I’m getting a divorce.
(My marriage is fine.)
I’m divorcing my ovaries. After years of abuse, I’m finally cutting them out of my life once and for good. They’ve played a bigger role in my marriage than I would’ve liked, really emphasizing the “in sickness” in “in sickness and health.” I’m still waiting on the health part. I think Alex didn’t see the fine print in the vows: in sickness and in health.*
*health not included in some models
I can trace most of our problems to these dumb little blobs. Endometriosis started kicking me in the ‘nads from the moment I first got a period.
My Oves: Congratulations, you’re a woman now, and you’ll throw up every month from here to eternity!
Me: The other girls don’t seem to be puking…
My Oves: We’re special! Don’t question our process!
In college when I was wracked with pain, in the fetal position clutching my belly on the hand-me-down dorm room sofa that smelled of stale cigarette smoke, Alex made me a waffle in the dining room and brought it to me with my favorite topping, syrupy cherries. He worried as I popped fistfuls of Advil every four hours, three and a half hours, three hours, scalding myself with the heating pad turned up to high pressed against my skin to try to reach the cramping uterus and stabbing ovaries beneath.
He sat on that same sofa, different dorm room, half a year later when I sobbed, staring at the birth control pill in my hand. I didn’t know what it would do to me, but I was desperate to take the endometriosis pain away. I was recovering from an eating disorder and afraid of weight gain and losing control again. Losing control to too much control, the endless loop of disordered thinking. He encouraged me that it would be okay and I believed him.
