Content notes: endometriosis, chronic illness, chronic pain, generational trauma.

I watched “Halmeoni” by Kevin Jin Kwan Kim and it was heartbreakingly beautiful. Heartbreaking in part because for some years I was that immigrant who forgot their “native” language, but also because I couldn’t help but wonder what it could’ve been like, would’ve been like, if I’d felt that kind of security in love before.

It struck me, in that moment where her grandmother speaks to her in English, shows that she made the effort to bridge the gap, that she doesn’t think less of her for forgetting…

Forgive me this; allow me this — the linking of the desire to mother and be mothered, the need to reconnect with foremothers and forefathers, the wish for something solid to stand upon, the wanting of access to knowledge gained across generations, the gnawing demand to feel pride in at least some of the history that led to me-in-the-now…to endometriosis.

I was speaking with a beloved the other day, of how she used “messed up pelvic ontology” in a fic, and how it fit because of how fraught that entire area is.

It’s referred to as a whole, which seems ridiculous if you think of it, even as I acknowledge the need for succinct summation when speaking medically.

Yet if you think about it. All the politics, all the trauma, all the expectations and desires that goes on around that tiny space.

Endometriosis. Literally when tissue like that which lines the uterus grows outside it, moving into spaces it shouldn’t, sometimes digging deep into other organs and not just content to do terrible things like “adhere the vagina to the rectum”.

Something meant to nurture and protect, twisted by itself and its invasion into spaces it shouldn’t go into something malevolent.

And forgive me the link, but I cannot help but see this physical entanglement, this encroachment, as deeply symbolic of my own references to my emotional needs as “tentacles reaching out and not finding and being pushed by an aching need to keep reaching out, often into territory where they’re unwanted and thus causing untold amounts of pain”.

The connection feels true.

I asked a while ago, if I really always wanted kids as I’d thought for decades, or if I just wanted a way to re-do my childhood, a sort of fix-it fanfic done in juxtaposition.

Did I really want to be a mother, or was the real craving to have a mother like the one I aspired to become?

Did I want the cute soft cuddly things for my child, or did I want to experience them in the name of my potential child?

I remember when my mother told me she was so driven to keep me learning piano because she’d wanted to learn piano as a child and was cruelly refused by her father.

Funny how, I’d been aware enough then to tell her that my learning piano was meaningless for her purposes: if she really wanted to learn it, she should go ahead and do it herself instead of using me as a stand-in.

Funny, because I almost perpetuated the cycle.

As much as I could try to persuade myself that there would’ve been no harm done there, no harm in wanting to be more patient, more loving, more aware, more present, more open a mother to my child.

But any child of mine shouldn’t be an alternate universe fanfiction attempt.

If I try to fix my childhood and my traumas through them — who is to say I wouldn’t enact other hurts because I might assume them to be a person they weren’t? Assume them to be me, essentially.

Note, I do not link the two in cause and effect.

I am absolutely not saying my own inherited mommy issues in some way prompted the endometriosis.
I am not saying there is a lesson there, because gods, what else is more annoying than people insisting that all suffering must exist for some kind of edifying good.

However.

Having drawn the connection, I feel it would be easier for me in the future to be gentler with myself.

Not “why do you ruin everything; what are you doing omg this is terrible; why do you hate me”.

I can look at my body, at what it is doing, and even if I don’t like it, I can sympathize.

Yes, I too am trying to find connection.

I too, try to hold on too tight.

I too, tried to work out my trauma in all the wrong ways, by trying to mother people uninvited and unwanted and then resented them for not cherishing what was given without request.

I too, was often inappropriate in my ways of finding connection with others.

I sympathize. I’m sorry it’s so hard. I’m sorry it’s all so painful. I’m sorry that despite all the pain and the difficulty, you still haven’t managed what you wanted. I’m so sorry that we have nothing except sorrow and regret to show for our efforts, because they were directed in the wrong directions and at the inappropriate targets.

I’m so, so, sorry.

Perhaps we can heal together.

And if we do not, that has to be okay too.

Because there is no alternative to being okay, really.

It has done this thing, is continuing to do this thing, and with endometriosis it really is possible to feel things getting worse in indescribable but definitely palpable ways…

It will possibly keep doing this thing.

The only “solution” Western doctors have for endometriosis is often to go in and surgically excise the tissue. Except. Up to 50% of people have things grow back within five years of surgery and they don’t really suggest that you go in again after that.

So when it has been doing this thing and might just keep doing this thing…

There is only:
I really don’t like the results of this thing and I don’t think it serves us, but if you gotta…you gotta.

I’m pretty sure the depression and obsessive compulsiveness and especially the anxiety doesn’t serve me either, but if I have three annoying life-mates I am learning to live with, I might as well accept this fourth.