GUEST POST:“I grieved womanhood as a child”

Ally Hensley was 16 when she learned of her infertility. Here she tells how the grief that followed shaped her...

From Catriona:

I don’t think we’re even aware of it much of the time. How expectations and ideas of who and what we should be sink in slowly, burying themselves under our bones. I’ve tried to explain before, always struggling to find the right words. “I’m sad because this is who I’m told to be… and it’s exactly who I’m not,” I’ll say. Some get it, and others don’t.

It’s why I want to use this newsletter, as a place for us all to explore, often without finding the answers, the complicated losses. The grief that is rarely discussed. The lessons we derive from the years and years of wrangling. Because we don’t just face grief when we lose people, we can grieve lives that we thought we’d have and ideas of who we thought we would be.

Ally, who has shared her story below, has had to unravel so much over her lifetime, to then sew herself back together. What she has created, both in this piece of writing and in her very spirit, breaks down how harmful the ideas placed on us when it comes to womanhood are. I hope you’re as inspired by her as I am…

But before you read her piece, I’m delighted to say that thanks to my paid subscribers I was able to pay Ally for her time writing this piece! It’s a big milestone for me and an important one as I truly believe in paying writers (and all artists) for their time and craft. If you can consider becoming a paid subscriber so I can do this more, please do , and THANK YOU to those who have done so far. You made this possible. (also sorry the newsletter has come out on random days this week, I’ve been travelling and had a broken phone!)

It waited there for years. This dusty tote bag stuffed with sanitary products, sitting, patiently, at the back of my mother’s wardrobe. I waited with it. I believed that ‘any minute now’ my ticket to womanhood would come. At sixteen I learned that I was waiting in vain, my period would never come. As for my ticket to womanhood? It would take me years to realise that, despite all I’d been told, my period wasn’t what made me a woman. 

I was so small, as I sat on the hard chair in my doctor’s office as he told me that I was born without a womb, cervix and vagina. Externally, you’d never know (cue, a vulva is not the same as a vagina). It was just after my sixteenth birthday and I struggled to wrap my brain around my congenital condition, known as Mayer–Rokitansky–Küster–Hauser Syndrome (MRKH) Syndrome. I learnt that my body hit a genetic pothole between the 6–8-week gestational period. This is when our bodies form our reproductive system. I learned that I’d never be able to carry a baby and my vagina, failed to form. I had to grieve not just my own infertility but also a whole concept: womanhood. I had to unlearn my fantasies, put there by others, as to what a woman is. 

But first. I had a vagina to build. 

For a long and traumatic nine months, for twenty minutes both morning and night, I would insert pink, hard tubes into this fingernail-sized dimple and push hard. Eventually, this routine requiring a white-knuckled grip would create a vagina. 

Some 25 years later, I will never forget the position I had to get into to force a dilator into my body - flat on my back with my feet on the floor and my knees apart.

You could say, I lost my virginity to myself. 

However, I was always going to remain infertile. As my body formed ovaries, my oestrogen levels were firing. I had curves, big boobs, and the external characteristics a female body would ‘typically’ see.

I refuse to use the word normal. 

Normal is an incredibly dangerous word when describing humans as there is no such thing. Humans are complex, perfectly inconsistent, and unique.

Ally as a teenager

After nine months, spent in my bedroom doing the unthinkable as a child - making a vagina - I went out in the world - trying so hard to protect this secret - as whenever I tried to open up I was met with head-tilts asking “do you look like Barbie down there?”

Riddled with trauma, I learnt how to dampen the memories by doing EVERYTHING to excess; boys, booze, and bingeing. This would be my life for fifteen years.

Until a series of turnaround moments (I want to say gracefully) that forcibly led me to a longing to recover and make peace with my past. As a self-confessed ‘glass-half empty’ woman, I could no longer be a passenger in life, waiting for a life refund that was never owed to me in the first place. But most importantly, I was confronted with what was a necessary but unexpected question: what really defines a woman?  

Thankfully, in my thirties I found peace with my condition, and co-founded an organisation to support other MRKH sufferers. However, my biological clock also started to chime – but was it my own maternal instinct or societal expectation causing it? I never ruled out becoming a mother, but I never totally ruled it in either. I never talked openly about motherhood in my relationships, as the partners I chose weren’t asking that of me – my subconscious attempt at avoiding a sense of failure. 

Was it all, “a little too late?”

I was 30 years old when I emerged from those hedonistic, excessive years - healing from my lost teens and twenties but suddenly with another mission: I was going to give womanhood a red hot go. All I’d been sold up to that point was that womanhood equalled motherhood… and I could still ‘achieve’ that dream. 

I walked into an IVF clinic with my pregnant best friend at my side, to explore egg retrieval for the purpose of egg freezing. There was no man beside me, no father currently on board with this plan (I was seeing someone at the time… but more on him later). After that appointment, for one year, I did everything I could to determine if I wanted and could become a mother. I was offered the gift of all gifts – another woman’s womb to carry my unborn and dreamt-up child, a surrogate. I had the money in the bank and the test results to confirm my body had a healthy egg-count. 

After endless hours of watching YouTube videos of hopeful IVF couples and envisaging what ‘she’ would look like, I began to realise that perhaps infertility was not inevitable. I created an Excel spreadsheet and titled it ‘Esme’ – the name I would bestow on my daughter if I ever were to have one.

However, a clumsy IVF disclosure to the man I was dating at the time, led to a response that left me unable to swallow what spit I had left, “Ally, this is a great idea … for you and your future partner”. 

I contemplated; can I do this alone?

I couldn’t.

I didn’t just want a child; I wanted a family. 

Maybe, I wanted an idea. 

After one final and disheartening appointment with my IVF specialist, I put my medical files in the bin, I shut my bedroom door and cried. I made the hardest phone-call to my surrogate and said, “Thank you, but no thank you”.

Oh grief, there you are again. 

So here I am, at 42 years old, kick starting a campaign that reminds us that, despite the toxic message that the ability to bear children is part and parcel of being a woman, it isn’t. It’s not the defining factor. To do this, I had to ‘unlearn everything I knew about womanhood’. 

So, what does it mean to 'unlearn womanhood’?

The idea of unlearning womanhood is about challenging and dismantling societal norms and expectations of what it means to be a woman, and rejecting the idea that there is a single, monolithic definition of womanhood. I needed to question everything, accept that the only thing normal in this world is difference, and discover new drop-down menus that don’t exist yet. You do not need to be a mother to be a woman. You do not need to have a vagina to be a woman. You do not need to bleed to be a woman. And you certainly don’t need to justify your definition of womanhood, to be a woman. 

A friend once said to me, “Ally, the world needs all sorts of mothers and women – friends, advocates, educators, speakers, and healers. You can do womanhood your way”.

So, that is what I am doing. 

Unlearning womanhood and finally, doing it my way. 

Thank you so much to Ally for sharing her story. I am so grateful you wrote this piece for me. If anyone else would like to share their work with me please do get in touch (you don’t have to be a professional writer like Ally, who you can find on Instagram here and read more about her work here). I’ll help you with your edits or I we can simply have a chat.