Outrageous Lies and Utter Fabrication

Because my period was late --

Because it felt like three weeks of PMS, oh my god -- 

Because my sister said, “maybe...?” --

And because I just wanted proof that I was perimenopausal, because I am an old lady, because my eggs started popping out with regularity 28 years ago --

I took a pregnancy test. What am I now? Some sort of walking cliche. I haven’t really decided which one. About 10 years ago, I came across this guy, this online blowhard, who said that women my age shouldn’t be “allowed” to give birth. “Allowed”! Who owns my body? I think I do. 

--unrelated tangent: Recently Amanda Palmer posted a picture of herself, her husband, and the baby bump, and someone said, “I feel betrayed.” What betrayal? What right do we have to Amanda Palmer’s body? Has anyone said to her husband, “I feel betrayed because you’ve (re-)entered the daddy-verse”? Probably not, because he is a man and therefore granted the right to live and work as his own self, and not as a mirror of our own insecurities. Amanda’s autonomy means that we don’t get a say what she does with her body or her life. The public ownership of women’s bodies and the decisions they make is one of those things that make me very angry (and now I am soaked through in HCG and all my emotions boil beneath the surface). Furthermore, motherhood (regardless of the route you take, the anti-mommy-verse, the full mommy-verse embrace, some uncharted path in-between) is not an erasure of self, of values and beliefs, of some sort of mythical divide between the procreated and the non. 

I was using birth control, of a type that is supposed to be 99.99% effective. Really, only abstinence is more effective and I was never interested in abstinence. Friday was an exhausting day of blood work, emergency doctor’s visit, horrific drive to ultrasound center (brand-new and enormous medical center HAS NO ULTRASOUND, which is utterly confounding). The ultrasound tech was nice, but the radiologist was a total jerk, who asked if I had imagined being pregnant (never glancing at my charts) (yes, it’s totally faked! I was hoping to get a spin on the transvaginal ultrasound amusement park ride, whaaaat the actual fuck, lady), who couldn’t see the gestational sac pointed out by the tech, who went on in considerable detail about the GS could be completely empty because the yolk sac wasn’t visible (the yolk sac in a gestational sac she couldn’t actually spot on the screen, by the way). The tech measured the GS at 4mm -- pregnant or not, empty or full of rapidly-dividing life -- that’s too small to see anything. But that’s been nice. Many hours of nice. Of wondering if I am actually pregnant or (as I suspect my husband secretly hopes) hysterically pregnant. 

I have been feeling All The Things. ALL THE THINGS. At once. It’s uncomfortable. I’ve had at least three sobbing sessions in less than a week and while I would never lay claim to being some sort of stoic never-crier, sobbing is quite beyond the pale. I can’t even decipher what I really think. I think I am happy and excited. But I am also terrified. There are times when I feel so alone and scared and sad. I finally had to declare a facebook fast because I cannot bear to see another post about suffering children. I’ve been going to school, about halfway done. Has all of my hard work and effort been derailed? Do I need new goals? What am I going to do? 

As a child, I was fascinated by cranes -- construction cranes. Their height, their spareness, their raison d’etre. 

As an adult, I am morbidly fascinated by cranes. I always hope they are sufficiently secured against high winds and oversized loads. I imagine them crumpling and wonder if the tiny, fragile humans on the ground below would have time to safely scatter.

There is a crane swinging around at the construction site across the street. High above the Earth it towers, higher than any building in town. 

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