Beloved,

 

Two women left this world within the same short stretch of days, and the world, including myself,  stopped to notice. Dolly Parton died at eighty, the woman who turned rhinestones and a guitar into an entire American mythology. Gloria Steinem died at ninety two, the woman who spent sixty years teaching us that the harvest of a womb was not every woman's desire or summons. Neither of them left behind a biological child but both became matriarchal for many others. Dolly came to believe, in her own words, that her path without children was simply part of God's plan for her, a plan that gave her the freedom to become a mother to millions of children in every other way that mattered. Gloria made her choice early in her life and never once described it as a loss.

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I read the countless tributes to them both, many from a hospital bed, as I considered my own 48-year old body in that same stretch of days while also grieving something of my own. Dolly Parton passed as I was preparing to lose the last sacred parts of my biological femininity, and Gloria Steinem passed just after I had relinquished what could never be replaced. The coincidence of their deaths as bookends to my own experience opened a fissure I did not know could widen. Being a mother of two does not exclude me from mourning the sacrifice of a part of myself, a part that so many reduce to mere childbearing rather than recognizing what some of us have given as a person, a female, and a woman.

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The truth is, I had already accomplish the very thing the world once told me I might never do. I birthed two little people who bring me more joy than I could possibly deserve. And yet, I still grieve.

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I have turned that personal hollowness over in my hands more times than I can count, trying to shake loose the kernel of shame that continued to sprout exponentially as I considered the numerous women, faceless in my mind though my sisters nonetheless, who will never know the joy of life as it flipped, dipped, and dived in my womb as they strained to burst into this world, taking their first unencumbered breaths. Because of this blessing am I allowed to mourn a door closing when I already walked through it more than once? There are women reading this right now for whom that door never opened at all. The women who have spent their savings, made countless bargains with the Lord, and lifted up every available prayer as their knees hit the hardwood, carpeted floors, or church kneeling pews with religious conviction while also asking for the same from others who knew their plight, and who spent years trying to conceive, naturally or with every medical intervention science can offer. For a long time, I shared their anguish when I was told and believed I would be one of them. So who am I to grieve when I have been blessed so abundantly?

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I was diagnosed with endometriosis at the age of nineteen, almost 30 years ago, and yet my physician's words still ring in my ears. For the life of me remember the tone, the timbre, or the possible empathy that infused the disclosure that I would likely be one of the women whom our culture often considers broken, undesirable, and disposable. I remember the profound sense of loss one would feel were their heart ripped from their chest as my worthiness as a women shriveled like raisin in the sun, wrapped in nonchalance as I was told to prepare myself for the inability to cradle my replica in the crook of my arms. For fourteen years, I often wondered if the reason I was still a girlfriend instead of a wife was because I was unable to give my husband what he had always expressed he wanted; a child to call his, but maybe not our, own. I carried that question around in my heart like a boulder of disgrace that left an indelible divot in my soul. Though never explicitly stated, I recall the feeling of my value diminishing each each year that passed without bearing the fruits of our pleasurable labor.

 

In the beginning, we were as cautious as young couples convinced they have everything to lose tend to be. We held out against going without protection until the accidents piled up high enough to change our sense of potential risk. Whether it was a broken condom, one that slipped when it was supposed to slide, or a night when the intensity of what we felt for each other convinced us that the gamble of "pulling out" in the nick of time was a safe bet since none of it ever resulted in a pregnancy. Eventually we let the condoms go altogether, because we were broke college students, and when the choice in front of you is condoms or dinner, Hamburger Helper wins every single time. We briefly discussed, plainly and without much drama, that in all our years together I had never conceived except once, potentially. About two years into our relationship I experienced a potential miscarriage. It came and went so quietly that I still am not entirely certain what to call it, except a missed opportunity for a divine blessing that I locked away in my treasure chest of hopes and dreams.

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Because of that long stretch of not knowing, we never lived the things so many young couples live. I never cradled my belly at the height of my young womanhood. We never sat up at night working through the questions that ambush people who become parents before they meant to. We never had to decide whether our love could survive the strain of raising a baby before we had finished becoming the two people we were eventually going to be. Friends navigating that experience used to call us lucky. Lucky that we never had to interrupt what we shared for protection. Lucky that we never had to bring a life into the world before we were ready, the way some of them had. Lucky that we never had to carry a financial burden that two college kids from two different states, both determined to go home again, might not have survived.

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None of them ever considered what that so called luck actually cost me. My sense of my own womanhood shrank a little with every month that passed without a positive test. Yes, lucky indeed.

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I think most girls inherit a storybook ending long before we are old enough to consider its origin story. A house with a white picket fence. A yard kept immaculate. A husband standing beside us in the doorway. And what people now call 2.5 children that includes at least one fur baby (for me, my goldendoodle named Biscuit) with the wagging tail of delight. We are taught that this storybook ending is what defines us as women. Get it, and you have arrived. Miss it, and it's proof that you are inadequate. Within the faith traditions many of us were raised among, that storybook ending gets dressed up in even heavier sense of duty and pressure that defines our value. We are told that marriage and motherhood are not simply choices we might make, but a purpose we were created for, a calling stitched into our very design. When a woman does not marry, or does not have children, by choice or by circumstance, she is often made to feel that she has failed to become what she was put on this earth to be.

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Where I am from, and I suspect in more places than just the South, that storybook ending comes with a deadline attached. Find a husband before you turn twenty five, so you can avoid the title of being called you an "old maid". Then give that husband children, so his lineage can be sustained. Because of what I once considered to be a major flaw in my matrimonial desirability, I asked my husband more times than I want to admit whether I was truly the woman he wanted to build his life with, knowing full well I might never be able to give him the progeny he craved. Yes, we even had discussions about adoption and I felt a deep gratefulness that he even entertained the conversation. This is a portrait of how I submitted control to someone else, and their valuation of my worthiness. If I am honest, I must be honest and admit that the conversation made the ache burrow deeper as opposed to providing relief that I was seeking. Many times after those exchanges, I vividly imagined raising a child who grew in another woman's body, a child whose eyes would never be his eyes, whose smile would never be the wide, blinding one I saw in my own mirror every morning, or whose skin may not have been the beautifully blended melanin of our differing caramel and deep chocolate hues. In the quietest and most humiliating corner of myself, I felt that my currency as a woman was depleting rapidly, especially as his sister and brothers became parents after nine months of rounded bellies and preparation for the next generation of his family.  I felt the quiet disappointment of not being able to fulfill the one job that mattered most for a partner, a wife, a woman. I felt the weight of possibly never being able  bear his children.

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And then, against everything I had been told to expect, I did. Not once, but twice.

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You would think that would have closed the wound for good. It did not, not entirely, because the wound was never only about whether I could conceive. It was about what I had been conditioned to believe dictated worth and worthiness. They are similar, but not the same, though I spent years treating them as one. Worth is fixed. It is what we're told God has ordained for every woman before we even arrive. Worthiness is a moving current, rising and falling with my choices, and it was never built to carry the weight of the circumstances beyond my control. So when a surgeon told me, years later, that the safest thing for my body now was to remove the very organs that seemingly  defined my womanliness, the old grief came rushing back to meld with what I was carrying in the present. I was not mourning children I would never have. I was mourning the closing of a chapter in my own body, shutting  a door that could never be reopened. One that housed the value that I built my entire sense of self around.

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This is where Gloria and Dolly found me. Gloria Steinem spent her life saying, in one form or another, that everybody with a womb does not have to birth a child. She never treated that decision as a wound to explain or a debt she owed anyone. She treated it as a fact about her own life, and she used the freedom it gave her to help build a movement that changed what was possible for the rest of us. Dolly Parton, married to the same man for nearly sixty years, said not having children gave her a kind of freedom too, and she poured that liberation into more children than she could have raised in one household. She sent free books to millions of kids through her own foundation. She funded scholarships. Children who never met her called her Aunt Dolly, because she made room in her heart for every child who needed one, without needing a bloodline to make it official. Neither woman needed a child's presence to prove she had built something that would outlast her. Their legacies are not written in DNA. They are written in every woman who ever felt permission, because of them, to become something other and more than a vessel.

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That is the gift of grace that was buried inside my grief. Having two children could not shield me from the lie that a woman's worth is tied to her ability to reproduce. Only unlearning that fallacy could accomplish that. Losing my ovaries, strange as it sounds, has done more to finish the unraveling of that myth than becoming a mother ever did. I am not less of a woman for the organs I no longer carry. I was never more of one for the organs I used to have.

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So here is what I want to leave you with this month, whether you are a mother, trying to become one, have made peace with never being one, or, like me, are somewhere in the middle of a story you did not expect to tell, your worth was never sitting inside your womb, waiting to be earned. It was never going to be measured by a white picket fence, manicured lawn, smiling husband in the doorway, or a number of children with a fraction attached to it. It was never proof of a divine purpose you either fulfilled or failed to produce. Grief does not require a permission slip, and you do not have to prove your loss is worse than someone else's to authentically to experience it. Your legacy, the real one, was never going to be measured in whose eyes your children have or whose name they carry. It will be measured in what you build, who you show up for, and what you refuse to let a diagnosis, a decade, or an old rulebook decide about your worth.

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Rest in power, Gloria.

Rest in freedom, Dolly.

 

Thank you both for showing the rest of us that a full life and a full womb were never the same requirement. This is a lesson that I will espouse from this day forward.

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With love, reverence, and gratitude,

Ebonie Michelle