Wombstories
An important part of the project 'Womb with a View' is gathering and sharing the stories we have of our wombs. Often, women don't have a space to share their experiences, or share them in informal spaces, around the kitchen table, in short sentences swapped on the school run, or in the bathroom as we ask a stranger for a tampon.
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I want this project to become a space where people can share their womb stories from the first period, fertility journeys or the impact of menopause.
Whether you have a womb or not, you came from one, and you most certainly know people whose wombs affect their daily lives, and by proxy, yours too. This is your space to share your experiences.
All stories can be submitted anonymously with the option to provide contact details. By submitting, you give permission for your Wombstory to be used to inspire artworks and become part of this project's story. Your details will never be shared publicly without permission.
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In the spirit of sharing, I will go first. I wrote this at the start of my project as a personal piece of writing that has informed my studio practice. Your Wombstory might be a lot shorter and more succinct!
Here is my Wombstory.......
My Wombstory
Much is said of the heart, a million love songs a whole culture of yearning, we sing of the heart, we write, we make art and films, and we know that our lived experience of loving and feeling is far removed from a medical drawing, or a mass of meat on surgical steel.
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The same for the brain, it powers us, it is beyond us, it is us, it is our past, our memories, it somehow gives us our perception of our reality, it is complex and fascinating and along with the heart forms part of what we understand to be human.
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Even the gut, previously ignored is having its time in the spotlight, the new brain the microbiome directing us in ways we never knew, we should feed it and care for it with probiotics -one man’s shit really is another one’s gold it seems.​​​​​​​​
But what of the womb? This vital housing organ, that we all either have or have spent time in. What of it?
No songs, no films, no cultural place, the temple reduced to somewhere behind the colon.
I look back at my life from as my grandmother used to say, ‘the wrong side of summer’, and I realise that while I was distracted with the heart and its drama, the brain and its intellectualising and processing, my womb has been there all along. It is interwoven with my life at every stage, but largely forgotten about, apart from when it deigns to make itself known and then as an inconvenience, something to be endured or silenced, rather than celebrated.
I feel like I have gleaned information about my womb and my own body in whispers passed through corridors and under toilet doors along with Tampax. Conversations shared around kitchen tables with tea and my mum, and my best friend sharing a halved Tramadol and a bag of chips on the bad days at school lunch break. Somehow this got woven in with a drawing in a dog-eared textbook, a description of a upside-down pear and something about moons and tides, and a half-remembered Victoria Wood sketch where she muses about having a hysterectomy and what will they put in the gap? Something to please her husband* she wryly smiles ‘like a bacon sandwich?’
I mull over this at the time, but then it is forgotten*(I am yet to know about the so-called husband stitch post-birth)
An Irish Catholic secondary schooling, although I am neither Irish, nor Catholic. As Alanis Morissette sings of irony in the charts we get sex education from a nun, ahead of her time with messages of female empowerment and ‘remember your body is a temple girl’, but very vague on the details.
Despite being temples, we are not for worship, it’s all to be protected, keep your distance from boys, stay out of those disco clubs and focus on your education whilst I’m telling you everything, but nothing at all really.
The mystery, the power without information, 'you are a woman now' at 10, 11, 12, nowadays as young as 9. This is bestowed upon you, you are viewed in a new away that is both exciting and bewildering, but barely grasped, this is an inconvenience and feels shameful. This hidden part of you must remain hidden to you and everyone else for the fear that you would revel in it too much, but the main thing, the main thing we all were told over and over, ‘just don’t get pregnant’.
This could be achieved by never getting too near to boys. To shield your ever fertile beacon from their eyes, your skirt must not go above the knee (I wondered lest they spy a shining light like a starship beam escaping through your legs) and if you must go to the disco club, stay at least one foot apart from them, do not parade yourself, even if that is just walking from one place to another, be careful, be proud, but not showy and all will be ok.
Of course, we set about discovering for ourselves, for better or for worse what the truth was. For some of us the consequences far outdid the action. Some stayed in that town and others didn’t, it seems to all even out in the end, but for me the desire to get away far outdid any teenage desire.
Weekends home from university or staying in my flat share where we laughed to discover apparently you do cycle together. A huddle of girls under a leopard print blanket with industrial slabs of chocolate, watching Sunset Beach and enjoying being a cliché. Going home full of newly formed outrage and opinions of Germaine Greer to your mother pale and tired, but patient of your enthusiastic ramblings. Unknown to you she is now on medicine designed for haemophiliacs and there is talk of a hysterectomy. You in your naivety quoting Germaine and the medicalisation of women’s bodies, meanwhile Dr Neary roams the corridors in a hospital in Drogheda whipping out the perceived useless wombs of women without consent.
Mum seeks another opinion privately and private, expensive, but a kinder and a less dramatic solution is found and an assurance that she is through the worst of it. Dad jokes about the huge womb to us three huge grown children ‘and the doctor wore a miner’s hat’, but he seems proud, and time prevails and the troublesome womb sleeps like a dormant volcano, or aged cat, thick with fibroids, but silent for now and who knows what comfort it brings the body. Now at seventy mum observes the brittle bones and bad hips of her contemporaries whilst scaling the stairs and moving wardrobes, and again not by practice or design it seems the better decision was made.
For the good ones that didn’t get ‘caught’ years later we discover the fertile beacons may not shine as bright or as strong as we had been told, in fact you may only get pregnant on certain days, or not at all, this will be explained as unexplained infertility, but at this stage would we expect any more explanation.
Some go down further in the medical tunnel to learn about luteinising hormones, back to the moon again. Injections and false starts and hope and praying for what you used to pray against and given advice just to trust your body and know your body after years of being told to deny its existence and silence it with contraceptive pills, which we have now swapped out for folic acid and charting and more fear. What we had been told was its only function, or use may be denied to us. What it is to be lucky, early, or late does a 180-degree turn. Not for everyone this path, some of us do have children, some don’t by choice, some don’t because it’s chosen for them by life and circumstance, and some of us wonder if we had known more, would we have done it all differently.
The whispers and passing of information go on, the tears and laughter around the kitchen table, the coffee, the tea, the wine. Women, women's problems, women's things, you find out you are never alone in loss or joy. A chain of women behind and around you, some things unspoken until years later, but immediately understood. A WhatsApp joke, Davina McCall, talk of HRT, prolapses and endometriosis. Did we know it could all just fall out, or grow over itself? No, no, we did not, nobody tells us, so we tell each other. Understanding doctors, and those who should be avoided, you talk to your friends, you are not alone, you are not going mad. Not madder anyway.
Apparently, it’s been the hormones all along, the songs, the films, the heartbreaks, maybe it wasn’t the heart at all, but gentle beat of pulsing pheromones giving you direction and causing chaos in plain sight, revelling in being dismissed, the true rebel. And now your daughter pats your tummy and laughs about the babyhouse getting bigger, ‘is there another one in there?’, no, just too much cheese! The wrong side of summer now, you remember that phrase again, thank you Granny forever reminding me of my mortality.
The womb is still in there doing its thing of I don’t know what, as I wake in the night in sweat and stare at the moon and wonder about the tides. I never worked it out. I read that that we were in our grandmothers womb when she was pregnant, as eggs in our mother’s womb, I have to read it twice, a Russian doll of wombs within wombs passed down the ‘mothers curse’ like the mighty mitochondria, the powerhouse of life, the story of being a woman which is more than the sum of its parts. Now I need to tell you my daughter how it might be, and let's celebrate it, and let me see if I can show you more by finding out more myself and give you a view into the womb.
Tell your
wombstory
Submit your story anonymously using the form
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​Adding your name and contact details is optional. Your details will not be shared without permission.