On hating my body

I performed as part of the comedy lineup for Splendour in the Grass last year. There is nothing that builds your resilience more than performing in a tent on the second evening of a music festival. It’s exactly when half the attendees are coming up on adult candy and the other half are wiped from already overdoing it.

RIP Splendour in the Grass, come back soon

I had only one strange moment. It was during Lizzo’s set when she said throw your hands up in the air and say, I love my body.

It was the moment I realised, I hated my body. I despised it. I didn’t dislike it in the way that my teenage self used to - because I thought my butt was too big and my eyes were lopsided and my nose was funky and my legs had weird marks on them. I deeply, truly, hated it.

As everyone around me threw up their arms, the realisation hit me as my arms refused to move.

We were in our second round of IVF and in the two week wait. This is a desperate window after an expensive transfer of an embryo into a uterus, where you must wait two weeks to see if the pregnancy has stuck. Of course, every week after this is also a nightmare, to see if the pregnancy continues. It is only the first nightmare two week wait of many.

We were trying to forget about all this, spending the weekend at a festival politely declining all the fast food and drinks and other things that steal all your serotonin in exchange for temporary rapture. The advice during the two week wait is don’t think about being pregnant, but act as if you are pregnant, in case you are pregnant, but don’t think about being pregnant. Easy stuff.

I took myself away from the crowd and sat on the hill overlooking the bodies moving as one to the beat. I am forced to confront why I hate this body. It is because it cannot do the one thing that women are supposed to do - create a child. This is what life is all leading up to from the moment we are born, yes?

I mean sure, we go get an education, study, get a job, find a partner, buy a house but that is all just to kill time until your child comes along. It eclipses everything you knew or did before them - every movie, every song, every television show tells me there is nothing a woman does better, or matters more, on this planet - than being a mother.

Women who are not mothers? They go mad. They get lots of cats that they’re later eaten by. They experience an ever increasing gulf with their partner who becomes obsessed with trains. You then have so much time to fill and your life is so empty that you start catfishing people on the internet. Okay those last two were very specific plot points from this television show.

If I can’t produce a child, I will start catfishing on the internet because how else does a childless woman fill her time?

Charlie didn’t own a train set yet, we only had one cat and I didn’t know how to catfish. The perfect future was still within grasp. I was desperate for my body to just do what it was supposed to do.

When we got home from the festival, I knew I couldn’t continue to feel this way about something so outside my control. I started writing a list of everything my body had done for me, in my thirty seven years of life.

It took me all along the Inca Trail and to the top of Huayna Picchu in Peru. It took me to the summit of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, the W trek in Chile, bedouin trails in South Sinai, an active volcano in the Democratic Republic of Congo and another in Guatemala. It took me diving in Thailand and swimming across rivers and oceans in Sri Lanka and Australia.

In every day life, it powered through many years of study and work and dancing with friends and tennis and touch rugby. It even almost picked up snowboarding before an idiot man blew out my knee.

My body smashing it on the summit of Kilimanjaro

In short, it did everything I asked of it, if it was able to. If it could, it would bear a child. It did not deserve my hate. It’s not its fault that the medical field has limited answers when it comes to women because all the doctors used to be men.

I joined the local council’s gym and started signing up for group classes. In my Pilates class, the instructor called out every muscle that was helping in the exercises we did. In my Body Pump class, the instructor noted the muscle groups we were focusing on. While swimming in the pool, I felt the air going in and out of my body as it powered through the water. I started to pay attention to every part of my body that worked tirelessly every day to give me this ridiculous life I get to live.

I’m back in Melbourne after two months away on tour and going back to regular gym classes is one of the biggest joys of being home. I still find it really difficult to contend with the ongoing question marks around our fertility struggles but I’m proud to say, I no longer hate my body. It is no small feat within the constant narrative that what it’s doing is not enough.

I’m lucky to have amazing friends and family who I know will support us no matter how life turns out. Right now the other options - commercial surrogacy, altruistic surrogacy, adoption - are mountains made of paperwork and bureaucracy that I cannot find the willpower to climb. More and more I’m thinking - what if we don’t have children? Can we just enjoy being married to each other? Can that really not be enough when it took me three decades to find this man?

I’m grateful to friends who are honest about their motherhood journeys, some love it, some don’t love it as much as they thought they would - all are united in confirming they didn’t enter an Eden once their child came along. I’m grateful to friends who are open about their fertility struggles and to those who didn’t, or couldn’t have children and are generous with their thoughts and feelings on the matter.

With each day, it feels like the first few not bad days after a break up. Remember that first awful break up? Where you felt sure you could not breathe without the one you loved and cannot see anymore? A couple of days later, you laugh and are surprise you can still feel pleasure. Even when you are in so much pain. Some months later, you’re breathing just fine and discovering that life can still be so full, even without the person you were sure you couldn’t live without.

This is what life feels like now. Open with possibility. Not empty - with sadness and catfishing. It’s a strange rhetoric that continues to be pushed on us about marriage and children, despite studies constantly finding women without a spouse or a child - are the happiest. Never again will I let any existing narrative tell me when my life is full and when it is empty. I will create my own - for it is solely up to me to decide.

I hope you’re all well out there. I’ll make the next one funny, I promise.

Big hugs

Sashi