Good Vibrations Magazine

The other night David and I heard a shriek through the walls of our apartment, followed by a rapid knocking at our door.

“I’ve some news!” Cried my neighbor in her English accent. I stared. Had she finally found a house?

She clasped her hands and stared at me in the ancient, wordless of language of women. This was no house.

“How late are you?”

“Five days. But the pee test was positive!”

“Forget the test. What does your body tell you?”

Her hands traveled the length of her torso, cupping her abdomen. My eyes followed, inquiring.

“I’m sure.”

More shrieking, embracing, counting off days, months. Mixed with my genuine happiness for her was a thin sharp needle of pain. I like to think she didn’t notice.

As I write, the familiar pain of my period pulls heavily at my belly and low back. I’ve swallowed pain pills, eaten chocolate, cried at nothing. My body’s grudging monthly announcement of failure to conceive.

Mine is a body made for babies. Made to carry then easily within my round belly, slide them out quickly from my broad hips with strong pelvic muscles, let them breast feed at double-D breasts, carry them against the perfect nestling point where my waist tapers in, chubby baby legs wrapping round the hourglass curve where my hip resumes.

This curve of my hip, a “C” shape of contoured fat, is called the “violin deformity” by cannula-wielding plastic surgeons who would happily suck out my offending womanliness, rendering me a good clothes hanger and palliating my seamstress, a bewildered Korean woman who tapers my jeans over my ass and hips, nipping them at the waist. The resulting uneven seam trailing up the backside of my pants irritates her sensibilities.

As a child I played with dolls, assuming I would have children. In my teens and twenties, I began questioning that assumption; something nameless was wrong with me. I started a raft of medications whose long-term effects remain unknown. Then I met David, and though he could father a healthy child, if that child were a girl, she might be a carrier of his Muscular Dystrophy, passing it to our grandchild. Though on the Pill, I didn’t want to be the two percent who got caught, lying on a table while David’s child, poisoned with pills and genetics, was suctioned from my uterus. Frightened by that wrenching possibility, I drove myself to the nearest Planned Parenthood and got my tubes tied at age 27. The relief was tremendous.

I knew from the outset being with David would entail decisions many women in their twenties don’t normally consider. I knew we needed to live a forgiving climate, wherever he found work, and that the increasing amounts of care he’d require would eat the time normally given to nurturing children.

But the full magnitude of my decision is a deeply felt experience continuing to unfold. Any ideas I’d had about wrapping my fallopian tubes with tiny rubber bands and blithely moving forward were naïve.

“You aren’t having kids?” My gastroenterologist asks, astounded. I am 31, deathly ill from the steroids she prescribes.

“Do David and I strike you as good genetic material?” I ask bitterly. This line of questioning is especially annoying from a doctor.

She is taken aback. “I guess not…” Brightening. “You could adopt!”

Wearily, I agree. Adoption always pleases people: they feel good about themselves for having solved my problem.

Until I was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome at 29, and learned more about my illness, I felt rather smug in my decision. My decision, my body. Then I joined the EDS society and began receiving their newsletters. Women with EDS are advised against childbearing. Fragile collagen often causes uterine rupture. A fetus carried to term means a dangerous birth. If mother and child survive these hurdles, the child inherits the disease, and whole sickening cycle turns on itself.

Suddenly this womanly body made for babies, stayed only by my liberated hand, is a defused bomb. While my peers begin carrying sleepy-faced bundles in baby slings, I am forced into a new understanding. Not my decision. My body’s, made without consultation.

My inability to bear children makes me feel damaged at the core of a previously unshakable sense of femaleness. As a woman, I am going to miss one of life’s profoundest experiences. My body will never know pregnancy or childbirth. David’s green eyes will never look at me through an infant’s face. This, that I cannot bear David’s child, is… the cursor blinks, demanding an adjective. I can’t have a child with the man I love because I am too fucking sick.

Our lovemaking brings us pleasure, intimacy, binds us. But it will never make a child, so our sexuality is something that offends some, confuses others. Disabled people are supposed to sit quietly in their wheelchairs; the barren are condemned to spinsterhood. If this sounds archaic, please read today’s newspaper for the latest plans from our new government. Policies for people like for you. Policies for people like me.

Recently we attended a small dinner party. Our friend Cal carried David up the steep steps to his Berkeley kitchen, where he served red wine in cut crystal glasses. As talk will among people in their thirties, the topic soon turned to marriage and children. “Are you guys going to have kids?” Around the dark wood table, eyes turned to us. “We can’t.” I replied.

Sarah gazed at us in the candlelight. “That’s too bad. Your children would have been so beautiful.”