Delicate Condition

by Danielle Valentine

Io knew she was lucky. People with two good legs were lucky too, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t hurt if one of those legs got caught in a bear trap. The things that made you lucky could also be the things that made you suffer. Io wished people would stop telling women they should be grateful for their suffering instead of trying to help them with it.

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

I looked at Dex and I wanted, just for an instant, to switch places, to experience pregnancy and parenthood like he would, as an observer, someone who got to take part in all the joys and highs and lows of parenting, but who wasn’t tasked with physically creating life with his own body.

“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.”

You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff people have said to me and Keagan. You know a nurse actually told me I was lucky I was Black, because Black women didn’t feel the same labor pain white women do?”

“I checked everywhere. There was no one.” He gave me a kiss on the forehead. “I know this is stressful, but just try to calm down and relax, okay? For the baby?” I tensed at that. I hated when he told me to calm down.

“Anna, this is important. Whatever this is could be seeping through your skin. It could hurt the baby.” For a moment I was breathless with rage. I couldn’t believe he’d just said that, It could hurt the baby, as if I didn’t already know, as if I hadn’t spent every second of the last eight months worried that some small innocent thing I did would hurt her. For a moment I actually wanted to laugh. No—I didn’t want to laugh. I wanted to scream in his face. I wanted him to feel, for just a second, what it was like to have your body taken away from you, to be treated like a vessel, a thing.

I stumbled back into the bedroom, wondering if a woman has ever calmed down after a man told her to.

His wedding band had caught the light while he was mopping up the blood on the insides of my thighs, drawing my eye. It made me think of Cora, how he’d told Cora he was going to leave me if the IVF didn’t work, how he’d left Adeline because she hadn’t agreed to bear his children. We were just wombs to him, just things. He didn’t love us. He didn’t even see us as people.

I leaned over and spit Dex’s wedding ring into the center console. It bounced against the plastic, scattering blood. I sat for a moment in the cold, my breath ghosting before me, staring down.

The gray-haired nurse helped me get into the right position and showed me how to move my nipple into my daughter’s mouth so she’d latch. “There you go,” she said, taking a step back. “You’re already a natural.” I wasn’t sure if it was the hormones, but I was suddenly, overwhelmingly grateful for the compliment. “Really?” “Oh yeah. Not all moms have it so easy.” The nurse smiled at us. “I’ll leave you to it,” she told me. “Hit the call button if you need anything.”

“I can offer you so much more than they can, an entire village of women to hold your hand and guide you, women who know how to heal you. You could join us, Anna. I want you to join us. Years from now, when your body breaks down, we could bring you back! Imagine what could we do together, if we had the time, if we weren’t beholden to the laws of mankind.”

Normally, Lena didn’t like to eat in public, especially not cookies, or anything else that could be considered decadent. She always worried there’d be people watching, judging her body, judging her.

It’s more common knowledge now that 10 to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, but we still don’t talk enough about how it feels.

Doctors were taught that women were inherently liars, unreliable, or hysterical hypochondriacs.

Unfortunately, all these prejudices disproportionately affect women of color. If you’re ever curious about why the maternal mortality rate in the United States is so high—particularly among Black women—these are good places to start. Doctors don’t understand our bodies, they don’t believe us about our symptoms, and they ignore us when we try to tell them we’re in pain.

People conveniently forgot the medical system that abandoned them. But would women turn to these things so frequently if they felt they were being listened to?

I hope we stop assuming that pain is a woman’s birthright and start trying to find a way to ease the burden, just a little. Childbirth is not, after all, something that only affects women—it affects us all.