You’re wrong.

The question is not

“How many times can your heart be broken?”

The question is

“How many times can it heal?”

This past Sunday marked the one year anniversary of my abortion. In part with Mama’s Day’s effort to complicate narratives and uplift marginalized experiences, I wanted to share these reflections.

1. Language

The word “abortion” is hard for me. Given contemporary meaning through white, capitalist patriarchy, this word, for me, has come to dehumanize a deeply human process. For one, it’s overly surgical. This word immediately provokes images of speculums, needles, latex gloves, vacuums with teeth. Yes, my abortion was performed by a doctor, included a needle going into my cervix, and included all of these man-made tools. But I want to resist having these details define or summarize my experience.

“Abortion” also is an overtly Political word. What’s problematic about it being an overtly Political word is that I don’t get to control the ways it is or is not political. The Political baggage of the word “abortion” does not leave room for me to express what was hard or how I struggled with my “choice” or how I believed what was happening inside my body to be something like life and how I held it sacred. It doesn’t leave room for how I had access to abortion services but struggled as a queer person accessing a service steeped in heterosexism to the point that health care professionals were unable to adequately support my decision-making. Some things I do not have control over. But I do have control over how I speak my experiences, how I breathe them into being and give them a life that feels most true to my body and spirit. I want to resist the pressure to intellectualize my experiences so they can be legible or fit into existing frameworks for understanding abortions. I want to speak from a place of feeling.

So I will start with a poem.

Post

– a poem from my womb

slow churning this cavern of blood

ache and tremble these walls

causing great waves of

fury salt heat

as if my heart has sunk

into the grave of my hips

I rise crash break

I am overcome washed over red

thick pulse of a brushfire charred earth

still pumping hot

A few weeks ago, I shared this poem with a group of fierce womyn I was in a writing group with. Before sharing the poem, I stuttered around the context until finally the word “abortion” came out. After I expressed my discomfort with the word, one of the womyn in the group challenged me to create my own word for it, since we too, have the power of language. The word “uprootion” (up-roo-shun) rose its way up through my belly and into my heart where I decide to make this word home. So from now on, I will talk about my experiences using this word: uprootion. As in being uprooted. As in losing your grounding. As in being separated from.

Required reading. Click through for the full article.

(via Feministing)

(Source: kylamcfaterson, via thechocolatebrigade)