"The Red Room: Hysterectomy" poem by dr.cpe.
Dear Souls:
I think, as many of you might too, about whether and what and how much to say in public places about one's private life. Yet, on this private subject and others, I weigh that against asking who will go untaught, unhelped; who will suffer if I do not say my life out loud?
If women and men do not tell the truth about lives, if they do not crack the shell of propriety as taught by family and overculture... and at last step out, not only to be free, but to free others as well... then what would become of all of us on Earth?
So, thus...
Many decades ago, having devoted myself to the fullest and most fierce family and creative life I could ... when I was 33 years old, because of a life and death situation, I became an old woman overnight...
without cradle-uterus, without ovaries bearing the millions of eggs I was born with, without fallopian tubes to fan and wave the little ones in the right direction...
I awoke from a devastating surgery having been severed from the so delicate barometers and beautiful rhythms of ' call and response ' of my bodily organs that were once strung like lights within my soul's one precious body on Earth.
I was weak unto death, but shocked the entire hospital and doctors' worlds by insisting in a morphine stupor that I must be given my severed body to bring home to bury with honor.
I did explain this need in several ways in my pleadings to the medics, standing on love of the children this body had borne, insisting on sacerdotal duty, and the traditions of the old believers I come from.
I wound up blessing the very ones who were so quick with radical and brutal surgeries in those times, for they did grant me back my own poor body to lay to rest in proper ritual and burial.
After months in hospital, when I could finally come back home, I made a ritual of prayer and gratitude for my life. Then I opened for the first time, the containers of what they then called 'surgical waste,' that is, the parts of me that had so protectively filled with blood and love to bring my two children safely to Earth...
I was shocked to see they had cut, dissected it is called, my tender body parts into halves, to biopsy, they told me later
I was devastated to see this, and grief suddenly hit as a purely visceral 'ghost of longing' inside my seeming now 'empty' body.
Yet, soul can often work in wondrous ways. After a long time sorrowing about all the life that would never come through me, the new smiles and first words not to be... I dreampt a vivid dream: I was wearing my own halved uterus on my head as earphones and I could hear deeply and clearly the most amazing things both in and across the worlds.
I was surprised and heartened, and also impressed with the wild creativity of the dream-maker; it had made me laugh, in more ways than one... oddly to me at first, I laughed in joyous-sadness.
As I grew in understanding, though I knew many people who said they 'resigned' themselves to certain difficult matters in life, I felt there was a diagonal path... another choice ... something else, and that is, reconciling... reuniting oneself with what is most meaningful and useful to the soul in the matter, regardless of sad or bad or inexplicable circumstances.
And this I labored through then, literally laying los descansos (the resting places marking where a death has occurred) on a timeline of my life... and gradually I found that the work of reconciliation can also sometimes and in some part, replace lost treasure with newly found odds and ends and wires and springs, that turn out to be treasure too, but in ways one never expected.
Thus a bounty began to burgeon, not right away, but in time, beginning with the dream above... and I proceeded, fully dressed in my progenative senses a la uteri 'receivers', as in that dream... listening, hearing, sensing, seeing far, farther than ever before.
It came clear that the creative works of making children once focussed within my body, was becoming a far more global endeavor and not tied only to my body, but to the outer world, to others, mind and soul.
Blood was still rythmically nourishing 'the new' but now, the child was the inspiratus. I was quickened vastly in conceiving and giving birth in new and different ways than ever before. It was as though my blood was being saved back for a whole different kind of bearing of life.
Thus, this poem about outcomes in early loss of childbearing ability, written in 1978.
RED ROOM— HYSTERECTOMY
by Dr. CP Estés
Gone is the tiny room they came to.
From far star roofs
they once jumped, giggling.
Parachuting, tiny travelers with no baggage
came here,
hoping to find
all they needed.
I brought some home safely.
Now, the waiting room is gone.
This station is closed.
But a thousand other rooms inside me
that once seemed sealed with steel bands,
I find these now held shut with
only cellophane.
I find there are 'rooms between rooms'
inside me,
and they can fan fully open to receive.
If, as in the days of my childbearing years,
I let this ancient rope
with ideas attached,
develop inside me, then when ready,
let them slip through and from me into life outside—
if I do not hold too tight, but rather loosen
all the bracelets of my body,
letting these new child-lettes
come in their own times,
just let what I know to be so
to have its ways with me,
--as always before—
then it will be so, as before,
new life will be brought down
to earth again, whole.
The red room is gone.
But the runway lights are still lit
fully blue and glowing
in this darkness.
The landing strip is still here
welcoming all newlings
blazing for new life
elbowing to be born
through this mother
who once grew dear childen
but now grows simple revolution.
“The Red Room: Hysterectomy”, © 1978, 1979, All rights reserved. Dr. C.P. Estés, poem from La Pasionaria/ The Bright Angel: Collected Poems of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés 1960-2010” This particular work may be used non-commercially as long as it is kept entirely intact, not added to nor taken from, and this complete notice including usage, author’s name and copyright notice are clearly printed upon it. Other permissions ngandelman@aol.com
