no reason to contemplate an abstract future when this will end. Being fertile affects your whole reality - the way you move through space and time. It affects your drive and your passion - for work, for family, for friendships. For parties, dancing, the big wide world. You are seeking and establishing. You’re not just fertile. You’ve got dreams for your career, you’re ripe with promise.
Others look out for you, you work hard, you are supported and you imagine things that will arrive in response to your hard work. It’s so thrilling, that promise. All the possibilities. There you are, in control and utterly amazing. Sure, at this time the ability to bear a child is actually often a liability, the worry about pregnancy (to become or to avoid becoming) a constant noise ... At the time it feels like a crazy rollercoaster, but... You. Are. On. Track. Even if you hate the pain, uncertainty, pregnancy fears, sexual pressure - that womb and its hormones throb at your core.
There’s no doubt I love being 50. The all consuming question of who to love and how is settled. Awful career dilemmas have been at last been managed with a happy exit to new study, new work, surprising respect from others which frankly, triggers my impostor syndrome. Suddenly I am the mentor and I love the clever young things I'm can support and advise, our shared conversations. While I am no longer lithe and thin and my body changes weekly or so it seems, aside from wardrobe malfunctions I celebrate my new stocky strength, and the greys that have turned me from brunette to blond (ish). I’m kickboxing and I sprint in the park, I'm getting used to having boobs - and a muffin top. Finally I’m not judging my body, and I can’t wait for the end of the painful periods.
Yet there it is. Laying eyes on my empty womb confronts me deeply. Now I’m thinking about my friends who have had 'women' problems over time. Lost their uterus. Their cervix. Breast cancer. For whom their womanly body turned on itself and challenged their very being. I gave them love and sympathy at the time but I didn’t really ‘get’ it. Well I'm getting it now. As the soon-to-be mother shows me my future with her magic wand, tears surprise me. There had been just the one child. And now that ambiguous knife edge of possibility is unambiguously over. I've seen how my little old womb is changing.
It’s not bad. It’s probably good. But most of all it is strange. Just so very strange.
