In the Peanut Hospital

© City of Boston Archives, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr

My mother wouldn’t tell me the name of her surgery—it was for old ladies, and she didn’t want to talk about it. No, it wasn’t dangerous, yes, she’d stay the night in a hospital, and she wanted me there and at home with her for a few days afterward. My father would be there too, but he wasn’t good around sick people or hospitals, though he’d been a sick person in a hospital twice in recent memory.

I’m not sick, she assured me. There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s a female surgery, she said, like that answered things.

I made plans to drive to Virginia, to the distant hospital in Suffolk where her doctor practiced. We had reservations at a Quality Inn that looked seedy even on the website (unlike the spiffier Holiday Inn Express, the Quality Inn would allow my parents’ dog).

It was August of the hottest year on record. Along the highway, grasses and weeds were yellowed and burnt. Out west, farmers struggled to feed their livestock; hay was high, water dear. A drought map of North Carolina showed every county in dangerous red-brown territory, and our well at home had to be managed carefully: brief showers, short laundry cycles, no guests. The Haw River, near my house, was drained to a bathwater stillness, too low to paddle more than short stretches.

What bothers me, a biologist friend told me the last time we were on the water together, is the idea that there is something wrong with me. The idea that I am damaged, faulty.

She was strong, healthy, beautiful, successful. She was also infertile. Our shared condition was why we met, through another friend who knew about our mutual struggle. Of course, I told her, you aren’t damaged. But her body wasn’t working the way she wanted it to, and mine wasn’t either.

What is wrong with having something wrong with you? I wondered on my drive to Virginia—windows closed, too hot then for anything but the blaring air conditioner. I had told my mother almost as little about my infertility or treatment as she had now told me about her surgery. Our broken parts—the broken female parts, at least—were an uncommon silence between us.

In Of Woman Born, her book of memoir and cultural criticism about the patriarchy-suffused experience of motherhood, Adrienne Rich writes about the need women felt in her youth to present to the world an image of health, industry, and fertility. Already a serious poet when she married, at twenty-four, she remembers taking up a broom the day after her wedding, thinking, This is what women have always done. While Rich was ambivalent about how motherhood would affect her ambitions (by the birth of her first child, she’d won the Yale Younger Poets prize, and before her marriage she had wanted to travel and become a journalist), she knew that “to have a child was to assume adult womanhood to the full, to prove myself, to be ‘like other women.’” As a pregnant woman—she had three sons in quick succession—she writes that she felt, “for the first time in my adolescent and adult life, not-guilty. The atmosphere of approval in which I was bathed—even by strangers on the street, it seemed—was like an aura I carried with me, in which doubts, fears, misgivings, met with absolute denial.”

The pregnant body suggests a story we think we know: health, love, happiness. That pregnancy is in fact a dangerous condition that tends to make women poorer and more vulnerable to violence and some diseases—and certainly less likely to write books—isn’t something we talk about. We instead learn, early on, that the inconveniences particular to the female body—getting a period, wearing a bra, worrying about becoming or not becoming pregnant—are properly suffered in secret, even in shame. We learn not...