Special note to people who are childless and are smugly smiling right now: Stop judging. It’s entirely possible that you aren’t really childless and that you’ve just forgotten you had a baby. Because that shit totally happens. Check your vagina. Does it look kind of broken? If so, you probably had a baby. Seriously, mine was all Franken-gina for a good year before it was presentable again. But not “presentable” like I’d lay it out at the Thanksgiving dinner table. I wouldn’t have done that even before it got destroyed. I mean, not that it wasn’t a good trade-off, because it totally was. And it’s fine now. Great, actually. My vagina is great. Slimming, even. Thanks for asking. It was just fucked up when Hailey was born, but I didn’t really care so much at the time, because I was so relieved that she was alive, and so I lay there on the hospital table thinking that is the only time in life when you’re too blissfully happy to notice that people are stitching up your vagina.
Also, I just want to say that I think when the doctor is stitching your vagina back up (for real, child-free people: Stitching. Your. Vagina. Up), I don’t know why they don’t throw in some cosmetic surgery while they’re down there, to make it look cuter. Like, when my gynecologist told me that she’d probably have to cut my vagina, I was all, “YOU ARE A FUCKING PSYCHOPATH,” and she was like, “Not for fun [unspoken: “dumb-ass”]. To get the baby out.” And I said, “Oh. Well, if you’re going to have to scar me, could you do it in some kind of kick-ass shape? Like, how about a lightning bolt?” And she just stared at me, so I explained, “You know . . . like Harry Potter’s?” Then she just looked at me like I shit on the floor, and I thought maybe it was because the sentence structure kind of implied I was referring to Harry Potter’s vagina, and so I clarified: “But not on my forehead like his was.” And she still didn’t respond, so I pointed down and said, “On my vagina.” Then she shook her head like she’d known all along that I wasn’t referring to Harry Potter’s vagina, and said, “Uh, we don’t really do that. In fact, we prefer for you to tear naturally, because it heals better,” and I’m all, “MOTHER. FUCKER. Are you fucking serious?” And I kind of suspected she was just making that up because she didn’t want me to have a nicer vagina than hers, because she’d never had a kid and so hers was probably all perfect and cheerful, and she probably didn’t want me rubbing my vagina in her face when it was all lightning-bolt awesome. Like I would even do that, Dr. Ryder. I would never rub my vagina in someone’s face, even though it would be the most badass vagina in the world. And whenever I have menstrual cramps I could just pretend that Voldemort was close.
Later, during the labor, I did tear and get cut, and it was totally not in a lightning-bolt shape, and I immediately regretted not doing some sort of perforation in a lighting-bolt shape, but I was so big at that point that I couldn’t even see my vagina, and when I asked Victor whether he’d draw a dotted line in the shape of a lightning bolt (with little scissors indicating “cut here”), he just walked off. I suspect it’s because he didn’t want to admit he can’t draw scissors, because honestly he is a horrible artist, but when I started badgering him the next day he said confidently, “Oh, I already did it. While you were asleep.” Which seemed suspicious, because I’m a pretty light sleeper. But I couldn’t even see myself with a hand mirror, and so then I just wondered whether he was fucking with me so that I’d leave him alone. And if he wasn’t just fucking with me, then what the hell did he draw? Probably a gun, or a cougar, or something stupid. And also, that doesn’t even make sense about tearing being better than cutting, because if that’s true then why don’t they tear people open when they pull out their gallbladder or remove their appendix? There’s really no other sort of surgery where the doctor prefers to just let you get torn apart rather than cut you, and I’m assuming that’s because gynecologists are just really lazy.
Holy crap, y’all. Remember back when I was talking about how my Grampa died but I got distracted with Hee Haw? That same thing just happened here when I started to talk about perspective and got distracted by my vagina. I didn’t even plan that. That’s how natural this writing shit comes to me. It’s like my brain is subconsciously sticking to the theme in spite of my distracting vagina. I am so fucking going to win a Pulitzer for this.