Learning to let go

I chatted to someone the other day about my hysterectomy. I hadn’t thought about it for a long time, and it was interesting to look back. In particular, to think about the emotions surrounding it, as well as the physical effects. Before the operation, I remember wondering how it would affect me emotionally. I was lucky in many ways. It was ten years since my infertility journey had ended, and since I had begun living a No Kidding life. Ten years during which I had come to terms with my life, and embraced the wonderful parts of it. Ten years, during which I had become menopausal, and had realised that I did not want to be pregnant any more. As the person I was talking to said, I had wanted to have a child five years earlier.

In those first five years when I was no longer trying to conceive, I went through a lot of emotions about my cycle. At first I was bitter, and hated the appearance of my period, especially when it was painful or became heavy (something I was lucky not to have experienced before). After a year or so though, I realised that what I was going through was what every woman went through – whether we wanted children or not, whether we had them or not. I appreciated that. I appreciated being normal. Along with all women my age, I was facing the end of one part of my life, and the beginning of the next.

Unfortunately, society has trained us into thinking that this is when we might feel worthless, unattractive, washed up. Fortunately, in the 4-5 years before I began facing this, I had done a lot of thinking around what was my worth, how society valued women, and whether I bought into that. The answer is, of course, that I had never bought into that. I’d always chafed against the idea that women’s biology created their value to society. I’d been a feminist since I was four! But there’s something about infertility, about the inability to have children, that gets you sucked back into those old traditional, pronatalist views. You start questioning yourself. But then you start answering those questions in the way you always would. At least, that was my experience. I denied the little voices in my head, and denied the voices of society, which were so limiting, and just plain wrong.

Those first five years were the critical time when I had trained and retrained my brain to accept and then embrace my reality – the reality that there would be no miracle* baby and that I would never have children. I’ve talked and written about this a lot, because it was the main thing that helped me heal, even though it was painful at first. This self-training has also helped me gain control over other thoughts since then. I realised only subsequently that it was, effectively, cognitive behaviour therapy. Self-administered.

When it came time for my hysterectomy, I was keen for it to be over, but I was nervous at the same time. I was nervous that some of those thoughts around self-worth, about feeling like a complete woman, might return. But you know what? They didn’t. Or if they did, they were swiftly banished. Sure, my uterus was gone, but – aside from the freedom from bleeding – I didn’t feel any different emotionally. Its absence didn’t make any difference to my life. And as I sit here, I don’t feel any different either. As usual, the anticipation was harder than the actual outcome. And the freedom? Well, the freedom is still fabulous, seven years on!

Note: I wrote a series in 2019 about menopause (including hysterectomy), the physical and emotional issues. You can find all my menopause posts – including ones written leading up to my hysterectomy – here. And posts about banishing those negative thoughts are here.