Overachiever

I’m in a play. (Midsummer Night’s Dream!With so many amazing and talented people!) Back onstage for a full production for the first time since my daughter was born. This would be enough all by itself, but I am an overachiever.

TW: pregnancy loss, profanity, current state of the US

Not only am I a primary parenting a toddler and participating in a fully staged production, but at the start of it all, I found out I was pregnant again. Not only that, but a month or so later I found out the fetus had no heartbeat and I would (eventually, theoretically) miscarry.

Is there a word for that time in between when a fetus stops developing and the physical act of miscarriage happens?

It’s a strange sort of limbo and I was in it for a month. Because as if all this wasn’t enough, my body refused to evict the fetus on its own, resulting in surgery yesterday. Two days after my birthday, scant days before tech week, with all our backup childcare out of town.

Have I mentioned my overachiever tendencies?

Despite the frustration and uncertainty of the last month, I haven’t mourned. I don’t know what it says about me, but I can’t grieve something that had no potential for life. Miscarriages are so common that I wasn’t going to get fully excited about the pregnancy until I at least saw a heartbeat. We never saw a heartbeat.

But throughout all this, I am angry. I’m fucking furious that there are people in this world and in this country that choose to criminalize women and other uterus owners. In another state, I might have been forced to carry a dead thing (if something that was never alive can really be dead) and risk a dangerous infection, all the while panicking that I might be ripped away from my toddler, all because I am one of countless numbers who ends up carrying a bunch of misfiring cells.

Those atrocities dressed up as laws are more murder than any woman who exercises a fundamental right (permitted men and the deceased) not to donate her body to the purpose of anyone else’s life.

This bullshit is about power and control and misogyny. Fuck that.

So in case anyone has been wondering where I’ve disappeared to (again) online or why I’ve hedged on making commitments over the last couple months, know that all this has been taking up a ridiculous amount of brain-space. I will now endeavor to be a little less of an overachiever.