Last Wednesday, I had one of these, intended to fix this and this, with the long-term intent of having this.
I didn’t say anything at the time, for a number of reasons:
1. “Uterus” isn’t a good out-loud word.
2. As Jane Hamsher noted a while back, the minute you tell anybody there’s something going on with you medically, you stop being a person and become an object at which everybody feels free to fling stories about This One Time My Cousin Had The Same Thing And Died, and You Have This Because You Don’t Go To Church Enough, and Here’s My Doctor’s Number.
3. I am so OVER well-meaning fertility advice, like, dude, if relaxing or eating cranberries or meditating was gonna do it, do you think I’d let somebody cut six inches into my stomach?
But I’m saying something about it now because it’s Mother’s Day, and honest to God, had it not been for my mom holding my head while I threw up from the anesthesia and the morphine, I swear I would have clawed my way into that automatic drip machine they hook your drugs up to and found a way to put myself out of my misery. I was omg so sick morphine is NOT your friend and she held my hand and rubbed my back and said, “It’s gonna be okay, you will get better,” and I believed her, because Mom when you’re sick is the voice of reason, the voice of sanity, the voice that calls you home, and she was.
Had it not been for my mother-in-law feeding me and cooking and cleaning my house these past few days, I would have starved to death in a pigsty, since all I wanted to eat was a little chicken soup, sometimes, and couldn’t have cared less who did the dishes. She made dinners and got cinnamon rolls and poured Gatorade while I winced each time I moved and watched Daniel Day-Lewis movies, and drove me places including to doctors’ appointments, and took care of Mr. A while I couldn’t. She even volunteered to take Fox to the vet for a check-up, and she’s allergic to animals, so believe me when I tell you this lady is ABOVE AND BEYOND here.
It’s not that I’m not grateful for these two incredible women every day, it’s more that today gives me an excuse to say thank you, thank you, thank you for being everything mothers are in stories, everything mothers are in ideal worlds, thank you for, quite literally, keeping me going this past week. I’m not good at needy, I’m not comfortable with being taken care of. An adult lifetime of carrying my own groceries, husband or no, has made me allergic to sitting there while somebody else gets whatever it is, but this week I didn’t have a choice.
I forbade them from coming down and making a fuss.
Thank God they made one anyway.
Happy Mother’s Day, moms.
A.