Farewelling Odette
Removing an ovary means marking the death of a small heroine.
Odette and Ophelia, I have called them, and it’s such melodrama that it works. Cursed? No. Defiant, yes. I listened to the Waltz from Swan Lake last night, as it makes me soar.
Odette rested as I held her in mind, painless and silent, waiting for execution day like a saint: a part of my future that sat nestled inside my mother before I was born, one that has held answers to my questions since I first started to menstruate.
Saying goodbye is not something I enjoy. And this organ isn’t something I want to lose.
I have attached a lot of my creative power to my reproductive organs. I have believed in them like god or my children. ‘They’re good, even if they hurt me. They’re good, so I do not need to be afraid. They are of me, and I am of them, and in their goodness I choose to believe I am good, too.’
‘Periods aren’t nice anyway,’ said my mother, when my options were discussed. But I disagree. They feel like the part of me that is magic. Of course the most magical part of me is the part that has the most conflict. Where is the story, otherwise?
I have endometriosis, and it’s back. I have a polyp, it’s back. I have a tumour of questionable (likely innocent) intention - it must go. For what if it is Odile, the black swan, affixed to Odette’s future, wanting to claim it for herself? Or, what if it is just a wide-eyed civilian my generous ovary has offered a ride to? Therein lies a gamble, but bird or snake, do you wait and see? After what the last few years have offered all of us? My belief that what grows from me is always inherently good has been stretched too far, my nonchalance has lost its elastic.
In the second house I grew up in, my parents removed a large tree that had started breaking the foundations of the building. The old owners stopped me on the street one day to tell me they shed a tear about that. A beautiful fig, torn down. I don’t deny that grief, and hence the social conflict. My parents chose to remove it, and I had to believe there was a good reason it was ripped out. That it was not violence for vanity, but restorative clearing: sad but safer.
And so it is with the friend who has bravely offered me babies, has helped me find my fertility, has let me cycle like the sun, always rising, dependably bright - even if she scorched me, left me peeling, erupting.
I have never felt betrayed by my body, I was always so grotesquely lucky in this department. Even when my placenta secretly tore away from the uterus, to let Mercy bleed out in a dark and soundless cave at 33 weeks gestation, I did not question its intentions. She was valiantly saved by sense and science. The babe was well, and my body was forgiven, for it knew not what it did.
I’ve understood for a long time that it is a privilege to have a uterus, to have a pregnancy, to have a baby. A privilege to have the gift of health.
My children and I have survived the risks of life - sometimes like a scrub turkey on a freeway, and sometimes like unwitting royalty, receiving the most thorough medical care. But such luck can give you the incorrect impression you are somehow immune to mortality, too.
While I do not take my body’s adaptability for granted, I’ve also probably put too much of my identity in the one place I don’t feel like a failure: my womb.
They will remove Odette, my ovary, today.
Ophelia will stay, once cut free of whatever tortured Hamlet is tying her down. She will be left without her twin, to guide me through this next strange season of hormones and hope on her own.
It might be uncomfortable for Ophelia and I, for a little while.
I won’t be any less of a woman.
I will have lost a very good friend.
Thanks as always for your beautiful vulnerable words
What a beautiful read, Anna. Thank you so much for sharing, lovely.