My sister is killing me. She and two of my nieces have driven three hours for a surprise visit. We have all gathered in my son Jacob’s bedroom. I am leaning in the doorway beside my husband while my sister and her daughters tell me stories about life at their house. My sister Brandi sits on Jacob’s bed facing me with Leighton stretched out, close by. Jacob and Addison build with blocks on the floor. Brandi replays scenes from home that make me smile and then laugh. I am trying not to laugh because it hurts. A lot. Stop, I plead. I can’t take it. But something wakes in me that I’ve been missing. It’s the kind of missing you do without realizing it.

I see that having surgery and a 3+ inch incision have made me notice two things: 1) I haven’t laughed in a very long time and 2) My sister always, always makes me laugh.  I start to think about the people I spend my time with, frequently or infrequently, and then I think about how little I laugh. This is not to say my friends and coworkers are mean or that I am unhappy.  Sometimes my husband makes me laugh. Sometimes my son makes me laugh. Sometimes we make each other laugh. But it is my sister and my brother who make me laugh the most. Following that, it is my son and my sister’s children, separately or together. I see that most of the people who make me laugh the hardest live one hundred and eighty miles away. 

In the evening Brandi, Jacob, Addison, and I gather on my bed to play Crazy Eights while Leighton instant messages at the foot of the bed. Jacob and Addi begin to exhibit signs of a day of too much sugar and soon they are making me laugh so much I am in real pain. My incision says STOP but my heart says Please, please. It’s been so long. You can take it, I tell myself.  And I do.

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I have a dream in which I am standing in a high school. A teenage girl stands beside me and shares that she almost had to have a hysterectomy. But I was too young, she says. They found another option. Oh. I had to have a hysterectomy recently, I reply. She looks at me and in my dream there is so much space between us but we are standing right beside each other. I am suddenly afraid that she will tell the way I used to fear gossip and revealed secrets in high school.

I wake and think about how I feel too young to have had a hysterectomy, but somehow not young enough to have the right to object. I have, after all, had one child. And I am not, like some women who have this surgery, in my 20’s. But there is this baby thought, the one where I kept the door open to the option of having one more. I imagined I would be a 39 or 40 year old pregnant woman.  I thought my son would like to be an older brother. I tucked away names and imagined baby girls and baby boys in brief day dreams. There was no intense longing, but an unquestioned possibility.

Yesterday I saw a neighborhood acquaintance that I felt comfortable speaking with about my surgery. I shared the news with another woman later who asked where I had been (she hadn’t seen me around my son’s school). I feel an urge to share this with select people in order to face it, to own it, to be okay with it. But I am afraid the sharing will spread until everyone looks at me as the woman who can’t have babies, who has been emptied of all identifying reproductive organs, who isn’t the same as they are, who isn’t anything they can name.

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