Delicate Condition

by Danielle Valentine

Io wished people would stop telling women they should be grateful for their suffering instead of trying to help them with it.

how nice it would be to live in a world where we knew as much about how to help women get pregnant as we did about how to help men get erections.

Some people couldn’t face the more intense parts of life.

We’d bonded over how sick we were of our country’s medical system, how frustrating it was to deal with doctors who didn’t see the problem with a model that didn’t put enough funding into researching anything considered a “women’s issue.”

It was infuriating, knowing there was something wrong and not being able to get anyone to listen.

Sometimes it felt like the continuation of our species was an ongoing experiment being performed on the backs of women. Or on our wombs.

Anger was so much easier to sit with than grief.

“I’ve always hated how people separate women who want kids from women who don’t, like we’re two separate species. It’s infuriating how people insist on defining cis women’s entire lives by this one choice.”

I think too many people take it for granted that folks with uteruses are going to keep having babies.”

“The thing I can’t get over is why there is still so much confusion over really common things. People have babies all the time. It shouldn’t be this big mystery anymore; it should be biology.”

Sometimes being alive hurt like hell.

I went to a doctor to see whether I’d developed an infection, but he took one look at me and said he didn’t think there was anything causing the cough, and that I should just “try not coughing” for a while.

The thing that really sucked about hope was how good it felt, like a cold drink of water on a hot day. After it was gone, everything was hard and sharp and cold. I didn’t know how I was supposed to keep going. Every plan I’d made for the day seemed pointless now. All I wanted was to feel that hope again.