May 01, 2019
Leaving IVF, and Its Promise and Possibility, Behind
I felt a down spell in my persistent belief in possibility—a sense that something within me once felt unremitting, but had since been stretched to its limit.
I felt a down spell in my persistent belief in possibility—a sense that something within me once felt unremitting, but had since been stretched to its limit.
Contrary to its reputation as an extreme sport, freediving has meditative aspects.
Dr. Couney settled in the United States in 1903, when he began exhibiting incubator babies on Coney Island every summer. “Infant Incubators With Living Babies,” the sign above the building read.
I just wanted to believe my eyes were magic, that only I could see things that existed below the surface.
I don’t want my self-worth to hinge on a relationship. But vulnerability is a practice, and for me, it has been a valuable one.
Weight loss is not a life change that just happens with a snap of one’s fingers. There’s more to it than that, even when people say it’s just about “putting in the work.”
This is the problem with the vocabulary of miracles when it comes to childbearing: It ends up equating failure of conception or birth with a divine curse.
These worlds I dearly love, with science-fiction that supersedes the science in our reality, deserve Smart Drives and automatic doors and disabled heroes, too.
Whether it’s postponing motherhood or dreams of the perfect dog, the most painful steps to living the life you want are often the most necessary.
I felt abandoned and alone. I was told that it was at odds with what mothers should feel, do feel, after childbirth.
These women showed me how to love and care for myself—the only way a Black woman could.
My eating disorder dictated my relationship to food. Then I moved to Wyoming, whose unforgiving landscape reminded me: We eat food to survive.
It was satisfying to see those robins, sparrows, and starlings, because they were still with us. They had stayed.
Beauty and its pursuit can be art, a delight, a terrific party. But a party you must attend every day isn’t a party at all. It’s an unpaid job.
Inside her small body lives every answer to every obstacle. No maps are necessary. She is the map.
I am at the nether reaches of my fertility, curious as to what I can still grow. This remains a shock.
“What I know is this: Some part of me, however small, is already dead. I live around it.”
“We were free and naïve enough to believe we could navigate the terrain of men’s hunger and their hands unscathed.”
I have been afraid most days of my life, which is what anxiety is, and the months of this pregnancy have been the most anxious of my life.
“What does it mean when your body is your art? Can a thicker brush not make just as beautiful strokes?”
