A woman at church once assured me her body knew just what to do to become pregnant. She spoke confidently, as if she were an executive who oversaw a factory of well-oiled machines churning away in her reproductive organs. My experience trying to get pregnant was nothing like that. No amount of medication or ovarian stimulation worked. There were never any false alarms or double pink lines.
I did have the experience of lying on plenty of cold exam tables, my feet in stirrups. Black, sleepy masses of follicles dozed away on ultrasound machines as the doctors explained to my husband that polycystic ovarian syndrome was the culprit.
During one appointment, the doctor pulled open my hospital gown so my stomach peeked through. “See, the hair here,” he said, pointing around my belly button. “It’s not beautiful and smooth like other women.” Immediately I was filled with hot shame. He finished with a punch: “Her breasts aren’t fully developed either.”
I have often squeezed my eyes since that moment and grasped for evidence that I was even a woman at all: my stomach sprouted unwanted hair and my breasts were pint-sized. There was my uterus, but I had to balance that with my underperforming ovaries. Not beautiful like other women. Those were the expert’s words I reached for when weighing the scales.
After two and a half years without any signs of pregnancy in sight, my husband and I timidly began talking about adoption.
When I broached this topic with a friend one afternoon, she encouraged me to “not give up” on my body, as if adoption was only something one accepts as a consolation prize. Other women encouraged me to keep trying too. My body was seen as infallible if I 1) just relaxed, 2) gave it more time, or 3) stuck my legs in the air after sex (my mother-in-law offered up this tip).
I wanted to provide a child for my husband through adoption, but other women wanted my body to produce one.
Dissonance is what I experienced next. I called an IVF clinic in the late afternoon and woke up sobbing the next morning. I did not want to walk the road of advanced infertility treatment but I felt so much pressure to persevere on the journey towards biological motherhood. To become beautiful, like other women.
We visited with a specialist in Chicago. I showed him nine months of charts I had meticulously kept of my menstrual cycles. Pushing them back across the desk, he actually called the charts worthless. Though shocked, I responded, “They might not be medically useful to you, but they help me feel informed.”
It was my body, after all. Did everyone have to have an opinion about it? That question has been asked by more women than just myself. Our bodies have landed squarely in the forum of public debate. My experience with infertility was a personal ride through age-old questions: Does my body have to measure up to other women’s? Do I have the right to learn about how it works? Will my womanhood always stubbornly be attached to reproduction? Mostly I wanted to know: When could I start paving a path towards motherhood outside of my body?
It turns out the moment I answered that last question was the very moment I made up my mind.
We did not return to either doctor, and I stopped consulting my friends about our family planning decisions. We chose adoption. My body has never felt more functional than when I own it, celebrate it, and think about all the love it can impart.
