Received three rejections this week, and am trying to face up to the fact that I have to have some serious female surgery when I get back from my holiday trip home to Cinci this year. For some reason, though I have never really been a particularly maternal type, facing up to not being able to have kids someday has really gotten to me. I know this because every poem I write lately has to do with women who can’t have kids. I can’t get this one Bible verse out of my head. It’s about a woman, Hannah, who is upset, nearly crazy, over the fact that she hasn’t had kids yet, and her husband says “Why is your heart grieved? Am I not more to you than ten sons?” So I have to write a poem about that. There are a lot of assumptions about women who don’t have kids – that they are selfish, that they spend all their time on themselves, that they aren’t whole. I went to get my nails done yesterday and the girl there was saying, “Oh, you’d be such a great mother – why don’t you have kids?” And I was like, “Hmm, I don’t think you really want to know all the icky scientific details that would answer that question.”

Also, my mother was really sick yesterday, she had to go to urgent care and they diagnosed her with kidney stones. It’s her birthday today, and that was her body’s very special birthday present. Hmph. Sometimes I think we women would be better off if we were just little floating brains attached to attractive and fashionable clothes. OK, that’s a weird image. I apologize.

Okay, here’s a problem only a poet would have. I have a poetry reading on the 20th of January and the 20th of February, and since the surgery takes a few weeks to recover from, I was like, how can I best fit this surgery in so it doesn’t affect the readings? Typical shallow me.

I remember doing a report on the female reproductive system with my best friend in 6th grade. We giggled the whole way through it. At 21 she had a twenty-pound cyst removed from her ovaries, and now I am facing getting the works removed. Guess we should have paid more attention to the “what can go wrong” portion of that report.

Sorry to be a downer this week. I am sure I will have more cheerful news soon. It’s raining and cold outside, typical Seattle Christmas weather, that makes me not want to leave the house. On the plus side, I did get the opportunity to watch Zorro, Lara Croft Tomb Raider, and The Mummy all in a row last night. What I should have been doing was finishing a book review and a profile of a chef for Seattle Woman Magazine. Glenn started packing up the house yesterday for our move. So we are going home to Cinci, coming back, packing up the house, celebrating Christmas, starting the move on the weekend of the new year, then I go to my residency in Forest Grove, and when I come back, we’ll be in the new place. Then, the surgery. A very exciting upcoming month and a half, that’s for sure. I should check my horoscope. It might say, the stars see travel, gifts, educational opportunity and a horrible hospital stay in your future. Also, my complaint? How come horoscopes never predict death? Surely someone with that particular sign dies every day. I guess the Onion’s horoscopes predict something like that.