When they left, the sting was so bad that I shook my legs out, like a kid doing the hokey pokey, trying to redistribute the pain. When that didn’t work, I bundled the blue cotton gown up and pressed it to my crotch like I was trying to stop up a wound.
In Randy’s office, which is home to two mismatched regency chairs, a charcoal drawing of a pregnant woman, and a pair of decorative boxing gloves, he explained that I had classic endometriosis. Using a laminated picture from approximately 1987, he explained that endometriosis is when the cells that line the uterus are found outside the uterus, rising and swelling with the monthly hormonal cycle and causing many of the symptoms I had always considered to be my unique dysfunction, a sign that I wasn’t strong enough for this world. The bladder pain, the stinging sensation, the ache in my lower back, were all the result of growths the size of pinheads that were dotting my once-pristine organs. He couldn’t say for sure without surgery, but he’d seen enough of these cases to feel fairly confident. And the adenomyosis—when the endometrial cells begin growing into the muscles surrounding the uterus—was a telltale sign. In the drawing Randy showed me, it looked like hundreds of seed pearls working their way into soft pink velvet. He was kind enough to also show me some photographs he had taken during laparoscopic surgeries, of cases worse than my own. The photos looked like the remains of a wedding: rice scattered, cake smushed. A little bit of blood.
“Does this explain why I’m so tired?” I asked, hopeful.
“I mean, if you’re in pain half the month, then yeah, you’re gonna be tired,” he agreed.
“And would this, like, affect my fertility?” I asked tentatively.
“It can make it harder to get pregnant,” Randy said. “It doesn’t mean it will. But it can.”
“Do we all have uteruses?” I asked my mother when I was seven.
“Yes,” she told me. “We’re born with them, and with all our eggs, but they start out very small. And they aren’t ready to make babies until we’re older.” I looked at my sister, now a slim, tough one-year-old, and at her tiny belly. I imagined her eggs inside her, like the sack of spider eggs in Charlotte’s Web, and her uterus, the size of a thimble.
“Does her vagina look like mine?”
“I guess so,” my mother said. “Just smaller.”
One day, as I sat in our driveway in Long Island playing with blocks and buckets, my curiosity got the best of me. Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina. She didn’t resist, and when I saw what was inside I shrieked.
My mother came running. “Mama, Mama! Grace has something in there!”
My mother didn’t bother asking why I had opened Grace’s vagina. This was within the spectrum of things that I did. She just got on her knees and looked for herself. It quickly became apparent that Grace had stuffed six or seven pebbles in there. My mother removed them patiently while Grace cackled, thrilled that her prank had been such a success.
For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a mother. In early childhood, it was so extreme that I could often be found breastfeeding stuffed animals. When my sister was born, family legend has it that I asked my mother if we could reverse roles: “Let’s tell her I’m her mother and you’re her sister. She won’t ever know!”
Over time, my belief in many things has wavered: marriage, the afterlife, Woody Allen. But never motherhood. It’s for me. I just know it. Sometimes I lie in bed next to my sleeping boyfriend and puff out my stomach, imagine that he is protecting me and I am protecting our child. Sometimes we talk about how exciting it would be if something happened accidentally, if we were faced with becoming parents without having to make the decision ourselves. I name them in my head, picture picking them up in the park, hauling them through the Gristedes when we all have colds, stopping by a picnic “just for five minutes because he’s really sleepy.” Reading Eloise to my three-year-old daughter for the first time. Running around and shutting the windows before a storm, explaining: “This will keep us nice and dry!”
When I tell my doctor aunt about my endometriosis diagnosis (“endo” for those in the know), she says I better get cracking. “In medical school, that was the first thing we were taught,” she says. “After an endo diagnosis you say get started now.”
My doctor never said that to me. He was casual—now that I consider it, too casual? I had been right all along, known better than any doctor: something really was wrong down there.