Okay, enough dropping hints and beating around the bush, y’all know there’s something up, you’re not stupid.
I had a biopsy of my cervix that revealed pre-cancerous cells. These aren’t going to just heal themselves, different kind of cancer than before. My doctor says when they find this kind of cancer, they just immediately do a hysterectomy, usually a full one, and they do not mess around at all. So that is what is going to happen in late May.
First of all, I’m absolutely fine with it, not upset, worried, scared, traumatized or anything like it. I’m grateful that we caught it early enough that we can deal with it quickly and efficiently and I can get on with my life. Menopause is a few years back for me, so no worries. My uterus didn’t have anything to do so it was lookin’ for trouble, and it found it.
As I think I mentioned in an earlier post, I have been dealing with a very stubborn strain of HPV since 2004, which cost me bits, slices, biopsies and chunks of my lady parts over this entire decade and a half. Frankly, I am so sick of having my lady parts prodded, pricked, pinched, sliced, diced and julienne’d that I am more than happy to just let them have the whole works. Done and over, and never a biopsy again, thank you.
What happened was this; my last bi-yearly papsmear was normal, for the first time in . . . over a decade. Nothing out of the ordinary, no HPV holding court, no abnormal cells, nothing noteworthy at all going on. Hallelujah! Hooray! Is it possible we have beat this bastard once and for all? Hopes up? Oh, you betcha.
This past January, the news was not so good. A very virulent and dangerous form of HPV showed up out of the blue, no reason, never been there before, just poof, suddenly it’s there. So my doctor wisely decided that we needed to do a much bigger biopsy called a LEEP, and I will spare you the gory details, though I will say it hurt a lot less than I expected and wasn’t nearly as bad as I feared. That’s when we discovered the adenocarcinoma, which took my doctor by such surprise that she called a mentor and colleague to discuss it with them before talking to me. But it made perfect sense to me.
Because my body is soooooooo smart. It threw up a red flag to get our attention so that we could discover that there was something really sinister lurking below the surface. It bought us 2 years. Adenocarcinoma is notoriously slow to show up on a papsmear, and by the time it does, it’s usually pretty advanced. In other words, there may have been some Divine Intervention Going On. This is not unusual at all for me, but I have yet to accept that I can fully trust my body no matter what – of course, that’s just how humans are. I’m closer than ever to that state after this, though. Trust me.
So here we go, onto the next thing. New experiences, new ways of being. More practice being a shape-shifter.
Because naturally, this whole thing has got me thinking about wombs and women (womb-en) and the power and incredible symbolism of the Vessel. The Holy Grail. The life-giving, ever-renewing cauldron. In some ways, it seems like a lot to give up.
In the research I’ve been doing, I’ve come to realize that a lot of women don’t feel quite so relaxed about losing their lady parts. A lot of women define themselves as women because they have wombs and the capacity to use them. There’s this idea that if they don’t have a uterus anymore, they’re no longer complete women, and their status drops even lower in the world.
Try as I might, I find myself unable to relate to that. And maybe that’s because it never occurred to me to limit my life in any way based on my gender. The only thing that I have ever done in my entire existence that required me to be female was getting pregnant and giving birth, and that is hardly unique. I understand that the drive to bring a child into the world can be overwhelming and powerful, I really do – when I was ready to have a kid, I don’t think much could have stopped me. (After doing it one time, though, I knew I didn’t ever need to do it again. What a miserable experience, eesh. I did not like being pregnant, and I really hated the labor part. The kid, however, oh yes, worth it all the way – but thanks, no, I’m good, no desire to ever do that again.) And I totally get it that not being able to have a child of your own due to infertility, problems with the uterus, whatever the cause, is something to be mourned.
For me, though, I’m really not attached to being a woman in any way other than hey, I am a mom, I had a kid. But I don’t really identify as a woman. Ask me what I am, and I’m gonna give you a whole list of things that have nothing to do with gender at all long before I ever get to woman. There’s that song, “Feel Like a Woman,” and for years it has baffled me what that even means. On any given day, I feel like a writer, a guitar player, a healer, a cook, a friend, a parent, a partner, a crafter . . . hell, I even feel like a big warm sweet milky cup of tea, but I don’t think I have ever in my life just felt like a woman. I feel like a human, and I have curves, big whoop. Does that make me a woman? I don’t know, I truly don’t. Maybe the only time I feel like a woman is when my bra pinches or I get a yeast infection. I mean really – bleh. No thanks.
Women have ovaries that control the way their bodies develop. Men have testes. We either are estrogen-dominant or testosterone-dominant, and it seems like a bit of a crap-shoot to me which happens. We all start out the same way, so why does it even matter? Patriarchy, Dominator culture. That’s why it matters. The more collective and cooperative we become, the less gender matters at all. And that is utopia to me, gender not mattering. We can all just do what we love and support each other in it. How fulfilling would that be?
If a woman is defined by the presence of ovaries and a womb, then I guess my next re-invention of self is going to be androgyny. And to tell you the truth, I couldn’t be more pleased about that. My body and my internal image of my body have never quite lined up; even when I was a young woman, something about wearing dresses and high heels never felt right. Part of me enjoyed the attention, sure, the part that was insecure and looking for validation – and when you are petite and curvy you can get all the validation you want for that. You can even get validation for being a really good guitar player if you are young and petite and curvy. But it’s not the kind of validation that means anything.
But the image in my head was, and remains to this day, a lean, un-curvy person with my face and long hair, but who seems neither particularly female nor male. I was always curious about that, but it never caused me any real pain. I just figure that my gender for this lifetime was pretty irrelevant, other than providing half the DNA that made my son – and honestly, I could have been male and his father female and that would have worked out just fine. Maybe better. Who knows, we might have actually got along.
I don’t mind being female, shading to empathetic and intuitive with a high emotional intelligence quotient. It’s grand, and perfectly fine. I’m just always looking forward to . . . the next thing. Could the next thing be androgyny? Bring it!
And maybe this is where the human race needs to start heading–we decide what gender we want to be in the moment and go with it.
That would be so cool. I would adore that. We could all dress in whatever we felt like wearing on any given day, and express the different shades of our gender at will. Women who want to be women could be honored as equals to men who want to be men, and there would be room and love and acceptance for every shade in-between. We could love whoever we want to love, and relish getting to know their practicality and their intuition and their emotional depth and their creativity . . . Humans could be rocket scientists or nurses or parents or musicians or police or whatever their hearts desired, without any stigma of “girls don’t/can’t/shouldn’t do that” or “you’re a boy, you need to do more/better than that, that’s women’s work.” Screw that.
Can you dream of this with me? Can we have this, please?
Dreams come true faster if we dream together. Join the dreaming.