Goodbye Grapefruit

I have been busy taking it easy and in that time, two of my poems have been published

The first, “While my son rattles on about dinosaurs I contemplate the futility of life,” was featured in DMQ Review’s fall issue of prose poems. Here’s my poem, but the whole issue is definitely worth checking out:

The second is “The Origins of Mermaids,” which was recently featured on Brawl and includes both a recording of me reading the piece and a short interview.

Huge thanks to both of these journals for sharing my writing and, as always, thanks to you for reading and supporting my work!

Goodbye Grapefruit

Number 4 from the list of findings on my post-surgery summary reads: Adenomyotic appearing uterus, 12-week sized.

I take this to mean that when they pulled my uterus out of my body, someone in the room said, “Geez, that’s like the size of uterus at 12 weeks of pregnancy.”

Twelve weeks of pregnancy is about the endpoint of when the uterus can still fit inside the pelvis. After that, it gets too big and has to start moving up and out to find more space to grow. For a clearer visual as we head toward prime citrus season: imagine a grapefruit sitting in your pelvis. Apparently, that’s what I’ve been walking around with for the better part of the last five years (except for those pesky 40 weeks in 2022-2023 when I was actually pregnant and carried all manner of increasingly large fruit inside of me).

My grapefruit is gone now, along with my fallopian tubes, my cervix, and what the pathologist ultimately confirmed were five separate clusters of endometriosis. And, at least I hope, gone too is the debilitating pain that has greatly diminished my life in the back half of my thirties.

I haven’t fully processed this experience yet. Life is full of before-and-after moments, and many people experience a topsy-turvy blend of relief and sadness when they decide they are done having children or age out of the reproductive portion of their lives; I am not unique in this. But when that shift happens in such a dramatic fashion, to know down to the hour and be given a descriptive summary of when you went from someone who could have a baby to someone who no longer possesses the necessary equipment to do so, it hits a bit different. And when you have to physically heal from that decision, have to look in the mirror to inspect the incisions that have turned your belly into a jack-o-lantern just in time for spooky season…

Well, it’s going to take me a little time to work through everything I’m feeling.

Leading up to this surgery (maybe because of it or maybe it’s just a coincidence in the timing), I felt a sudden, strong shift to let go of a lot of my ambitions. To release any sense of expectation, goals, driving forces in my life and instead just sink into small, simple pleasures, the everyday delights of reading good books, watching my children explore and grow, taking my little walks and writing my little poems, as my friend Vic so expertly put it.

Maybe it’s the season, a sense of everything downshifting, but if so, that’s a change from how the arrival of autumn usually makes me feel. More often, I feel creatively invigorated and physically energized, no longer weighed down by the humidity of summer. Maybe it’s that my life is at a transition point, the “after” of this big physical change is coming and so too is a new decade as I finish out this last year of my thirties. Maybe it’s that between this surgery and my massage license expiring at the end of this month, that part of my working life is officially over and whatever comes next is wide open for me to decide. I suddenly don’t feel any great rush to decide, though. I have the good fortune to take it slow, wait it out, and at least attempt to resist the pressure to “make the most” of the years ahead. I am practicing this now as I heal from my surgery and must prioritize resting over everything else. It’s not easy to do, but I am trying to push aside any urge to use this healing time for anything but relaxation and ease.

The things I thought I wanted for myself—my professional ambitions, my desire to prove I was doing something significant and worthwhile with my life, my striving to live up to a self-imposed notion of success—I am suddenly aware of how much these desires have been getting in the way of my happiness, how they pull me out of my life and conflict with what I really want more than anything, which is to find pleasure in my relationships and joy in my activities, and to engage more deeply with the experiences of my life rather than to always have some part of me tucked away in my mind processing in real time how I will write about this at some point in the future.

I remember on an episode of the podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, way way back when it first started, someone mentioned how his life goes through distinct periods of consumption and creation—sometimes he spends all of his time reading, watching movies, taking in art, and in other periods, his gives himself over entirely to creating, and rarely do the two mix for him. Another way to think about this could be observation and reflection. I feel like I am entering a period of observation and setting aside the need for immediate reflection. Perhaps the reflection will come at some point in the future, but perhaps not. My urgency to produce something, to always feel like I must be engaged in reflecting and creating has lifted.

The need to justify my existence through creative output was its own version of a grapefruit-sized uterus: one day it was there and the next it was gone and though I haven’t fully processed what it means to be without it, I no longer feel it pressing against me at every waking moment and that is a relief.

You can find more of my writing & contact information at clairemtaylor.com. If you’d like to further support my work, please consider purchasing one of my books, or a copy of Little Thoughts Press. I also have a ko-fi page.