I Inseminated Myself and Now I’m Waiting: Blood, Baby, or Aliens?

I don’t really know what this is a photo of, but Pinterest says it’s a photo of St Patrick's Purgatory Caves; anyway, I liked it.

In the next 24-72 hours, either:

my period will start

or I’ll test positive for pregnancy.

(Or some secret third option, like I get abducted by aliens, or civil war breaks out, or I go in for an emergency hysterectomy, or… But we’re talking within the realm of likelihood here.)

I really should be afraid as I walk into this liminal space. But I’m not. I feel mostly curious: curious about what it will feel like to go through this most female of rituals. The waiting, enduring it. The blood that comes or doesn’t come. And when the blood comes or doesn’t come, whatever the consequent feelings are.

I’ve never had this experience before: a certain sense of mystery in the general vicinity of my belly, a sense that anything could come out of me…or not. I already inseminated once before, last month. But that time, I was tracking my progesterone with a Mira device, so I knew almost day by day if a pregnancy was likely. It felt much more “21st century tech bro,” with all of its imposed certainty from technology and scientific observation, than “16th century peasant woman” who awaits her bleed with the same resigned, impotent observing that comes with the change from winter to spring, when the buds blossom or don’t blossom.

I want to feel like a 16th-century peasant woman, for so many reasons. I want it because I am tired of the way devices and measuring and certainty eat my brain every moment of every day. I want it because it feels like tapping into something fundamentally human, something fundamentally female, some way of joining myself to a story and an emotional experience that people with bodies like mine have done over and over and over and over since….before we could count. Since before we could measure anything at all.

I keep thinking about this Ezra Klein interview I listened to a long, long time ago, and if I recall correctly and am not mixing interviews, it was about alien UFOs and bibliomancy and also purgatory. (That doesn’t have anything to do with anything other than I found that combination charming.) Supposedly, once, St. Patrick decided to build actual purgatory in Ireland. Essentially a cave, about the dimensions of an Irish sweat lodge. The kind where you’d go to get high and encounter God. I’ll butcher here the original spiritual and religious intent of St. Patrick’s purgatory, but for me, I think about liminal and I think about waiting and I think about the pain and transformation that comes from that kind of endurance. You don’t get it any other way than by standing with two feet in possibility: one on earth, one in heaven. You certainly don’t get it from techbro certainty and elimination of all negative outcomes.

Old medieval art is literally always the best. Enter, knave, into the purgatory of God!

In 24-72 hours, blood comes out, or a baby starts to grow, or, you know, hell, let’s lean into being abducted by aliens. Let it happen! I welcome it. Rilke: “Go to the limits of your longing. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.” And aliens.

Welcome to my pseudo-journal about the experience of trying to have a baby as a single person. Now that I’ve published my memoir about God and sex, maybe eventually, these notes and jots will become a second book.

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