here is what's hard
and hard doesn't equal bad
Per usual, my “Stuff I Buy at 3am” picks are at the bottom of this letter.
My therapist asked me recently when I last felt like my body belonged to me?
I didn’t have an answer. But I want to start here, before anything else: my daughter is extraordinary. SHE IS FUCKING EXTRAORDINARY, I’m literally sobbing as I type that in all caps. I chose all of this. I would do every single bit of it again without hesitating. That is not nothing. That is everything.
And also, here’s the rest of it…
That question has been sitting with me ever since, because I think for a lot of women the honest answer is … a long time ago. Maybe never, depending on what you’ve been through. Your body becomes a place where other people have opinions and instruments and waiting rooms. You learn to think of yourself in terms of function. Is it working. Is it cooperating. Is it going to do the thing.
And then you have the baby, and everyone says look what your body did. And you think, yes. And also: look what it took.
But I’ve also been thinking about the women who chose it too and didn’t get what I got. The women still in the waiting rooms I’ve graduated from. The ones who would trade places with me in a second, five (and possibly #6 coming up) surgeries and all. The women who wanted a family and got a different life instead — one they didn’t dream of as a young girl. The women who didn’t want this at all, and are watching the rest of us work ourselves inside out over it and wondering why the world can’t just let a woman be.
I think about all of them when I’m lying on the exam table. I think about how much we carry, in every direction, whatever we choose.
And, I’m not asking for sympathy. I’m asking for honesty to be the norm rather than the exception. And for honesty to not always be digested as a big flashing “danger” sign on our behalf. Women are moved too quickly past the hard parts. Told to reframe it, find the lesson, be grateful for what they have. And gratitude is real. I have it. It lives right alongside everything else I’m feeling. But we are allowed to say this is a lot. That it isn’t fair. That fair was never promised and we’re saying it anyway. Like truly it’s okay to not be fully okay for a minute. It takes nine months to bring a baby into the world, and we should start making more room than a few weeks of mat leave for us to be considered healed.
I shared in the past few days I may have to have another surgery to remove some retained placenta and a humongo ovarian cyst my body is supercharging from postpartum hormones. I find out more next week what’s gonna happen after my next scan. I don’t have the resolved ending yet and I’m continuing to learn to be okay with that (you have to be if you do IVF). I wonder if my body will be mine again.
What I have is this… (!)
A big announcement. A new project I’ve been building quietly, born out of exactly these kinds of conversations. The ones that don’t happen enough. The ones women have in their heads at 3am or in DMs with strangers or not at all because there’s nowhere to have them out loud. It lives alongside the work I do at Love Wellness. It’s inspired by it. And it is, at its core, about women telling the truth about what their lives actually look like — not the version they’ve been told to present.
You’re hearing about it here first. I’ll share more on Wednesday.
This project came from this chapter, a hard one. And hard doesn’t equal bad.
A follower DM’d me that recently. I’ve been saying it to myself every day since. So thank you, whoever you are.
More soon.
— Lo
Stuff I Buy at 3am
body: My whipped Henley by Negative for cozy sleep (it’s so soft)
wellness: Quick Melt Strips (I love the energy and sleep ones right now)
home: coterie diapers bc my friend got me a subscription (they’re great tbh)
phone: The Wonder Weeks app for baby development stuff
bag: Saie glowy super gel (it’s divineeee for an all over glow that isn’t sticky)
Thank you for sharing your thoughts so beautifully! ❤️❤️