Pains of Her Womb
“You’re happy?” A mother asked her daughter the other day.
The daughter laughed.
“I’m grateful, Ma.”
Then her mother did what she has done every time she has received an unimpressive response from her child — she stretched the girl’s name out from under raised eyebrows and a half open mouth, causing it to metamorphose into a much larger version of itself.
The girl was thirteen the first time she felt she was up against a much larger version of herself. It was in the middle of a math class, when going to the toilet was about more than being excused. It was about finding an excuse to get away from a space she didn’t want to be in. Except that day, a strange gripe seized the lower half of her abdomen, her body demanding that she escape the classroom immediately. A minute later, her back rested against the pink wall in the last cubicle of the female toilet. Angry tears stained her cheeks. She was experiencing the first day of something that would plague and empower the rest of her womanhood — a period.
She was fifteen when she felt slightly diminished in her womanhood. It was the first time she felt like she had lost all semblance of control over her physical self. The body was working against her, against her will. She had recently been approached by a local football scout. Her team had just won a tournament and she had come out as the highest goal scorer. The scout had watched and then invited her to try for the nationals. Upon hearing the invitation, she felt proud, maybe even arrogant, but ecstatic. In Greek, a state of ecstasy requires one to stand outside of oneself. She was certainly outside her womanhood in that moment. But then it came. She felt her body give way to a wave of abdominal cramps and as the rest of the team went off to celebrate, the upper half of her body crouched over the lower half, forcing her into a position of prostration in the middle of a football field. Defeated, off she went, straight home and to bed, where her womanhood seemed to belong.
Six months later, she had her first appointment with a gynaecologist. He was very kind but she was too consumed to notice. Her period had become unpredictable, irregular, painful, heavy — some of the words one hears when a teenage girl is described. Hormonal. Fat. Moody. These were the ones she’d learnt to identify her own womanhood with. As she sat down in the clinic with posters of swollen bellies and photographs of IVF babies, she felt an aversion to the whole process of explaining herself — of laying bare all the symptoms that would continue to confuse her; the sweats, the stomach, the sadness and all the other things that seemed connected to being a woman — none of which she remembered choosing. It was also the first time she decided to bring God into the whole affair. Perhaps the God she’d been introduced to in her childhood would hear the complaints about the sudden rage of acne on her cheek. And those thunder thighs; the honorific that a boy in school had given to two indispensable parts of her body. After all, God must be agnostic to gender, right? For He is the one who created it, no? Perhaps if she prayed a little more her thighs would magically shrink to a lady-like size, a smaller size. And if not, she could be certain that it really was God who had been intervening in her life all along. The bouts of inadequacy that she had started experiencing with growing frequency, they were well beyond her control — both warranted and acceptable if coming from a place much larger than herself. The whole thing must be His plan, not hers.
By the age of twenty four, she felt more placid in her womanhood. She ate little. No dairy. No gluten. No acne. She worked out twice a day. She gave up playing a regular sport. She graduated with a degree that met the standards of both men and women and she was going to earn a living. She was going to be independent. She lived in the first world. She knew who she wanted to marry. He was supportive. They travelled. Everything seemed quite alright for she was a modern woman. But then, she lost her period — and just like that, she felt entirely abandoned — her womanhood had left her.
In those months, she reflected on how young she was when she first became aware of her gender. Girls, when following the grammatical rules of her mother tongue, Urdu, are taught to maintain consistency in language. There are some nouns that take independent form in Urdu, separate from possessive nouns, but those are exceptions. As a rule, the words of a sentence constructed in Urdu flutter around a core, a defining element — gender. But she grew up speaking in English and her voice shrank away from confidence every time she spoke in the mother tongue. Garbled letters formed in her mouth as she struggled to translate a mind that was thinking in another voice, in a different language. How disconnected the movement seemed to be from English to Urdu; how counterintuitive she found the use of gendered nouns when she attempted to construct sentences in Urdu. At some point in this reflection, she turned outside herself and to God again, except this time she was not going to relinquish hope. “Allah” she started whispering as she walked to and from work through first world streets, “please, make me larger than myself again!” Six months later, her period returned.
She’s older now. Married. Out of the first world. Doing well, whatever that means. She was pregnant a few weeks ago, she was almost in love, but then her period came too early, interrupting a dialogue between her and something much larger than herself. Women are told the chances of a miscarriage are in 1 in 4 early in a pregnancy. One should be grateful if it happens early, then. She is also healthier than she’s been in a while — in her mind at least. She learnt that being a woman and being vulnerable don’t mean the same thing. But there’s still work to be done. She still resists pain, both physical and emotional, every month, and for at least two weeks of the month she submits to her womanhood. She is also learning to submit to whatever it is that feels much larger than the self. Perhaps, they are one and the same. The thought carries peace, even happiness occasionally. Don’t ask about the other two weeks.
