Motherhood With Depression
I wanted to be pregnant if only for the possibility of helpful hormones. “Pregnancy is great for some women with depression,” my psychiatrist says. “The hormones can help.” I think of my women friends with depression who tell me that pregnancy nearly killed them. That depression was only alleviated by taking their meds, and hoping everything would be okay. That they love their children, but hell if they’d ever get pregnant again. Medication-free, I rely on strict sleeping hours, a careful diet and daily exercise to be the...
read moreActivism Revisited
I grew up in a state of unionized workers. My mother was in a teachers’ union. My father worked for one of the “Big Three” automakers and UAW is an acronym every Michigander knows. Every year, there were talks of negotiations and talks of strikes. The only thing worse than buying “a foreign car” is crossing the strike line. My babies went on strike. They held up signs in my uterus and said “Hell no, we won’t go.” When my friend described the miscarriage this way, I laughed out loud. For the first time in weeks. I...
read moreSacrifice
A lot of religions consider blood to be an appropriate sacrifice to God or gods. Kill the fatted lamb, say scriptures in the Hebrew Bible. Lay the ram on the altar – instead of your son, God tells Abraham. Place the blood upon your doorposts, and the angel of death will pass you by. Slit the chicken’s throat for the orisha, say many Yoruba religious traditions. In most churches of my youth (and too many of my adulthood), the Eucharist is still taken to the words of: There is power, wonder-working power in the blood of the Lamb What...
read moreThe Loss Of Blood (part 2)
I long became comfortable with bleeding. The Red Tent, Honoring Menstruation and Sacred Woman guided me into a healthy relationship with my womanhood, my womb and the cycles of the moon. I didn’t know what to do when I stopped bleeding. It felt like weeks before I got to a pharmacy, asked if brand name made a difference, and bought not one or two but three sticks. Finally the lab that took my blood to test for the hormone. I wanted to be sure. Because I also knew not to get attached, not to get excited, not to make any plans before I knew...
read moreThe Loss Of Blood (part 1)
I grew up in the 1980s before AIDS was called HIV. My closest friends and I were trained to be deathly afraid of unprotected sex. At worst, you would get AIDS and die. And best, you got pregnant and there went your career dreams. Or so we believed as we sat around the pharmacy section reading the labels on the condoms so we could buy a three-pack and each of us could carry one in our wallets. We had no person or plan, but this made us “90s women.” So I never had unprotected you-could-get-pregnant-from-doing-this sex until I was...
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