Delicate Condition

by Danielle Valentine

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.

I was way too old to be a new mother. I pictured cobwebs growing inside my uterus, my eggs all dried out, decrepit.

“We’ve been looking for girls like you,” the woman said.

“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.”

But what was it really going to add to my day-to-day life that I couldn’t get from my dogs and my friends and my husband? Was there some magical, next-level love I wouldn’t be able to feel until I became a mother? Or was that just something we told women so they’d keep breeding?

“Okay, if you say so.” Dex sighed and rubbed his chin with one hand.

Her husband drives me nuts

Unfortunately, the smoothies were truly awful, full of wilted kale and flax seeds and all sorts of other things that were apparently super healthy but tasted like grass.

We know from Rosemarys Baby not to drink SMOOTHIES!

Of course he did, Frances thought. These doctors always seemed to think women’s emotions were things to be hidden and locked away and fixed.

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