Bohemian Crip on Choice...

Deep down, I suppose I knew the choice was never going to be mine. Even as I played house with little-boy schoolfriends and freaked them out by suggesting that maybe mothers do something besides make dinner and retrieve briefcases, through the family-tree assignment where I dutifully(and optimistically) left branches below mine

I’ve already raised my kids,” my mother said, darkly.(Not that I ever met anyone in real life that I wanted to combine features with, wanted to mix their big brown eyes with my pale skin, even as college me sparked to preposterous names that are thankfully lost in all the subsequent dramas and had a few relationships that never got to germinate. I never had a close call, where I was praying for my period with my brain, but my heart felt a little tug anyway.

Thankfully, a decision was never forced on me, either.  Maybe it could never have happened for me anyway, and my somewhat madcap quest for birth control in my late teens might have been a Macguffin, either because of my disability or because of some inherited physical condition…I’ll never be sure now and “ never” is kind of a hard word to face, even about something you weren’t ever sure was something you cared about.  The window was always small, and now it’s drawing closed.  Sometimes I feel sad about that, but also kind of grateful that I’m not a born nurturer, that little tennis shoes in the store never feel like more than “Aw…”

I did not get the usual cultural messages about childbearing, being sort of, you know, a cautionary tale that writes letters to the newspaper.  From the time I was eighteen till I was about 30, I got notices from my health plan about tying my tubes or other permanent birth-control methods on at least a quarterly basis. Even if you’re not truly looking to spawn, it’s hard not to take the idea that the very thought of your roving ovaries(note to ignorant-ass legislators: they don’t really do that. I’m kidding.  Just thought maybe  some of you might take that seriously. And, you know, don’t.) fill some bureaucracy with horror of little system cheats personally, hard not to feel that it says something more unsavory about you than you need an attendant.  My fight for reproductive justice might have been very different than yours.

I don’t want other “nevers” for other women, though.             I want them to do everything(and everyone) they can if it doesn’t hurt people. I know what it is to have your choices taken away.