Natural Woman

definition of natural:  existing in or formed by nature, as opposed to artificial



Patients of mine, both young and old, will argue the case of hormonal contraception with what I like to call the "natural" argument.  "It's just not natural to trick the body," they will say.  Sometimes the argument is simply that birth control pills are not "natural," as if the Mountain Dew or Red Bull they drink is.  This argument has the corollary of "hormones are bad," but that is a discussion for another day.



What is, indeed, natural?  What is a natural woman?  Can it be argued that any of us today resemble, at least reproductively, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers?  While I believe that there is nothing new under the sun, especially when it comes to sex, I don't believe that my generation and younger are anything like our fore-mothers when it comes to reproduction.  We begin menarche younger and younger, for whatever reasons that may be found for this, and we also begin menopause younger (known euphemistically as the 'perimenopause').  We bear fewer children, if at all, and also begin bearing them when we are a good deal older than was thought possible one or two generations ago.  What was 'natural' to our great-grand-mamas was to marry in their late teens or very early twenties; to begin having children fairly soon after marriage; to breastfeed those children; and to start the cycle again, repeating every eighteen months to three years until they were exhausted.



I generalize, of course, but you see what I mean.  There is an argument that 'modern' woman is not 'natural' in her hundreds of monthly cycles, i.e. having a period every month instead of being pregnant or lactating for several months out of her life.  It's not considered 'natural' to continuously dance that cycle every month for years without pregnancy.  Today we want to be able to control nature, but somehow remain natural.  We want to avoid pregnancy until we are ready, and that may mean when we're fifty, and we expect that technology will be there for us.  We do not expect limits.



Perhaps it is my own aging that makes me realize how little control we have, and the appeal that fate holds for some has seemed a more and more reasonable stance.  We can maneuver out of its way, perhaps, but it always gets us in the end with irony and surprise, doesn't it?  So it was with me and my uterus.  A uterus, it should be known, that has never been pregnant.  An intact, never used, factory model:  vintage, in fact, at forty-five years of age.  I had decided in my dotage and in my desire to avoid being a middle-aged freak show (first pregnancy at forty-six!) that I would get the Mirena intrauterine device (IUD), and maybe, as an added bonus, get fewer and shorter menses, too, in my waning reproductive years.



Alas, it was not to be:  upon examination my uterus, that pristine, still in the package uterus, measured ten centimeters deep, too much to have the IUD placed.  To say I was speechless is an understatement.  I was stunned, and my voice rose with each succeeding, "But how can that be?  I've never BEEN PREGNANT!"  Most uteri (yes, the plural of uterus:  is it not wonderful?) measure between six and nine centimeters, though sometimes, a uterus that has housed many a pregnancy will sound to greater depths.  And then there's my uterus:  a virtual five thousand square foot house just waiting to gestate a fetus or three.



When the shock wore off, and after another contraceptive plan was made, I wondered if I had fooled fate or had been fooled by it.  Perhaps I was designed to have a passel of boys, each a year or two apart, running me ragged but kept in line most of the time by their father, who made them behave like angels once a year on Mother's Day.  Maybe I would have had only one child, after successive miscarriages, my uterus a large, cold room unable to keep hold of a pregnancy.  Maybe that big old uterus was waiting for ovaries that wouldn't, or couldn't, cooperate.  Maybe fate was wise and knew that a uterus that size didn't have a chance of recovering after delivery, and decided not to let me bleed to death.  Who knows what explanation there is for what seems to me to be an anomaly, this seemingly capacious and capable uterus in my never pregnant body.  For a minute I wished I was twenty years younger in order to be a surrogate, because even though I've never wanted to be a parent, I've always fancied that I'd like pregnancy and have always wanted to know what it felt like to push a baby out of my body.



So here I am, waiting out the last of my (supposedly) fertile years, with a wondrous uterus that never got her day in the sun.  I hope she's not taking it too hard.  I hope she still feels like a natural woman.