Who Moved My Ovary?

by Ryann (writer), , January 31, 2012

Reaching out to the fertility-challenged, non-procreatives searching for a few words of comfort and compassion.

It is an empowering and overwhelming sensation to watch your own life, being completely disconnected, where you’re watching yourself as a third-person character in a movie, rather than a first person in your own skin. Under the guise of a movie, there are twists and turns in the plot, heroes and villains, alternate endings, retakes, and other events of production that had all left me feeling canned, or on the cutting room floor.

My childhood is made up of a series of flashbacks; happy times in slow motion, peppered with darker voice-overs that create just enough irony to foreshadow the decomposition of my picket-fenced setting.

I was nine when I had experienced emotions that have now sent me on a journey to rediscover still to this day. My little sister was born. I was purely, instantly, and irrevocably in love. I wanted everything for her. I became brave to protect her; patient to listen to her; articulate to talk to her; funny to make her laugh; opinionated to make her think; proud to give her strength; and humble to give her humility. In turn, she gave me purpose and perspective. She opened my heart to experience a world past my own. And this happened to a nine-year-old’s old soul, literally, in a heartbeat.

My mom even called me “a little mom” Considering I was a mom-in-training, it seemed a natural rationale to assume that just as a young Republican becomes a Republican, a junior executive becomes an executive, a resident becomes a doctor, I would therefore become a mom.

At nine, I was ahead of the game; I found my passion, my talent, my strength, and my life’s ambition. I knew what I was born to do, and smugly, my life’s purpose seemed far more likely than my best friend’s dream of either being a model on Paris runways or a roller-skating goddess like Olivia Newton-John in Xanadu. Thusly, childhood dream or not, it still seems unfathomable that I am, essentially, a childless parent.

I had felt like a personal failure. I still laugh at my feeling of entitlement and ignorance; like a blind person who was never told that being an air-traffic controller was simply not in his career cards.