Wombed by Jen Fischer

TW: Graphic descriptions of sexual assault and childbirth trauma

I wanted to hold you carefully and closely. You and your sibling. I wanted to control how you came into the world, but there was too much scar tissue already, before they laid their hands on me, used my poverty to decide what my womb was capable of, how it could bring another human being into the world, how many wires and cables and machines were required, how many knives.

My hands dig into the scar and begin to peel back the layers. Like an onion, the scent brings tears to my eyes.

And the pointy hands of an awkward teenager are pulling down my underwear. My body is small and fragile. I’ve only had 6 years on this Earth and was born 6 weeks early. My yellow almost white hair is in pigtails, my cotton nightgown is blue. My panties are down now, those pointy hands are exploring. Then, one pushes my hands inside his underwear. I feel something fleshy turn hard. I grab hold and peel back another layer.

This weathered womb of mine, the palace of the child.

I imagine that palace. Gold and shimmering in the sun. Made for protection, but failing.

Your heart stopped beating inside of me. Someone shoved a paper in my hand to sign.They rushed me into surgery.

I shout at my partner to text my sibling. My partner thinks I’m crazy, but at that very moment my sibling is with a crowd of Buddhist monks. They all chant for my health and the health of my baby. Their words secure the palace even as the doctors make their first cut, unable to see the layers of scar tissue already there.

I peel back another.

I am 19 and wearing a cool, new H&M skirt that I bought in Paris. I step off the subway to go to the Louvre when I feel a stranger's hand push up between my legs, thick fingers penetrating my anus.

The subway cars close behind me as I shout, “Fucking coward!” at the stranger, safe inside the subway car whooshing down the tunnel.

My wandering womb pulls open at the edges, and I peel back another layer.

I am walking down a crowded middle school hallway with hands grabbing the new soft spots of my changing body. “Tits and ass, tits and ass” the boys will be boys say, “tits and ass.”

I push their sweaty palms away and peel back a layer.

They cut me again because some man in an office, staring at a machine, noting my income level, disregards the words of my doctor, a woman, who believed my womb was a palace of the child and not ‘an animal within an animal.’ She believed I didn’t need to be cut again. She believed my palace would keep you safe. My pushing this time would not be against the sweaty hands of strangers. It would push you into this waiting world.

But instead, they lay me down under harsh lights, make me bleed, cut across a scar that hasn’t properly healed yet, rip apart muscles that will never find their way to each other again, and this cut feels deeper.

I sink to the kitchen floor in my mother’s house after she offers me a free full body massage because she knows what my body has been through. 39 months straight, pregnant or nursing. This will help me. This will heal me, but the thought of a stranger’s hands on me makes me nauseous.

I offer the massage to my sister instead, who embraces me, sees the layers, sees them all because that is who she is. She who sits among monks. She who takes the stage, strums her guitar and makes people scream. She who wrote me letters from Berlin reminding me that the world was bigger than the small town in Texas where people like to cut you for being different.

She peeled back the layers and offered a salve to heal them.

Even still, my body burns during sex and I know that nothing is right. That my ‘wandering womb’ is out of place. That even though the scar above my pubic hair is barely visible now, it has not healed properly.

“You have a prolapsed uterus,” someone finally tells me. Ten years later. Ten years it’s been this way, and nobody bothered to notice. 38 years I’ve been out of place as others staked their claim, sought ownership of my body.

I peel back the last layer now. I find the palace of the child that hides inside. Trying to protect me. Trying so hard to protect me.

Jen Fischer

Navigating mental health as an Asian femme

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