Hallmark does not sell any Christmas ornaments shaped like a uterus flipping you off. Just in case you were wondering. I spent about an hour looking and even asked a store clerk who was not only unhelpful but could not understand why I would want to put an internal organ on my Christmas tree, so you can trust me on this. But people put hearts on their trees all the time and that's an internal organ.
Ever since my brother and I were born my parents have had the tradition of buying us each an ornament to commemorate the year, a tradition we have carried into adulthood. My brother is very committed to theme with a tree so swarmed with airplanes and spaceships that no one would be surprised if it took flight. My tree is a bit messier. I like to choose my ornament based on the year and big events in the year. I like to find something that really captures it in my mind; I also buy an ornament whenever I take a big trip so my tree is in more danger of having a lobster and a llama present at the birth of Christ. That is why in early October of 2018 I found myself in Hallmark looking for a uterus, flipping you off or otherwise.
At 29 years old my body had decided that we could no longer work together. In the five months since my birthday I had spent $3000 going to the doctor and having tests done in an attempt to salvage the relationship I had with my body. That $3000 told me that I had a fibroid, which is a specific kind of tumor, on my uterus, as well as being anemic thanks to said fibroid, and that for some unknown reason my body had essentially stopped producing hormones at the levels it is supposed to. It wasn't my whole body that was upset with me, just my uterus throwing a fit. Over the course of that year I had stopped living my life and started, just barely, coping with it and no amount of self care was going to fix it. Suddenly, as a 29 year old woman, I understood exactly what girls go through when they reach puberty.
Preteen girls are the way they are because all of sudden at 11 or 12 they receive a software update that kicks their uterus off of do not disturb mode. When that happens their hormones, which have been stable until that point and have a big impact on your emotions, start fluctuating. It takes several years to get used to that fluctuation and figure out how to cope and even thrive with that constant change in your body. Essentially puberty for girls is life walking up and punching them in the uterus, eventually you learn why life is doing this but the first few times it is shocking and confusing. I cannot speak for what it is like for boys. Even having gone through this I did not understand that that was what was going on until life decided to punch me a second time as an adult. So the next time you see a preteen girl doing preteen girl things please remember that life literally just punched and she doesn't have the emotional intelligence or experience yet to deal with it.
It is also really important that you remember that if I see you making fun of these girls and not allowing them to just live their lives that I will embed a patent leather pump right in your ass.
Hormones, and major hormone fluctuations have a big impact on your life. Over the course of my year with a major hormone imbalance I ruined a relationship with someone I genuinely cared about, I was put on anti-depressants that made me dissociate (because you shouldn't be on anti-depressants if your brain isn't the one off balance) and I lost 30 pounds while on a steady diet of cheesecake and pizza. I also had regular anxiety attacks, I could not focus on anything for more than ten minutes, and once sat on the floor crying because I had dropped a slice of cheesecake when there was still have a cake in the pan. That is just the emotions side, it doesn't include the 29 days in every month I spent in too much pain to do anything or the less socially acceptable to talk about effects. Yoga helped a little, so did the almost monthly reiki-massage I booked but enough. Nothing actually stopped me from feeling like my 13 years old self had taken over my body. I was a pod-people impersonating myself and not doing a very convincing job. Acting in a primeval survival mode that had been unlocked with no warning or trigger I could point to, just a switch that one day flipped.
It got bad enough that I actually went to the doctor. Not just once but 11 times. 5 pelvic exams, 2 transvaginal ultrasounds, 1 hysteroscopy (ouch), 3 doctors, 1 blood draw, 2 rounds of hormone therapy, and $3000 just to get a doctor to agree there was something wrong and it wasn't just "bad periods" or something in my head. He agreed to do an exploratory surgery to check for something called endometriosis and hopefully remove the fibroid that I was certain was making me sick.
Endometriosis is a disease with no cure, just treatments. Your uterine lining, that thing the egg attaches to when you get pregnant and that women usually shed once a month causing them to turn into raging monsters, grows outside of the uterus on other organs. Other organs are not meant to shed a lining every month so this causes pressure, severe pain, and internal scarring a long with a whole long list of other unpleasant symptoms. But it does not cause a complete and total shut down of hormone production... unless of course it grows on your ovaries, where you produce hormones.... which mine did.
Sounds an awful lot like my uterus flipping me off to me. Which led to me, standing in Hallmark wondering why they did not sell ornaments that were shaped like that. If anything matched the year 'd had it would be that.
Why write about this? I have no real pithy story to go along with it. No lesson to unpack. I just understand now why hysteria was considered a plague on women in the 1800s and why it was so often diagnosed. The science wasn't accurate but I can see how men thought the uterus made women go crazy. I get it. If I don't feel like really explaining what has been happening over the last year and will continue to happen possibly for the rest of my life I just tell people that I basically have hysteria. And maybe every 12 year old girl you meet also has hysteria. All I really know for certain is that it is not a way anyone wants to be living their lives and that Hallmark does not sell ornaments shaped like internal organs.
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