Ovarian Emails

Ovarian Emails

I got an irate email from my ovaries the other day that said, “Where the hell is our uterus? We are getting reports from stranded ova that after they ovulate there’s  nowhere to go. Can you imagine what that feels like? You wait fifty years for your chance to leave the room you’ve lived in with all the other unripened eggs—you know everything about everyone—their hopes and dreams, their nasty habits, the rumors about the ova who live in the other ovary being smarter and better looking than your lot of listless, shallow and self-absorbed eggs, who are content to post selfies on Body-Book and worry about their weight. And imagine that you’ve experienced all the tiresome competitions between the Left Ovary and the Right Ovary in the Successfully Released Egg Contest, and read all the research and opinions about who deserves to ovulate, and then endured the monthly ups and downs of the Ovarian Selection Process (which is only slightly less complicated than a Supreme Court confirmation). Yet you are always living with a nagging question in the background: Where do we go when we leave this ovarian life? What happens to us? And then finally you ovulate and nada.”

I was shocked. Not just because my reproductive system knows how to e-mail but to find out that their sex education system is possibly worse than ours, especially in Ovary-Right. Apparently the eggs don’t know what happens to most Ova: disappearing into a toilet or tampon somewhere, lost and anonymous with the blood that was once part of the uterine lining—all hopes dashed. But who would agree to ovulate if they knew of that probable future? Finishing the email, I realized that my Ova were also not prepared for the other thing that can happen: turning into a human being. Perhaps the ovaries weren’t equipped to handle large scale panic.

My phone beeped, interrupting me. I had a message. It was from Eva the Ovum. She wrote, “We’ve been trying to call you, since typing is hard without fingers and the voice-to-type thing sucks, but you never answer the phone. Some of us think you are a Millennial, but I disagree—I suspect you are simply a curmudgeon who hates talking, but I thought you might respond to a text.

“I want you to imagine what it’s like to be me. Finally liberated from Ovary-Right, I arrived at the end of the fallopian tube only to say, ‘Where the fuck is the uterus?. . . I know there’s a uterus. Right before I ovulated, I was notified about the difference between a fallopian tube and a uterus and this is no uterus. I can’t possibly embed here. I was specifically warned against that kind of behavior. But here I am and it’s basically a door without a house and even the door is missing. I felt disenfranchised. ‘Is this all there is?’ I asked the silent tissues.

“Nothing in Ovary-Right had prepared me for the possibility of the uterus going missing. I dug into the end of the fallopian tube and tried to remember more about the briefing I’d had before ovulation. Does the uterus leave the pelvic floor and come back? Had there been any instruction on what to do if the uterus is late? Should I wait here? Does the uterus have a phone number or an App? If it travels, where does it go? Around the body like some kind of weird inter-organ Uber? Wait a second, didn’t I hear about that somewhere. . . in history. . . the wandering uterus?. . . that causes-yes that’s it- Hysteria, when the uterus wanders around the female body creating problems for the GOP.

“What were those symptoms? Moodiness, hysterical regulation of pregnancy, delusions about birth control and abortion, and a special kind of neurasthenic paralysis of the hands that keeps the Senate from voting on Supreme Court Justices? Yes, that had to be it

“I decided to make an temporary fallopian encampment hoping the uterus would take a break from abusing mankind and come back to pick me up.

“And….nothing happened. A month passed. And here came another Ovum, Olivia, and I reached out to grab her because unlike my slow careful meander through the fallopian tube, she was tearing through it like an egg on a mission. I thought maybe the woman we live in-you-was having sex and making everything slippery and turning us upside-down, which ruined my encampment, dumping the tent over that I’d managed to scrape together out of tissues and the bits of some cancer-causing Johnson and Johnson’s baby powder. Unfortunately, my fellow egg slipped out of my grasp in the bedlam, sailing off into the abyss and then falling and falling until I couldn’t see her anymore. I was horrified.

“Then the questions started up: What is the ovum without the womb? What is a uterus without the possibility of a baby? What is the purpose of an unemployed and undereducated egg? What skills did I really have? Shortly thereafter, I decided I had been alone and self-aware way too long—us ova are not generally good at solipsism or solitude. Obviously some action needed to be taken. ‘But what should I do’ I asked myself. ‘I can’t possibly live here the rest of my life. It’s like a train station for round tiny slugs. I’ve studied Feng Shui and these conditions are not good for me. Plus I feel the danger of dying without a purpose. Parts of me already seem to be disappearing when I sit still too long. Anyway, I was promised a uterus and I want to know what happened.’

“I decided it was no use waiting around for the wandering uterus to come back. In fact if I was a uterus and could move around the body why would I come back to the pelvis where I’d been trapped my whole life? Why not hang out in the left triceps? Or the knee? I hear the face is great this time of year if you know how to handle it.

“Then I remembered some gossip that some Uteri (which is the plural of Uterus) feel that being a receptacle for human life is not always what it’s cracked up to be, which is maybe why the Ovarian Committee told us nothing about it until right before Ovulation. Evidently some Uteri resent being seen as only useful for pregnancy. We’d dismissed this as propaganda because it leaked from Ovary-Left and involved science, which for us on Ovary-Right was just a misspelling of Scientology.

“Subsequently I recalled more talk about our uterus being involved in a Fibroid Ring that she couldn’t get out of that was making her pay in blood and pain.  Maybe she had every reason to get out. Shit, what if our uterus had left the building entirely in order to escape from a Mafiosa of Fibroids? Maybe our Uterus wasn’t in Our Woman’s body at all anymore, but had applied for a passport to places unknown. Perhaps she’d had plastic surgery of some kind and was hiding in plain sight. In fact she could be anywhere or anything, like a fancy scarf, or a small purse, possibly even a man’s face in the form of a mask. Wow that would be really something. I wondered if I should slip out of the body and go look for her, but I had no idea which way to go. There were no signs saying: This Way Out.

“I had to get back and tell the others. I owed them that.

“I found some fibers that no one seemed to be using and, like the Salmon, that I’d read about on the Ovarian Internet, climbed my way back up to the fallopian door, took a running jump at the canyon of gap between the fallopian tube and Ovary-Right and then clung to the outside and threatened to turn into Ovarian Cancer if they didn’t let me back into the Ovary tout de suite.

          “But we’ve never had an Ovum come back,” said the GateKeeper. “Our revolving door only revolves one way.”

Ignoring that Sarah Palinist logic, I said, “I have the Johnson and Johnson’s talcum powder pointed at your head. Get out of the way and I will solve the enigma of the revolving door as well as the mystery of the missing uterus!”

“And so I told my story to the Ovarian Committee, and then, after learning how to write, which took another month, we composed an initial email and then I decided to text you this testimonial. Please tell us what is happening with our uterus.”

And that is how I found out that you should always notify the Ovaries of a major shift in Uterine Policy so they can prepare to fall to the floor of the empty pelvis and be absorbed into whatever tissue happens to be there—a death perhaps better than being carried out of the body on a sludgy river of blood and letting the ovaries know that the hidden dream of becoming your own body through the miracle of gestation and birth is now over.

Did I really want to tell them I chose to have a partial hysterectomy to remove a uterus infested with many different kinds of fibroids, most inoperable, causing pain and digestive problems that would only get worse with menopause still years away? I didn’t know I had to warn the remaining organs and set up a psychological support system. Furthermore, it had never occurred to me that I could email my reproductive system. Think of the conversations I could have had if I’d only known! On second thought, maybe not.

How was I going to explain all this? Was I going to say, “Look ladies I had them excise the uterus, but I left you alive, never mind that now all of you are doomed for reabsorption in remote and unknown pelvic areas, never before seen by other Ova.” Would that spin of me saving them so they could be Pelvic Pioneers be a sufficient consolation prize? What would happen to me if all my remaining ova got mad at me at once? What about sad and depressed eggs? Would they be more inclined to just throw in the towel and cause cancer? What if the ovaries decided to start wandering around my body weeping and carrying protest signs about the oppression of Ova and the murder of Uteri by women? Worse, what if they accused me of being a Republican, who could do ridiculous things, like vote for the GOP from 2001 onwards and decide that putting a Pussy Grabbing Male Presidential Candidate into office was somehow better than choosing the “evil” e-mailing Hillary.

As usual, the threat of even looking remotely Republican galvanized me into action and I began to think hard. Where would a uterus go once she leaves the body if she could? Mine would go fucking vote for Hillary.

So I did what any self-respecting democratic woman would do when texting her ovaries: I became a politician.

I texted back a headline to Eva the Ovum. It said, “Hysterical Wandering Uterus Votes for Clinton.”

Eva the Egg texted back, “Our uterus is out voting for president?”

I wrote, “Yes. In fact I think my sex organs have been plotting this for a long time: the fibroids being an excuse for voter autonomy. It is the Year of the Hysterectomy: GET OUT THE FUCKING VOTE. Female sex organs are so excited to vote for Hillary who is a Woman’s Woman, not like that shit-for-brains Sarah Palin, who finds plastic Ziploc bags confusing, and totally different than that morally bankrupt, talking penis-puppet Condoleezza Rice—who has all the morality of a cockroach despite her IQ being four times that of G.W. Bush. Women are out voting for Hillary Clinton with all their reproductive organs—vaginas, wombs, ovaries and brains, and no one can stop it!”

I added, “Last night Trump held a press conference and whined and screamed and said, ‘We need to crack down on Illegal Wandering Uteruses Committing Voter Fraud. We must keep female reproductive organs from rigging this election and getting away with it.’ But no one’s listening to him anymore and he can’t stop it. Apparently it’s too much pussy for even him to grab.”

Eva the Ovum wrote back: “Wow.”

I wrote, “Your sacrifice, Eva, just might save our Democracy.”

A day later I got a text from Eva the Ovum. “I was so inspired by how our Wandering Uterus is trying to save the world that I’ve convinced all of us in Ovary Left and Right to ovulate all at once behind Hillary Clinton. After all, we are Stronger Together! Come on Girls! Let’s go fill out all those ovals!”

I sat back with a sense of a job well done. No more periods and a female president! What a great time to be alive!

Sincerely,

The Laughing Coyote