Dear uterus —
We’ve been through a lot together, you and I. I mean, we’ve been together from the start, and I feel you’ve really gone above and beyond in terms of meeting my expectations.

Our first real partnership started with so much excitement! You were the reason for the slight panic that day at the Christmas craft fair at school. The following Monday, you were the reason the girls’ bathroom in my classroom got a trash can. Thanks for giving me a reason to stand up for what I needed! (Just kidding, I made Mom do it.)

As we got older, I took care of you and did my level best to make sure we stayed healthy and strong. It wasn’t easy, and I remain grateful for our partnership with Planned Parenthood in the early days, even before we knew that getting pregnant was easier for us than it was for my mother and her uterus. Yay, us! But we got to plan parenthood, for real, and that’s pretty great.

It was only seven years ago that I poked my belly at the right time, in the right way, and discovered some fibroids that led us to the snarkiest OB/GYN I’ve ever known (which clearly makes her a good match for us). There wasn’t anything to do about the fibroids — trying to remove them then would just create scar tissue that could affect pregnancy, and they weren’t causing any particular damage, so we bided our time.

That was the unintentional beginning of your most impressive work, though. Within a year, you were harboring my oldest son (and those fibroids grew with him), and nearly two years ago, you wrapped production on our second son. And I have to tell you — neither of them wanted to leave you for the outside world. They had to be retrieved. You must be a pretty nice place to grow, uterus.

Now, though, we’re at an impasse. Fibroids continue to grow and scans show that you’re the size you should be for a 13-week pregnancy, even though we’re done with that particular adventure. I was chalking the excessive periods up to my time on the keto diet, but it seems that we’re just at that point in your life when things start to go a little…off (it sounds like we come by these symptoms honestly). And listen, you’re really messing up my planks, man.

So! Off you go, uterus, to that big medical waste bin in the sky. Chasing down individual symptoms just creates more problems and my elderly-multi-gravida days are over, so it’s time to laparoscopically part company, and today’s the day.

Thank you for my babies, uterus. The stories I grew up with made me so nervous for that part of our life together, and you handled it beautifully from start to finish each time. You sheltered them and kept them safe and gave me peace of mind for 40 weeks or more each time. I’ll never forget that.

Love,
jen