working on carving me back into me

As of today, I’ll be missing period number three. I would have been three months pregnant this week--1/3 done with it all. Damn.

I’ve been super fragile. I’m not used to being delicate and breakable. I am used to strength and tenacity in all things. This, of course, does not mean I am insensitive; I tend to be ultras-sensitive, but I usually pull myself up after I crash out. I usually make it on through the fear and sweaty palms and feelings of terror or sadness that might well up in my chest. I realize it is okay to be fragile. It is okay to need help and call on friends and family for care whether it be the need of comfort, food, or mindless chatter to keep me from my own worst thoughts.

Lately though strength is not my forte. The other night I cried and screamed so hard I think I scared the hell out of kk. My hip had gone all painfully whack. It hurt so bad and I thought, “what if I lose my ability to walk? What if my body is failing me? What if…this and that and this other terrible thing, etc?”

This is not what it means to be vulnerable; this is however what it means to be ground up and spat out. And then it demonstrates the reaching to put myself back together with the greasy ligaments and bony fragments of my former self. And gristly, ground round is hard to repair—it is hard to carve back out the image of the me I have been accustomed to and familiar with.

And this re-negotiating me, isn’t even all about the miscarriage…It is about where my mind and heart are after such a strange experience. Realistically, kk was supposed to be the carrier of our kid. Realistically, I am quite a boy at heart. Realistically, I do not prefer periods and bleeding and some of the other femaley things about me. Realistically, I love my own version of me as a woman. I like bending gender. I never thought I would explore my version of me as a queer woman through the lens of my own pregnancy. And then I was in the middle of raging hormones and the possibility of a child coming into our lives and the shock and physical and mental befuddlement of it all. Of course, now this experience is one of the tools I’m using to carve through the ground round mound of malleable material that I am right now.

Furthermore, I think we come into realizations of who we are in the world through every experience and that versions of womanhood and manhood and queerhood are constructed on multiple levels. I do not need to be pregnant and give birth and/or be a parent to come into a full version of who I am as a queer woman. I fear that often people who choose not to have children are left in an isolated place among the breeders and their offspring. I think it is critical that we understand that we are all in our own time and in our daily deeds and experiences constructing who we are and that our versions of ourselves do not need certain events, biological or other, to make us complete.