WOMB-FREE ZONE! 

The little quip springs easily to my lips, ‘Yes, I’ve had the operation - and now I’m half the woman I was!’  I heard myself saying this to a friend the other day and wondered what I really meant? Was there a darker truth in the harmless joke? Suddenly it sounded like an admission that a womb-free zone is something sad. That now I have had the dreaded hysterectomy I am less of a person.

Of course that’s not true. How could it be? Yet I’ve discovered that having an hysterectomy forces you to embark of a journey of self-examination (it’s too soon to say discovery) which raises questions about how you define womanhood. Some women enter a highly emotional state, seeing the operation as a crossing-point between fertility and...what...old age? It is as if they have defined themselves all their lives in terms of the proud possession of baby-making apparatus  - and without it they feel bereft.

That’s not how I feel.  I had the traditional operation (which lasts less than one hour) at the end of May. The specialists are pioneering so-called ‘lunch time hysterectomies’  but  mine was the full Monty where the ovaries as well as the uterus are removed. Women require the operation for a number of reasons - in my case it was a fibroid which was growing like a foetus (or so it seemed) and causing bleeding. Enough was enough; I wanted it gone. I was warned by everybody that I would have to convalesce for at least six weeks - and telling that to somebody like me is rather like trying to turn back the breakers on Bondi Beach.

I dreaded becoming an exhausted semi-invalid lying around on a couch, yet at the same time I relished an excuse not to be busy. That was the first bout of honesty: admitting that I crowd my life with activity in order to define myself, as surely as some other women define themselves through childbirth.  Having a  full diary can be a form of neurosis; because you need to be wanted you can’t say ‘No’. It would have to stop. Not knowing how I would cope with the aftermath, I had no fear of the surgery, and no hang-ups about what it meant to my precious psyche.

I woke early the morning of the operation and found I felt nothing but relief in saying goodbye to all that useful but troublesome part of my body. When we’re young we wonder about periods: when they will  begin and what it will be like. If they start late we feel immature besides our classmates; if early - well, that’s just longer for the sheer, bloody bother of it all. In some faiths women are considered unclean when menstruating - and most of us feel it anyway. The old  euphemism ‘the curse’ is no accident.

Later, as an older teenager, sexually active, you get to worrying whether the period will come at the proper time.....So what contraception to use? Another problem. Condoms or coils? I’d rather choose from a box of chocolates, thank you. And there are always the mistakes. Girls secretly haul their best friends off to get the morning-after pill after an unwise night out, and the whole thing churns on, in cycles of stress.

Once married - or in a stable relationship, the question is whether to have children, when to try to have children, and maybe - oh dear - can  we have children?  Whilst this woman is desperate not to have another child, her sister is in anguish over her infertility and is considering IVF.The ovaries rule - and it’s not OK. Childbearing - in you are unlucky - can be the worst part of the whole business, and I am not just talking about embarrassing gynaecological examinations, or tedious ante-natal clinics, or the pain of childbirth itself.  For the whole business the word ‘Labour’ is about right.

Operation gown on, waiting for my husband and daughter to arrive at my bedside I contemplated my own obstetric history and wondered that I’d survived. In 1974  our son Daniel was born a small weak baby with jaundice, and had to be looked after in Special Care. In 1975 a second son was stillborn at full term after a long, grim labour, and to my lifelong distress the word ‘womb’ became synonymous with ‘tomb’. In 1980 Kitty was born with a bowel disease and a talipes (club foot), and was destined to have a life of countless operations and endure two spells in Intensive Care. After her caesarean I had a severe and dangerous infection....then, still frail, with a sick baby to look after, got pregnant by accident ten months later, and was advised to have a termination.

Add to that list a miscarriage two years later and then a sterilisation...and you start to get the picture. I was deeply fortunate in that my not-so-trusty machinery had produced the two wonderful people who are the centre of my life, and  my proudest achievement. But  you know, if  my womb was a car I wouldn’t say it had every been very roadworthy. To the scrap yard then, with no regrets.

Women talk to each other about these intimate subjects in a way men never do.  I went into a shop about a year ago and the two behind the counter commented that it was hot, then one of them rolled her eyes and said, ‘Unless it’s my age!’ - at which we all laughed. There’s a not-so-secret society of older women who take comfort in groaning to each other about hot flushes, and angsting over HRT.  It’s the old osteoporosis v breast cancer dilemma: at what point do you decide to take the risk, and who will help you assess it? In my case it was fibroid v HRT: without the HRT I felt rotten yet the HRT made the fibroid grow. Yes folks - that is the latest turn in the travelling show: the Magnificent Menopause doing its balancing act, with nobody applauding at all. I once knew a woman who lived for over five years in a state of silent menopausal depression with her hapless, uncomprehending husband, whilst the world told her to pull herself together.

Oh, how much we suffer because of our fertility, and how frequently men roll there eyes because of what it does to us - then use it as an excuse to treat us as inferior (‘She’s got PMT  -wouldn’t you know!’).             It’s significant that ‘hysterectomy’ comes from the same womb-root as ‘hysteria’. It used to be called ‘Mother’ and at one point in his madness King Lear cries, ‘Down, Mother, down’, as passion and grief rise within him. The wandering womb was supposed to rise into the throat of a girl and choke her. As Germaine Greer points out in ‘The Female Eunuch’, ‘It was assumed that unmarried women and widows suffered most from hysteria and that a good man could fix it.’ I tell you, no wonder some of us are driven nuts by the whole thing.

All over now. Not long after the operation, I said to a friend, ‘It’s like this: I cleared weeks of space in my diary, and because I’m resting there’s an unusual vacancy in my mind., and there’s certainly a space within my body. Well, Nature is suppose to hate a vacuum. So I’m waiting to see what will flow in.’

Still waiting, I think I see why it takes so long. The gynaecologist told me that  doctors do not quite see why recovery after an hysterectomy is usually such a drawn-out thing. People don’t need such a long convalescence after  other forms of abdominal surgery - say, a gall bladder operation.  Yet sometimes women take three months fully to recover from the relatively simple procedure of losing the womb. My theory is that it is Mother Nature’s way of forcing the difficult transition between these different Ages of Woman. Families are forced to realise that Mum can’t bend down and heave the wet washing out of the machine into the basket, as she always does. Maybe the husband or the son will do the supermarket shop on their own - and realise all the things there are to forget.  As for us - we have to submit to change. A control freak, I found myself almost unable to keep out of my own kitchen, yet loved the fact that somebody else was making me a meal. What’s more, the decision to resign from this or that committee, realising that I should be more choosy about what I do, wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for this hiatus.

Before the hysterectomy I kept meeting women who’d had  one. I  loved their stories, their sisterhood:  the camaraderie of wombless ones. The message was invariably the same: ‘You have to take the resting seriously, but after that you’ll feel absolutely wonderful - like a new woman.’ I looked in the mirror and wondered whether I needed to be thus transformed.  One friend told me, ‘You’ll probably look back on this as a turning point.’

Yet I could not work out what I wanted to be turned towards, but I’m truly glad to move on from  all the  problems. In other words - to be free. Creativity isn’t just located in the womb; it exists in us all in the choices we make and the way we grasp our lives, choosing to live them as vigorously as we can. I may have lost what some see as the essence of womanhood, but at 56 I feel more of a woman than ever. I have a body in pretty good nick, a brain bursting with ideas, an imagination which can’t help but produce stories, and a spirit that intends to stretch and have more fun than ever. 

Forget the Earth Mother bit.....been there, done that and got the wrinkles.

Now it’s time to hop on the broomstick and fly.