after #3 (journal entry 21 days post op, nothing you can name)

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.