on sexy, and what I stopped wanting

Five years.

Five years of herbal supplements and mayan stomach massages and acupuncture and IUI and medications and doing every single thing anyone told me to do. Five years of willing my body to cooperate, of making it a project, of treating it like something broken that needed to be fixed by trying harder.And I was doing all of it while working in a high risk labor and delivery unit. Which means I was slipping away to empty triage rooms and the nursery and hospital bathrooms to give myself injections, timing my medications around my patients’ emergencies, calculating whether I could step away for sixty seconds without compromising someone’s safety so that I could do the thing my body needed to maybe, possibly, give me what I wanted most.

Then I’d walk back out. Catch a baby. Run a hemorrhage.

Hold someone’s hand through the worst moment of her life. And go home at 7am and try again.

There is a specific kind of grief in being unexplained infertile — which is what they called it, unexplained, as if that word is supposed to be comforting — while working in labor and delivery. Watching a woman deliver her fifth baby, a pregnancy she’d been told she shouldn’t have for whatever reason, while your own medications are still warm from the nursery fifteen minutes ago. I loved those women. I love birth. It is my calling, my why, the thing I would choose again even knowing everything it cost me. But man. Some nights it cut so deep I didn’t have words for it. I still don’t entirely. I just held it. I’m still holding it, honestly. The grief never really came out. It just went quiet and found somewhere to live.

Five years of trying to force my body into doing what I wanted had left me somewhere I didn’t recognize anymore. Exhausted isn’t even the right word. Hollowed out, maybe. Angry in a way that had stopped having an object.

One day I just heard myself say fuck it and I meant it in a way I hadn’t before. Like something in me had finally gotten loud enough to listen to.I had found tarot early in the trying years, before we got deep into the trenches of it, and it was that quiet practice that had first cracked open something spiritual in me. So when I finally let go of the forcing, I already had a language for asking.

I went back to it — and to the kind of spirituality that lives outside, in smoke and moonlight and running water, and doesn’t need a name — not as a last resort but as the truest thing I already knew. So I stopped trying to make it happen and started just living.

I went to Thailand. I went to Burning Man. I started pole dancing and following whatever felt good and true and alive in me — which turned out to be a lot of things I had quietly set down in the years I spent trying to become a mother instead of living like myself. I started dressing up and dancing and being silly and having sex with my husband for fun again, the way we had before all of it, reconnecting at Burning Man in a way that felt like finding something we hadn’t even realized we’d lost. I started asking the moon and the water and the smoke and the plants for what I wanted most. Quietly. Without the white knuckled grip. Just — please. If you will. This thing I want so badly.

I still did the IVF. Showed up to every appointment, took every medication, said yes to everything medicine had available. I want to be clear about that because I’m not telling a magic story. But something in how I was holding all of it had shifted. The trying had gone soft. I was asking instead of forcing.

Two days after our transfer I did a tarot reading.The cards laid out so clearly, so almost rudely clearly, that this was going to work. The theme of the reading, the card sitting right at the center of the whole thing —The Sun.

I put my cards away and didn’t touch them again until my son was almost two years old. Because the truth of that reading scared me in a way I still don’t have clean words for. I don’t want to know the future. I want to let it unfold. But I have that reading saved in my phone. I look at it sometimes.

The Sun. Obviously. Of course.

I got pregnant around Halloween.

(part two to come…)