“I have a womb; it does not crave.”
In which womb cravings are top of mind and bottom of uterus. Are kids gross? And why aren’t adoption plots more included in media??
Womb Craving References
This is another edition of quarantine podcast recording! WEEEEE Technology fun and games. Gina was MIA for the first 2/3rds of this recording because she had this stupid thing she had to accomplish… Graduating law school or something boring.
We recorded this on Mother’s Day week and we released it Labor Day Month (we’re fun and thematic not on purpose lol). So we began this journey by discussing Mother’s Day and plants, which are vaguely on topic. Just barely on topic. Maisie and Kelly live with their mothers and they had very easy Mother’s Day requests, food and quality time. Sissel is partaking in social distant desert and lawn chairs. Hannah’s mom claimed she didn’t actually want to do anything… Hannah believes her. She is getting her this t-shirt “Nadie Me Ayuda En Esta Casa” which translates roughly to “Nobody helps me in this house.”
Lucy lives far away from her mother so she’ll giver her a call. Honestly mothers just want your presence mostly, or at least ours do. Sissel’s mom just wants her, and her brother to visit her. Her brother is an odd duck. He has all his stuff at her parents house but he doesn’t stay there or sleep there. He lives sort of like his space is a museum, everything perfectly placed and can’t be moved. He’s got potential maybe he’ll get functional one day… he currently owns two BMWs… One he spent his college money on right after high school and one his friend helped him get a good deal on this year… Why does a dysfunctional 24 year old need two BMWs? No one could tell you.
We are talking about wombs, not brothers!
This is a Maisie chosen topic, because she has a lot of them, womb cravings that is. Kelly thinks it’s a spring time thing? Maisie thinks it could be related? Sissel thinks Maisie is a sweet summer child and would get all womb cravingy when summer is just getting started. Plus fertility is spring.
Maisie recently started following this video blog, of this woman who’s about our age, who has a toddler; she also has a facebook friend who’s just had a baby and it feels like the babies are everywhere and the cravings too.
Womb Cravings
/woอom/ /หkrฤviNGs/
that annoying feeling you get when you suddenly think you want children.
If you have a womb you might not get this craving. If you don’t have a womb you might get this craving.
By the way there’s this dope podcast All My Relations which focuses on Native issues in the United States, and there is this great set of episodes Growing New Beginnings & Whole Family Wellness about holistic and indigenous pregnancy wellness. PLEASE LISTEN!!! LEARN THINGS!
It is relevant because Hannah just listened to it, and even though she doesn’t have womb cravings, she did find this episode extremely funny and interesting, and relevant to this podcast!
Kelly finds it fascinating how someone could not notice how they were pregnant?!?! Lucy points out that periods are not as reliable as we’d expect, Sissel and Maisie point out that stress not only can cause you not to have a period but also just causes you to be stupid, and we don’t give it enough credit for stress’s impact on us. Lucy also points out that some bodies just don’t show the growth of a fetus as obviously as others. Capitalism and Society has really destroyed our connection to our bodies y’all.
There’s a real lack of education and experience around pregnancy in modern culture. Pregnancy became real taboo, in the semi recent past (maybe Victorian but definitely by the 60s), and you were supposed to hide it. So how are you supposed to really understand pregnancy!
Hannah talks about how the woman on the All My Relations episode didn’t notice that she’d gone into labor, because she assumed the pain was the same pain she’d experienced the whole pregnancy. TMI but Hannah also wonders when she’s having her period poops if that’s what cramps feel like… It’s probably worse.
Lucy’s friend was pregnant and gave birth right before the ‘Rona happened and she started having contractions for weeks before she actually went into labor. The human body is fascinating and we don’t know enough about the female body.
What do you do when you have womb cravings?
Maisie mostly just thinks about them a lot, and doesn’t really do anything about them. She ponders having a family and children because she thinks of childhood as her peak existence.
PSA: She’s sorry kids
another PSA: Adulthood is a LOT of work but not completely horrible
So it’s sort of about reliving her childhood joy through having children. She also thinks it’s fascinating scientifically to create a thing and watch it grow. The human female body, and most female bodies, ability to produce life is fascinating period.
It’s maybe a usual feeling? But also women are sort of expected to want to have children, but remember it’s not a requirement and we’re sorry if you feel pressured!
Kelly used to really have womb cravings more often. She hasn’t had them as much lately. She thinks a lot of it is wanting to nurture something, and maybe just convince them to like all the shows and books and movies she likes, even though that’s not how it works in real life. When she’s not around kids, like now, it’s less of a present feeling but she does still like nurturing plants and animals.
Lucy wonders if because her job is about nurturing, stage manager problems, that’s part of the reason she has not womb cravings? She can barely take care of herself, her friends, her job, and her cat, there’s no space for any womb cravings.
Sissel always really thought she wanted to have kids, but then life happened and now she’s on the fence about the whole kids thing intellectually. But what she has noticed as she’s gotten older is that when she was a kid she always thought she would adopt and not have biological children. Probably mostly because her brother is adopted, but it was always the plan to never get pregnant. As the years ticked by though… her body started asking if it could have a baby, little whispers of wouldn’t it be fun to make life inside you? hmmm? And she was like wait what? I don’t want to have a baby! I’ve never wanted to have a baby.
She thinks it’s because her body can have babies now so they (her body and her brain) should think about it now.
Maisie thinks about how the other factor is society moving forward and our age group being more exposed to other people getting married and pregnant and having babies and there’s more pressure to have a baby. But also get married and have a house and all that jazz.
But Babies are Gross Right?
Sissel is like I don’t have cravings for that part tied to the baby part. It is like very much a craving to be pregnant, not a craving for a family. So it’s definitely a hormonal instinct. Cravings for her spine readjusting to the weight, boobs getting swollen, thinking about growing and losing a mucous plug, just all those fun pregnancy experiences.
Lucy is like no, definitely has no interest in having babies right now, but she’s also not totally sure if that will change. Kids are so annoying and loud… She’s never really liked kids and that’s probably why she doesn’t feel like she wants kids. But everyone says you like kids better when they’re your own.
Hannah reminds us that in the before times, you had to hang out with other kids when you have a kid. So you do have to interact with kids who aren’t yours, so that will still suck. Plus your kid’s friends will probably suck, and your kid probably won’t like your shit anyways.
Sissel is not a fan of babies, womb cravings are about pregnancy not babies, but does like when kids get old enough to form thoughts. And one of the only reasons she does kind of want to have kids is to mentor someone, which is maybe not the best reason to have children. There’s lots of way to mentor.
Lucy likes nurturing, but has no desire to have her OWN child. She would adopt before she’d have a biological child.
Hannah has never really had a womb craving, she’s also not a fan of children, but she has also always thought about adopting, and recently has started thinking about fostering. She doesn’t think she’d be a great foster parent because that’s a lot of work. Hannah isn’t sure at all about any of this. She has noticed recently that hormonally she has started liking babies more than she ever has; she can see why people like babies.
Evolution is fascinating.
You must like the weak innocent version of your species, you must keep making more, keep the species alive! Even though it is functionally a parasite.
Lucy really doesn’t like babies, she hates the sound of babies crying. Nails on the chalk board. Women are supposedly programmed to react to babies crying, and fix it, but Lucy just wants to ship that baby off.
Kelly agrees that babies are not that great. Gross, super droolly, very fragile, need lots of attention, could die at any time! Sissel already has enough stress thinking about her pets dying, she can’t imagine having something more fragile than that to worry about! A human being you theoretically created from scratch that you could easily kill is not the stress you need.
Kelly loves working with 4th graders because they’re functional but not dicks going through puberty. They are peak mentoring age. It gets iffy when you get to middle school ages. Those kids can be a nightmare!
Lucy and Hannah met at summer camp, where they were both weirdos and probably were loved by the counselors for being easy to work with and not annoying. The rest of middle schoolers are probably not. Kelly just likes to find the middle school kids that remind her of herself at that age because it’s so fun and cute to interact with them and try and bring out their interests (cause they match her own).
Sissel has been trying for years with multiple 10 to 12 year olds to convince one of them to ready Sandry’s Book by Tamora Pierce. Not because that book is particularly good, but it’s the first one in an amazing series that’s actually age appropriate for the cousins, cousins’ kids, and nieces & nephews she’s been trying to get to read these books. But as of yet no one has read them and it makes her very sad.
Someone please read them!!!!
She feels weird giving a book with sex to a child who isn’t her own, ya know?
We on the other hand read a lot of trashy romance novels. We exchanged them and our parents didn’t really seem to police us. Good on them.
Hannah saw a lot of stuff that she probably shouldn’t have as a youth. Her first movie was Tank Girl…
Going Back to Middle Schoolers
Part of the difficulty is seeing so much of yourself in that sad pathetic growing human. Having to remember those horrible feelings…
But she does really want to be an aunt! We all want to be aunts honestly, Lucy and her sister actually joke fight because neither of them really want to have kids but both want to be aunts. Lucy thinks she’ll win.
Maisie really wants her brother to get married and have kids but she’s not sure if he will. She wants to do the cousins and watching them growing up together thing.
Sissel feels pretty confident her brother will knock someone up. Married or not married, either way she’ll get to be an aunt eventually. Probably before Sissel will be a mom.
Kelly has so many cousins having babies right now so she’s got lots of little babies running around. So she feels kind of like an aunt already in a lot of ways.
Sissel just had one of her cousins have their second baby during the pandemic, and it has made her think a lot about what that relationship is? How much you like your cousins determines how much you like their children, you know? It’s not a like a sibling where you are guaranteed auntie status, you have to sort of earn it through a relationship with your cousins children.
Speaking of Hormones
TMI (but that’s why you’re here) but Kelly has noticed a big difference between when she’s ovulating than when she’s not. She gets horny, she wants penetrative sex, and she wants babies!
Maisie was reminded of that episode of Friends where Joey and Chandler lose the baby, and there’s this one part where a woman sniffs the babies head and goes oh! My uterus skipped a beat! Which is something that Maisie has decidedly recognized.
Everyone else is like… what? That’s not something we’ve experienced.
But apparently it is some sort of boob smells like baby, baby smells like boob, cyclical thing to help with bonding and breast feeding.
Sissel is not sure about motherhood but is obsessed with the science of pregnancy and birth. Give her all the facts!
HELLO GINA!!!!
This is where we were interrupted by newly minted graduate from law school, GINA! So rude, we didn’t even invite her… well we did actually… but that’s beside the point!
She was late because she was with her family, socially distant celebrating. She will keep celebrating by reading The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie, it’s a great book, and will really help her deal with the anti-climax that is her graduation from law school during a global pandemic.
Speaking of families.
Gina has a womb, and no cravings.
We’re an interesting group, in a weird bubble where none of us are all that excited about making human life. It must be more common than we represent, with our “city girl” “modern lady” lifestyles.
We’re also a weird group, because only Sissel is currently in a long term relationship, and half of us (Kelly, Maisie, somewhat Hannah) don’t really date, and Gina and Lucy have never really wanted babies.
Lucy has a lot of friends from college who have kids now. Sissel wonders how much of the babies being produced are from people who actually have had womb cravings, or just felt societal pressure to make babies.
Maisie notices a lot of the people we’ve made friends with through out the years have not had kids, it’s only a select few showing up on social media.
Gina talks about how people in small towns have babies because everyone is small towns seems to be having babies, so they decide to have babies.
All the Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister talks about how we’ve started making singledom an normal happy life choice instead of being some strange satanic cult choice… Sorry Kelly you aren’t automatically a Satanist just because you’re single, you still have to work for it!
Will We Change Our Minds?
Lucy talks about how most of the people she knows from work have babies, and a lot of Hannah’s timeline has babies. It’s not just the stereotypical small town person who has babies.
Hannah wonders if just 5 years makes a big difference, if suddenly we’ll hit 30 and change our minds? Lucy is skeptical of this logic. She thinks a diverse group of people decide to have children.
Maisie and Sissel are wondering if there is something to the idea that just turning 30 makes more people have children?
Lucy really wants to know if these people changed their minds about having children or if they always wanted to and then just finally did it at 30? She’s always resented how people would tell her she was going to change her mind about wanting to have kids when she got older. She wants evidence it’s true! She doesn’t think she’s just being like well fuck you for saying I’ll change my mind but she wonders.
Which is how Sissel felt about people telling her she’d change her mind about wanting to adopt.
Adoption is Normal!
This is a topic very dear to Sissel and Lucy’s hearts. Neither of them is adopted but both of them have adopted family members, Sissel a brother and Lucy’s uncles.
Maisie feels like if you were a biological child who’s parents adopted after she thinks she’d feel offended? That they needed someone else besides her!
But she quickly gets called out by Gina and Sissel, because she felt that same way about her biological brother so there’s really no difference.
Sissel desperately wanted a brother so she was just very excited to have one, it didn’t bother her that he looked different, he was just really cute! And he could play with her!
Sissel thinks the core issue people have with adoption is equating attachment to biology. Some sort of carry on the bloodline male bullshit that has nothing to do with love and attachment. There are other more important issues with adoption that have nothing to do with biology, like childhood trauma, the foster care system, people treating their adopted children not like their children!
Lucy’s experience is that her Grandmother had two biological children and then adopted 8 more while also fostering kids as well. Her Dad’s closest sibling is her adopted uncle. So she’s never really understood how people can see adoption as a something weird.
Hannah remembers growing up across the street from one of Sissel’s close friends, who had two adopted siblings. One day they just appeared, and Hannah was like huh, I guess he has siblings now, that’s new.
Lucy talks about the other issues in adoption around race are something she hasn’t experienced in family, though Sissel has since her brother is adopted from Vietnam.
Sissel and Her Opinions on Adoption
It’s put Sissel in the circles of a lot of adoptees, most of those she is friends with are still very close to their families and are very pro adoptions. It’s only tangentially she’s heard of sadder stories where the adopted children felt disconnected and went looking for their birth families so as to disconnect from their adopted families. She also knows there’s plenty of issues with adoption in other countries, like Korea and China, where some times the child isn’t willingly put up for adoption by the parents, or someone in the family needs money and the kids is effectively “sold” into the adoption “industry”. None of these are issues in regards to the ability to attach to a non-biological child.
The thing that really bothers her is how adoption is portrayed in the media because there’s all these extremely sad fertility stories, which is an extremely valid experience, that plays on the women’s feelings that pregnancy is natural and easy when it really isn’t. However, what happens a lot is that they ignore adoption as an option.
In the show Glow there’s a fertility plot, where the woman is afraid of being pregnant and what it will do to her body, and she also doesn’t want to go through the trauma of her previous miscarriage, but adoption is not discussed at all during this whole discussion!!!!
Fertility is a deeply personal journey and you shouldn’t have a say in anyone else’s fertility story. But Sissel will god damn have an opinion about how it’s represented in the media! Friends did a very nice job making adoption a plot line for Monica and Chandler. It’s frequently treated as a last resort, or not included at all in the discussion. Maybe more people would adopt if adoption was a more normalized story in movies and tv.
A lovely adoption story is Lion
Lion is a great story about what level of choice is adoption for you? It’s also a great story about how childhood trauma is a large part of the adoption journey.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-30692127
Adoption is a complicated poignant story in it’s own right, with both good and bad to it. It deserves to be part of the conversation of parenthood.
Back to Womb Cravings
Gina has never had them, but she’s also never really felt like she didn’t want them. She’s just never really thought about it. Which she didn’t think was odd until she met people who did have strong feelings about whether they were having them or not.
Kelly never really had strong opinions, but she eventually decided she did want them and then it sort of became a future thing she would do… but it’s gotten less futurey as she has gotten older. However, there’s a lot of misconceptions about female fertility going away that just aren’t true, it’s more of a gradual decline, and men go through it too. Adoption has always been a viable option for Kelly. Lucy points out that surrogacy is an option if you remove your eggs.
LOL Did you think we were actually done with Adoption?
Donating or removing your eggs is a BITCH. It’s so hard, IVF and egg donation are almost the same process. Gina has always thought it would be kind of cool to run into her biological child that she had no real impact on. She has good genes she’d be a good candidate to donate but the difficulty of doing it has really kept her away.
Sissel thinks the growing popularity of egg freezing as a precautionary measure is fascinating. It makes sense though with a population of women that are waiting to have children and also the chance of miscarriage, which is about 1 in 4 pregnancies result in miscarriage. It’s extremely common and we don’t talk about it as much as we should. We are getting better, we are trying to make this natural though tragic thing, less shameful. Because the ability to get pregnant and stay pregnant is so tied to women’s self worth.
Hannah get’s really frustrated because she does have close friends who have gone through miscarriages that say some truly sad and ignorant things about adoption and fostering. She doesn’t understand the intense want to have their own biological child, she doesn’t understand how they can’t see the value of adoption. There are over 400,000 children in foster care in the US alone. It’s not like you really know what your biological child will be like any more than an adopted child. She struggles to be empathetic in those situations some times. Gina also can’t relate to the intense biological drive to procreate.
We shouldn’t minimize the adoption process either, it’s also difficult and complicated and stressful.
There’s an interesting statistic that families that try really hard to have a biological baby and end up adopting, actually end up getting pregnant after the fact because getting pregnant becomes less stressful.
Speaking of Have We Mentioned Sex and the City?
Sex and the City actually had a really beautiful representation of adoption. Charlotte starts to think about adoption really early on in her infertility journey. The show ends with her joy at learning she’s going to have a baby through adoption!
It’s interesting because they do have her have a biological child in the follow-up movie. We debate the pros and cons of this portrayl, Sissel doesn’t find it problematic because it is such a statistical fact, Lucy and Hannah think because it’s barely a footnote in the movie that it doesn’t derail the original adoption plot. Gina just finds it frustrating that they felt the need to augment the adoption story at all.
Sissel just wants more adoption stories everywhere. Lucy wants more positive representations of adoption!
All these parenthood stories are difficult and problematic but also can be beautiful in their own unique ways.
Okay Actually Back to Womb Cravings
Only Kelly really experiences womb cravings when she’s ovulating. Gina only ever thought about having children when she was in a relationship.
Kelly re-explained how she doesn’t see her hormonal fluctuations for womb cravings is weird because it’s more that her body wants to be pregnant more?
Just Kidding…
Kelly has always thought about adoption as an option because, like all of us, she grew up with fantasy stories and adoption and found families are very common and wholesome.
Maisie brings up that she actually had to start thinking about pregnancy and adoption because she had major surgery that made it difficult or bad for her to be pregnant. She didn’t really expect to be thinking so practically about her plans to be a mother, but the surgery forced her. She finally put adoption in her options list, where it hadn’t really been before.
We maybe covered all the things… Fucking Gina the hacker trolling our podcast… Asking questions we already asked! So rude!
Thank You For Listening!
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