Center of Gravity

In this deeply moving personal essay for The Rumpus, Kristina Kasparian reflects on the emotional weight she carries after a decade spent trying to start a family via surrogate pregnancy. “A body has its limits, a couple does too,” she writes. As she recalls the cumulative trauma of a miscarriage and a stillbirth, Kasparian wonders how much more pain and grief she and her husband Ethan can endure.

In ten years, my center has been entered seven times to excavate this seaweed, and rotten masses, and harvested eggs, and fossilized fetuses, and a uterus that bled more than a heart. So much weight has been carried and uncarried in this rattled core.

I am as protective of this center as I am terrified of it, of what it will do or fail to do next. I struggle to see it as an ally rather than an adversary when its antics have cost me my lightness, my career, and much of my independence. It has made my breathing erratic and sex unpleasant and digestion torturous. It’s forced me to outsource my body to Ethan, to pile my inabilities onto his to-do list. Still, Ethan swears I haven’t cost him a thing. Even when I pulled the plug on our fertility treatments to save myself from sinking into sickness. To some, having a surrogate before a hysterectomy makes a selfish wife. And selfish wives make selfish mothers. This, too, churns beneath the surface of my skin.