This is the story of a girl
A lot’s happened since the last time we talked. Between January and now, life handed me my north star on a silver platter. The platter is cracked and tarnished with bits of dried-on jelly and fossilized biscuit crumbs squished across the surface, but oh, is it is the platter I have long asked for. I’ve never been more sure of it.
In my previous post I wrote “I’m not a journalist. I’m not a mother. I’m not sure who I even want to be. But I’m figuring it out.” I never in one million years expected the answer to come in the way that it did or so quickly after I put those words into the universe. I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve been writing about reproductive health for the last six years and listening to my own draw to motherhood for the last 10. I’ve been diligently working through the emotions that have carried and motivated those two interconnected journeys in therapy for the past four years. And I’ve been making art about it, whether I realized it or not, for the past five. It’s all been there. The runway clear. The work done. The writing on the wall mirroring the writing on my heart; and now, finally, the writing I’m letting flow freely into the universe. It’s always been there. My story.
Let’s back it up a bit. Three weeks ago, the Alabama Supreme Court—invoking Genesis, John Calvin, and one man’s personal ethos—ruled that embryos in an IVF setting were “children,” with the same legal rights as the living, walking, crawling, breathing kind. Days later, the hospital where I’m currently undergoing IVF paused all IVF-related procedures. And just like that the post-Roe world was knocking on my front door.
I found out my clinic was pausing IVF procedures the same day my newsroom cut more than a third of it’s staff. I was already raw with emotion and righteous indignation, but when I read the news on my phone—in a damn Instagram post—I gasped. I felt like the room was spinning. I read the news aloud to my husband and screamed this guttural, sad, angry cry and looked for something to break. I wanted to do something actionable. Immediately. I wanted to break the mirror in my bedroom, or the vase on my dresser. I wanted to show up somewhere and scream where other people could hear me and be forced to acknowledge my pain and anger. So like any well-adjusted millennial with a nose ring and something to say, I re-downloaded Twitter and shot off a quick pitch “who do pitch to write about dipping out of repro reporting bc I was going through infertility treatment and now my embryos are potentially being held hostage by the state of Alabama?”
I wasn’t surprised. But I was angry. Like I said, I’ve long hollered about abortion and how it’s “not just about abortion” and how even if it is about abortion you should be listening to the people that are having abortions. And as a journalist, I was already aware of the South’s crumbling reproductive healthcare climate and it’s citizen’s reluctance to discuss topics where women and people of color are the authority. I saw the writing on the wall. Roe would be overturned; and it was only a matter of time before other pillars of family planning, the ones white women, wealthy women, church-going women openly care about, would be affected.
I wasn’t expecting to share my infertility story so publicly and so soon. I had just written about it for the first time here a couple months ago. I was planning to share my story on my own terms, on my own time. But in Alabama, and many other places in the country, we aren’t afforded that those terms anymore. Our family planning is at the mercy of politicians and their pastors, not our partners and doctors.
I didn’t have time to think. I already knew. My story—the one where I’ve been covering the South’s dwindling reproductive rights while trying to start a family of my own and making art about relinquishing bodies from the male gaze— was necessary; and I was ready to tell it.
I’m thankful for journalists like Stephanie McNeal at Glamour (who I have long-admired for her ability to cut through the noise to talk about hot button topics with authority and nuance) who reached out to me to help me tell my story on a national platform. She helped me get the emotional word vomit version of my story out in a timely way necessary for the news cycle that provided context and nuance to a national audience. I really just want to me a mom.
This is already getting really long and I probably want to save some things for another day. But TLDR Vice President Kamala Harris read my words in Glamour and invited me to meet with her at the White House. She wanted to hear my story. So I told her. And I told it well. And I want to keep telling it. Bigger. All of it. The awful parts. The beautiful parts. The contradicting parts. The secret parts. There’s lots more to it, as often is the case with most people’s stories. That’s really just the point of all this. There’s more to people’s journeys to and away from parenthood than what fits in a legal brief or a profile piece. Entire worlds, legitimate, valid, and true.
I am a storyteller. I always have been. I’ve always created, crafted, painted, written, and performed my way into being understood. I know I’m good at expressing myself and I’m thankful that I found a career that helped me to hone that skill to help others express themselves. But I got so caught up in helping others heal, to help others be seen, that I forgot about my story.
I won’t say I have it all figured out or that I have answered the “who I want to be” question. But damn. I know I’m headed in the right direction.