What Was Taken

They said you’re lucky,

Said you’re young, resilient, strong.

Said you should be grateful to survive.

But no one said how survival can feel like a hollow kind of death.

They took the thing that made me feel like a woman before I even knew what kind of mother I’d be.

They carved it out of me,

this sacred, invisible part

and called it healing.

I bled grief into the stitches.

Woke up sore, swollen, and already missing something I never got to use.

There was no eulogy,

no funeral,

No one brings flowers when what you’ve lost was still inside you.

I learned quickly how quiet this grief is.

I learned that society doesn’t hold space for a womb you didn’t get to fill,

I learned that the absence of children becomes a question mark on your womanhood in every room you walk into.

They ask, Do you want kids?

I say nothing. I smile like I’m okay,

but inside, I’m screaming

I wanted the choice.

Some nights, I press my palm to the scar like it might whisper back,

like it might give me permission to cry without explanation.

I was twenty-something.

I should’ve been dancing in dark clubs,

falling in and out of love,

not waiting in cold clinics, signing consent forms that asked me to give up a future I hadn’t yet imagined.

I should’ve been dreaming,

but instead I was dissecting.

Bracing for biopsies.

Learning to smile through pain that couldn't be dulled by pills or platitudes.

And still,

I heard the whispers:

You’ll never be whole.

You’re damaged goods.

Less of a woman now.

Playground.

As if my body was the only part of met that could mother.

They don’t tell you about the rage and

how it simmers under your skin when people minimize your grief with

“You can always adopt.”

As if love can be handed out like a second hand coat.

As if healing means pretending none of it happened.

But I remember.

I remember

the cold of the stirrups.

The ache of the anesthesia.

The look on the doctor’s face when the word cancer settled like ash in the room.

I remember mourning my womanhood alone in the shower so no one would hear me sob.

And I’m still mourning,

not just what was lost, but the version of me who never got to exist.

The one who got to carry life, who wasn’t made to feel like her body was a betrayal.

But still, I wake.

Still, I breathe.

Still, I learn how to love this scarred vessel like it’s enough,

not because it conforms, but because it has endured.

I am still becoming.

Still teaching myself that grief and gratitude can hold hands.

That womanhood is not what they said it was,

womanhood is not a womb,

not a timeline,

not a definition stamped on me by a diagnosis.

It is in how I rise

slow, bloody, whole,

in a way no scalpel could undo.

Some days, it still feels like nothing will ever be okay.

But on those days

I look at my reflection and whisper:

You are here.

You are still here,

and that is everything.