Play Dough
On becoming the person I was always meant to be
Listen to me read “Play Dough”
This story contains sexual content, a graphic description of abortion, and material that may not be suitable for younger readers. Reader discretion is advised.
This piece was originally published in 2021 for Love & Literature as part three of a four-part series that eventually lead to the creation of this blog. If you’ve read this piece before — thank you for supporting me since the very beginning! I’ll be re-sharing the original series this month for those who are new to Sex, Drugs & Endometriosis.
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When I was three, I considered myself a bit of an expert on sex.
That’s when I became a big sibling, and to prepare me for the new baby, my parents (two librarians who met and fell in love at library school) bought me a children’s book done comic-style called Our New Baby: A Picture Story about Birth for Parents and Children. It detailed the entire process of a Mommy and Daddy being in love and having sex and the journey of the sperm to the egg and the entire process of pregnancy. It was very informative and very heteronormative. It was 1990. I loved it.
I was fascinated. I couldn’t wait to make the drawings on these pages come to fruition in my own little belly - I could grow a baby in there?!
By elementary school, people would brag on the playground about what they knew about sex and I, in my trademark know-it-all style, would teach them how sex worked by putting the penis inside the vagina - I didn’t know any alternative - not just because it made a baby but because it feels good too.
I’d spent time cautiously exploring my own little body — I learned it felt really good to touch my nipples, so you’d be hard-pressed to not find me without a hand up my shirt, no matter where I was - school, church, ballet, at the playground. It felt like someone was always telling me to “get my hand out of there!” I once wondered if that’s why they ended up as innies, as punishment for touching them so much at inappropriate times.
When my brother was born, we lived in a small town outside of Ottawa; Mum stayed home with us while my Dad worked in the city. There was a French family who lived across the street with three kids (eventually five), one of whom was my best friend. Their Dad was an artist and had a beautiful, open, and airy studio at the top of their house that I loved to poke around in, and our mums were best pals. Needless to say, we spent a lot of time together.
She was the first real friendship I can remember having in my life. She was about a year older than me (which at that age felt like a decade), with an older and a younger brother. I loved being in between their ages, because it meant if one of them wasn’t around I could play with whoever was.
“House” or “Doctor” were our favourites.
One day we were being the mommy and the daddy, making lunch out of play dough and we decided that after lunch we wanted to make a baby. Because her mom was currently pregnant.
“Well, I’ll need a penis if we’re going to make a baby!” I was bossy even then.
“Okay,” she scanned the room. “What can we use for a penis?”
I looked down at the homemade play dough I was squishing in my hand, a swirl of purple and toxic green, the result of blending two colours together when too much of one had disappeared.
“Let’s use this!” I broke the lump of dough in half, and then broke one of the halves in half.
Two for the testicles - that’s where sperm lives - and a bigger one for the shaft.
“I want to make sure we’re doing it right,” I said. Right meaning between a man and a woman? That’s what my book said.
“We have to kiss and stuff, that’s what mommies and daddies do before they make a baby. It says that in my book.”
I often thought about ‘kissing and stuff’ when I was alone, and how nice it would be to try it.
I would stand in the window of a second-floor bedroom in our old, creaky house. The soft carpet was electric green and sheer white curtains floated in the breeze from the open window. I would hide behind them, stark naked, staring into the window of the house across the way, no longer in the house but in my own bubble between home and the outside world.
I would run my fingers over translucent nipples the colour of tea with milk, enjoying the tingly effervescence that washed over me, over a proud little belly that the world hadn’t told to hide or put a baby in yet. I’d touch my vulva, hairless because I was a child, not because society told me I should look like one. I would run my fingers up and down, feeling the soft contours and folds. I liked how it felt.
Sometimes there was someone in the window next door. I think they liked it too, I’d see them, looking at me. Maybe that’s why I like it when people watch me now.
With both testicles ready to go, I started on the shaft; rolled it between my hands like I was making a snake, except shorter and fatter. I’d use that move again when sex became too painful and I gave my ex hand jobs to shut him up. I made sure that one end was slightly more bulbous than the other, like the penis in my book.
Hers was a sickly pink speckled with darker bits throughout that were probably dirt.
“Maybe we should both be mommies, and we can just use these as the daddies?” I looked down at my first dildo.
That should probably have been an early clue that I was queer, but it’s hard to imagine that two mommies are possible when you’re surrounded by mommies-and-daddies and taught that sex is what happens when a man and a woman love each other and want to make a baby. Not to explore pleasure or something ridiculous like that.
I assumed I would prepare myself for The One Dick To Rule My Womb, as women ought to. It would take me another thirty years to finally admit to myself that I did not want anyone to impregnate me, ever — in fact, when someone did, it didn’t last long.
She agreed, as long as we could have our babies together and be good mommies. Phew.
“Okay, are we ready?”
We attached the phalluses (phalli?) to the testicles and they were mostly staying intact. I can still smell the salty mixture of dough and sweat on my palms from molding my masterpiece of a member. It felt big, but I was small so it was probably like a Bonne Bell Lipsmacker, but size doesn’t matter anyway, right?
“Okay, now the penis goes inside the vagina,” I instructed, bringing the twisted lump down to my vulva.
Grabbing the penis by the balls (one fell off which I hastily reattached), I rubbed it in a downward motion, tracing the head along the lips with zero awareness that it would be physically impossible for a penis-bearing human to penetrate someone from the angle that the play dough penis was approaching.
It’s truly shocking we didn’t get childhood yeast infections. Is that a thing? I licked the penis when the deed was done, not sure if it was the salty dough or sweet coating that made me do it. That would not be the last time I’d use that move.
We sped through our 9-month gestation in about nine minutes with pillows in our shirts and birthed two healthy babies - a Cabbage Patch doll with one eye missing and a stuffed rabbit wearing a bowtie - in a flurry of grunts and pushing. We were mommies!
Despite the fact that the narrative around me was Grow Up, Fall In Love, Have A Family - Oh And Also A Career That You Love And A Nice House And Stay That Way Until You Die, for most of my life I was petrified of becoming pregnant.
Even though I was on the pill for 14 years, I still took dozens of pregnancy tests so I could catch it before it happened, if it happened. I’m pretty sure I had a miscarriage in the shower when I was 20 but I was too scared and unsure to tell anyone about it.
In junior high I even had a few terrifying dreams of immaculate conception (curse you, Catholicism), sometimes actually believing that it would be possible to wake up one day, pregnant, despite never having seen a boner in real life let alone touched one. I started the pill before I had penetrative sex for the first time and it’s shocking that I never fell pregnant given how fast and loose I played with creampies over the years.
I share my name with the only dinosaur to ever be found with fossilized eggs - Maiasaura. ‘Maia’ means ‘mother,’ and in Greek mythology, she was the mother of Hermes and the goddess of nursing mothers. Even my fucking name was not so subtly guiding me down the path of Motherhood. I never knew if I wanted to have kids because I wanted to be a mother, or because it’s what the world around me showed me was The Way.
There were always conversations around family and friends like, “when you have kids of your own one day,” or “never say never!” or “people like you should be having kids!” What does that even mean?! When I was a teenager my dad told me he pictured me as a high-powered executive type in a suit with a toddler in tow. My mum and I butted heads a lot when I was younger, and she’d often say “I can’t wait until you have a teenager,” presumably so I would get my comeuppance in the form of my own infuriating offspring.
Motherhood was just something I accepted as an inevitability, without questioning it in any real way. That’s just what people do.
Fertility was the driving force behind seeking my endo diagnosis - at least it was the one that doctors seemed to respect above anything else. Even though I was only 23, concerns about one day having children with my 33-year-old ex were high in my mind. Thank fuck we didn’t.
As I got older, more doctors started telling me I should think about getting pregnant soon - without ever asking if I was in a stable or healthy relationship - “before it’s too late.” Because heteronormativity made them assume that was my goal.
After my excision surgery when I declined more hormones or an IUD, my surgeon joked with me that I could try getting pregnant to see if that helped my symptoms.
It was almost three years before I saw another specialist because I couldn’t handle any more invalidation. Once again, she told me that pregnancy would cure my endo symptoms, and if I didn’t want to be a sick person caring for a baby they didn’t even want, then I should have a hysterectomy. I broke down in her office and wondered why I’d even bothered in the first place. Because this is how the medical community treats people with endo.
Hell, the Ancient Greeks also believed that if a womb was deprived of its “primary purpose” of bearing children, it would cause endometriosis-like symptoms. Great.
I faced my fear to try my luck a third time, and my current endo specialist told me on our first call that telling people with endometriosis to get pregnant is patriarchal. I think we’re gonna do just fine.
~
So when I saw those two pink lines one Sunday morning, I froze. I chugged water and took two more tests, sure that it must be a mistake, and sat there, empty of urine, full of disgust, three plastic sticks in my hand.
The proof that so many people with endometriosis are desperate to hold in their own hands, but can’t. After a hellish year of finally admitting it wasn’t what I wanted, this moment confirmed it. There wasn’t a single part of me that wanted to give my brand-new nibling a cousin, even if that possibility was staring up at me, covered in pee.
I felt everything roiling in my gut: relief, fear, concern, disgust, shame, disappointment, confusion, anxiety, anger, sadness, injustice, guilt, urgency. Then I turned around and threw it all up. Twice.
The week between that moment and my abortion felt like the longest of my life. Morning sickness amplified already existing endo nausea, pelvic pain neurons were firing on all cylinders, I was so constipated I was shitting blood, and I couldn’t stop crying. Or sleeping. I felt so fucking alone.
I chose the surgical procedure to get it over and done with, no two-week cramping and bleeding at home for me, thank you very much. I made them wheel the instrument tray over and explain to me what each tool was for so I’d know what was happening. They gave me fentanyl, so I was high as fuck but still in the realm of consciousness. I definitely cracked inappropriate jokes as I got the cellular origins of a pregnancy scraped out of me while I held a stranger’s hand because Covid meant no support people.
But I never felt more confident in any medical decision.
I could mold a play dough penis when I was three but I couldn’t mold myself into what the world wanted me to be: a mother. And that’s okay.
I’m becoming something else entirely.