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The wandering womb

Maybe worrying about death-by-tampon is the cost of abandoning your kid at home to embark on a dreamy European vacation.

Tracy Clark-Flory

Jun 5

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The other day, I went to urgent care because I was worried I had a lost a tampon in my body. This feels like the start of an old-school xoJane essay, but bear with me. I spent three hours in the waiting room, sitting next to a 9-year-old with a mass of bloody gauze stuck to his forehead. Then I was shown to an exam room, where a doctor peered into my body with a speculum.

“There is no tampon in there,” she said. “There is nothing in there.”

I know how I sound here. Delusional. Neurotic. Hypochondriacal. In my defense, I had just stayed up for 24 hours while traveling from France to California, before going to sleep at 7 a.m. in my previous time zone. Also: my OBGYN told me to go to urgent care.

I’ll spare you the details, but I had explained to her the situation: a missing tampon. It went in, I was 99 percent certain, but I hadn’t taken it out. I hadn’t seen it come out. Had it come out? Maybe. Probably! But for the first time in my life, I couldn’t actually say for sure.

I had written my doctor in hopes that she would lightly laugh it off and tell me that there was no way a tampon had magically migrated out of reach. Instead, she directed me to urgent care, urgently.

All for me to be told that there was “nothing in there.”

Over the previous 36 hours, through a haze of travel and disjointed sleep, I had traveled home while worrying about this phantom tampon. I’m pretty sure all menstruating people are flooded early on with messages about the risks of toxic shock syndrome from leaving a tampon in for too long. Waiting in Charles de Gaulle Airport, I had Googled “TSS death rate” and was told: “30% to 70%.”

Over those hours of contemplation, this body quandary of mine started to feel like a philosophical exercise that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around—Schrödinger's tampon, I guess. But it also felt weirdly symbolic and dreamlike, like my subconscious had manifested this medical pseudo-drama.

I had just spent ten days away from my husband and 7-year-old in the South of France. My dad—living his best retired life—was traveling solo for a week in Europe and had invited me to join him on a father-daughter road trip. Obviously, I jumped at this bonkers once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

I wasn’t consciously aware of any feelings of guilt about leaving my family back at home to swim in the Mediterranean sea, eat carbonara three minutes from the Italian border, hike around a medieval village, and visit the asylum where Van Gough made his most famous paintings.

I wasn’t getting guilt tripped by my partner, either—Christopher had been emphatic that I should take the trip. And my kid seemed pretty happy with the selection of letters I’d left him for every day of the trip, especially the bonus fart and poop jokes that I’d been sure to include.

But I also had a suspicion that I couldn’t just… get away with it? I had never been away from my kid for more than five days or at a greater distance than New York. To go to another country, 6,000 miles away from my child, felt like taking the kind of liberty that would be punished by the gods. She left her child to go to France? Let’s give her death by tampon.

Even as I sat in the airport worrying about that 70 percent mortality rate, I mentally riffed on the perfect symbolism of this hypothetical medical problem. I know this isn’t how the human body works, but I had this visual of my womb inhabited not by a fetus but a tampon—proof of infertility, my unmotherhood.

I started thinking about hysteria and that charming concept of the empty womb wandering around the body in search of semen. I thought about the whole fairytale procession of bad and selfish mother archetypes. I thought about the hero’s journey and the inner cave and the uterus as a cave. I thought about vagina dentata and cis men’s fears about being subsumed, swallowed whole, by the monstrous feminine.

I felt pretty monstrous crouched in the airplane bathroom trying to find that fucking tampon that wasn’t even there.

I thought about all those folded instructional tampon booklets that I’d studied as an adolescent, trying to understand my own insides. I thought about how much you can remain a mystery to yourself, long after adolescence. How, in some ways, adolescence returns, cyclically, in surprising ways.

And I thought about the first and last time I’d been to France, over two decades earlier. As a 19 year old, I’d stopped in a youth hostel in Paris for two nights at the end of a summer semester studying abroad in Madrid.

I was such a little baby deer back then—so unsteady in the world, so unsure of myself. Instead of eating my way through Paris, I had defaulted to the mediocre Japanese restaurant across the street from my hostel because it was cheap and close and felt familiar. I’d bought a pass for one of those double-decker tourist buses to see the main sights, but mostly I was moved by the cute guy who drove one of the buses.

I had reluctantly hopped off at the Eiffel Tower stop, never to see him again, but I was pretty sure he was the greater marvel.

Over twenty years later, I am far less credulous about cuteness and much more discerning about food. I’m also pretty steady on my feet at 41 compared to 19. Still, it’s surprisingly easy to access that baby deer, especially when I step out of my daily life, filled as it is with conventional markers of adulthood (marriage, motherhood, a mortgage).

At the end of my roadtrip with my dad, we stayed in Paris for a couple nights. This time, I ate all the good food. I walked and wandered by myself. I stood in front of some of the most famous paintings in the world. I took photos of other people’s cute dogs (I remain very credulous about canine cuteness). I sought out a handful of French bookstores and found the “féminisme” section in each. I sat in a cafe and wrote in my notebook.

“It’s funny how you can loop back on yourself,” I wrote. “Hello, there I am again. I am both profoundly changed and essentially the same.”

Obviously, obviously, I do realize that I’m talking about a missing tampon while also writing a very perimenopausal type of essay.

Before the urgent care visit, I’d had Christopher search around for the imaginary tampon. This was our romantic reunion. “Does everything feel normal to you?” I had asked, I admit, treating him as the greater expert in the nuances of my body, féminisme aside. I am certain that 12-year-old me with her tampon booklet could never have fathomed the comfort and lack of embarrassment in this scene.

This morning, I texted a friend about the urgent care visit. She sent me back a voice note of herself cackling in laughter, totally beside herself. No words, all guffaw. It made me laugh so hard I cried.

Then I saved her voice note, this record of total hilarity over life’s little absurdities. C'est la vie.

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