They told me I wouldn’t have children when I was still a child.
I didn’t have language for it then, but I felt it.
Failure. Less than. Not whole. Disbelief that settled in my body like a verdict.
And even when I grew older and learned how to laugh and keep moving, that sentence lived inside me. Not loud every day—just present. Like a shadow that followed me into every future I tried to imagine.
I was anemic as a little girl. Tired in a way I couldn’t explain. Drawn to ice like it was comfort, like it was a need. But back then it was just something people noticed and brushed past. Low iron. That’s it. No story. No urgency. No curiosity about what that meant for my body long-term.
The Loud Silence
When I got pregnant the first time, I was still so young the years blur when I try to pin them down.
I remember telling my mother. I remember her excitement—how her face lit up and then shifted into something careful. She warned me not to tell anyone. Not because I was young, but because she remembered what the doctor told her when I had the hernia surgery: she won’t have children.
So I told only my boyfriend and my mother.
That was my whole world. Three people holding hope like a candle.
And then I miscarried.
There was no funeral. No public grieving. No cards. No casseroles at the door. The silence was loud because nobody knew. Outside my body, life kept moving like nothing happened. Inside my body, everything happened.
I wanted to die.
I talked to my babies in my womb. I imagined holding them. I imagined the weight of them in my arms like it was already real. And then it was like a mirage—something you swear you can see, something you know is there, but it isn’t within reach.
I was shattered.
And the interesting thing is—I learned to not talk about it.
That’s the part people don’t understand. Miscarriage can make you private. It can teach you to carry grief in silence because the world doesn’t make room for it. A piece of you feels missing, and you have to learn how to live without that piece while everyone else looks at you and sees “fine.”
It’s invisible.
The First Survival
After that loss, pregnancy didn’t feel like simple joy. It felt like fear with a heartbeat.
When I conceived my daughter, I was barely twenty.
I had been bedridden much of the pregnancy. My equilibrium was off. I had shortness of breath. My body gave out mid-pregnancy and I fell down the steps. That sentence still doesn’t sit right in my mouth. I was away from family in Oklahoma City, trying to finish my senior year, physically alone and carrying something fragile.
The day I went in was supposed to be a check-up. It was cold. The doctor checked me, saw contractions, and admitted me to the hospital. I called my baby’s father—he was in Ohio. My daughter’s godmother, Marsha Akabashorun, was on call.
And I lay there thinking: please don’t let me lose this baby.
Because I knew what miscarriage felt like. I knew the quiet, the blood, the disbelief, the way the world keeps moving while you fall apart.
Labor lasted over seventy-two hours.
People say it’s normal for first-time moms not to dilate. My contractions grew stronger. Cold turned into snow. My water broke. Still no dilation. By then my blood pressure was rising and steady climbing like my body was sounding an alarm nobody wanted to hear.
Marsha was with me—and Marsha was beyond mad. Screaming at doctors, nurses, anybody who came near me acting like my pain could wait. She was trying to get the baby out of me and the suffering off of me. I had never seen that side of her in my life. I thought there was going to be a murder.
But underneath the humor was something darker: I felt like someone was going to die.
And the old words came back: science was right… I’ll never have a baby.
Finally, they agreed to do an emergency C-section.
I took birthing classes alone. Not one day did I prepare for surgery. Nobody taught me what it means to be cut open when you thought you would breathe and push life into the world.
I didn’t know if I would survive. I didn’t know if she would.
But on December 18, 2000, my daughter—my Princess—entered the world.
I fought to bring her here on levels she’ll never fully know.
We started this life solo.
And yes, I hated that she got her dad’s last name before me. I hated it. But there was no time to dwell. I had to heal. I had to become a mother.
It was one of the worst experiences of my life.
And still… I risked it three more times to meet my three princes.
Each birth harder.
Each pregnancy heavier.
Each time my body asking, are you sure?
By the time I made it to my second child, my doctor strictly asked me to consider not having any more pregnancies. The risks were too high. And before each birth I told her: save the child, not me.
That sentence carried everything.
The fear.
The pressure.
The love.
The way we’re taught that womanhood equals motherhood—like giving life is the highest proof we exist.
I wish we weren’t defined by motherhood.
But I also know what it looks like to look a woman in the eyes—heartbroken because she hasn’t given birth yet—and feel that grief with her.
I was fighting to deliver each child, yes.
But I was also fighting to see them.
To meet them.
To bring them into a world that kept telling me I couldn’t.
The Myth That Erased Us
Years later, I learned I had endometriosis.
And I learned something else too: for a long time, endometriosis was treated as if it belonged to White women.
Not because it did.
Because the medical system decided it did.
For decades, the disease was framed in ways that sounded scientific but were really social: that it was more common in “educated,” “affluent,” “career women.” That idea shaped who clinicians suspected, who got referred, and who received surgery that could confirm the diagnosis.
Here’s what gets left out:
Endometriosis historically required surgical confirmation—laparoscopy. That means diagnosis followed access. Access followed referral. Referral followed belief.
And Black women’s pain has not been believed.
So while White women were more likely to be evaluated for endometriosis (often through infertility workups), Black women were more likely to be told:
- heavy bleeding is normal
- pain is just cramps
- it’s fibroids
- it’s stress
- it’s in your head
And because fibroids are also common—and very real—Black women were often pushed into one diagnosis while endometriosis stayed unspoken in the background. Sometimes both exist at once. Sometimes one hides the other. But the pattern remains: fewer referrals for surgical evaluation, longer delays, more years of untreated inflammation.
Endometriosis is not just “bad periods.”
It is an inflammatory disease. It can create adhesions—scar tissue that binds organs together. It can affect the uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, bowel, bladder. It can complicate pregnancy. It can complicate surgery. It can make a person live with pain that becomes normal only because no one takes it seriously.
The “White women’s disease” story didn’t just mislabel endometriosis.
It delayed care.
It delayed research.
It delayed recognition—especially for women who already had to fight to be heard.
The Blood
By adulthood, my anemia wasn’t mild.
It was severe.
I had been anemic as a little girl, but it was treated like a side note. Low iron. Eat better. Take vitamins. Move on. No one traced the thread. No one asked why it persisted. No one connected heavy cycles, chronic inflammation, or what that might mean for a body already carrying more than it should.
I chewed ice constantly.
I didn’t know it had a name. I didn’t know it was called pica. I didn’t know it was my body begging for iron in the only language it had left.
In 2018, I met Dr. Lambert.
She’s a petite woman. Quiet strength. The kind of presence that doesn’t have to be loud to command a room. The moment she walked in, she looked at me — not at my chart first — at me.
She studied my eyes and said,
“How long have you been anemic?”
Just like that.
No hesitation. No guesswork.
I remember thinking: She sees it? Just by looking at me?
It felt like someone finally recognized a battle I’d been fighting my whole life.
Dr. Lambert doesn’t treat numbers. She treats people. The way she advocates for me, you can tell this work is personal for her. She explains my red blood cells like they matter. She explains iron saturation and ferritin levels like they are pieces of a story we are solving together. She listens.
For the first time, I felt seen in my own body.
I began iron infusions.
And something else became clear: the more stress I encountered, the worse my iron levels became.
By 2020, I was going through a divorce. My iron deficiency worsened. I was told I now had fibroids too — heavy bleeding feeding anemia, anemia feeding exhaustion, exhaustion feeding everything else.
I will never forget in 2022, sitting in court, waiting for the judge to announce we were divorced… and then rushing to the hospital for another infusion.
Ending a marriage in the morning.
Rebuilding red blood cells in the afternoon.
I was doing my best to get better.
It was beyond stressful.
I was fighting for my health alone.
It felt like invisibility all over again — like the miscarriage silence, like the labor no one believed was urgent enough, like the years of heavy bleeding brushed aside.
But slowly, after I left that house, my health began to improve.
Not magically. Not instantly. Slowly.
It was as if my body had been holding its breath for years.
Stress is not just emotional. It is chemical. It changes cortisol levels. It affects inflammation. Endometriosis is inflammatory. Fibroids are hormonally responsive. Iron deficiency worsens with heavy bleeding. The systems are connected.
My body wasn’t weak.
It was overloaded.
And finally, someone was helping me carry it.
The Knots
Now I am over 40.
I have pelvic floor therapy weekly.
My therapist told me I have knots inside my pelvic floor. Trigger points. Muscles that stayed braced for so long they forgot how to soften.
It saddens me.
Sometimes I feel like I’m constantly being experimented on.
Hysterectomy has been advised. Birth control to stop bleeding. Another decision. Another attempt to quiet a body that has been screaming for years.
And I don’t always know how to explain to people that I’m suffering inside my body.
I don’t know how to say: I fought for my children, and the fighting left scars that no one can see.
The Cost
We celebrate babies.
We don’t talk about what it costs the body that carried them.
We don’t talk about the woman who whispers, save the child, not me, because she believes motherhood is worth her life.
We don’t talk about miscarriage grief that has no funeral.
We don’t talk about pelvic floor knots that form from years of bracing.
We don’t talk about iron infusions scheduled around court dates.
We don’t talk about how stress lives in the bloodstream.
For years, I felt invisible inside my own body.
Invisible when I miscarried and no one knew.
Invisible when I labored for days and wasn’t heard fast enough.
Invisible when heavy bleeding was treated like inconvenience instead of warning.
Invisible when endometriosis was framed as someone else’s disease.
But invisibility is not the same thing as absence.
My body was speaking the entire time.
It spoke in blood loss.
In scar tissue.
In adhesions.
In dizziness.
In falling down stairs mid-pregnancy.
In chewing ice.
And then one day, someone looked at me — really looked — and said,
“How long have you been anemic?”
That question changed something.
Because it wasn’t disbelief.
It wasn’t dismissal.
It was recognition.
Motherhood cost me something.
But so did silence.
So did stress.
So did carrying everyone else’s expectations while my body was breaking quietly.
I love my children.
I would choose them again.
And I am also allowed to name what it cost.
I am more than the babies I delivered.
More than the scars.
More than the myth that erased women like me from the research.
Womanhood is not proven in childbirth.
It is proven in survival.
It is proven in healing.
It is proven in finally telling the truth.
I am still here.
And that counts.
The Day Someone Saw My Blood
She was small.
Petite in frame, but steady — the kind of steady that doesn’t move quickly because it doesn’t need to.
Dr. Lambert walked into the room and before she touched my chart, before she asked about my symptoms, she looked at my eyes.
Not my clothes.
Not my paperwork.
Not the clock.
My eyes.
“How long have you been anemic?”
Just like that.
No hesitation.
And in that moment, something in me loosened.
Because I had been tired for years.
I had been pale for years.
I had been chewing ice like it was oxygen.
I had been bleeding heavy and living heavy and surviving heavy.
And she saw it.
Not dramatically. Not loudly.
Just clearly.
She explained ferritin levels like she was explaining a language I should have been taught long ago. She explained red blood cells like they were tiny messengers doing their best in a system overwhelmed.
She advocated for me in rooms I didn’t even see.
You can tell when care is personal.
You can tell when someone does this work because it matters to them.
Iron infusions aren’t glamorous. They’re quiet. A drip. A chair. Time passing slowly. But every drop felt like something rebuilding.
That year I would sit in a courtroom dissolving a marriage and sit in a hospital chair rebuilding my blood.
Losing one thing.
Restoring another.
And for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel invisible.
Someone saw my blood.
And sometimes, being seen is the beginning of healing.
