A Time to Uproot

Amber Stewart

For the first time, I have dug, from the dirt, a garden. And now, my garden is dead. It’s been too hot and I’ve been too tired, too overwhelmed with the reality that our time here, in this house, on this land, in this state, in this country, is probably limited.

This is not the queer liberation I dreamed of, where bodies exist to take up space, to assert their need to be vehicles of experience—to eat, to fuck, to rest indulgently, to run up excruciating hills and coast down the other side. To create life and cultivate pleasure, inflict pain. To reach out a hand and say the borders of me meet the borders of you, and here we require no passport, no immigration papers. Come inside.

Here, where our bodies meet, we transgress. Here, we are everything we need to be.

But I’m not there. Instead, I am in Tennessee, sitting in that interminable two-week period between being and knowing—in which direction my body decides its form. A week ago, my wife emptied a vial into me, and at the same time, our state’s post-Roe trigger law went into effect, with no exceptions for the health of the mother, making our bodies a battleground, with a potentially high casualty count. And I am split between the terror and joy of possibility. Every small cramp is an ectopic pregnancy. Every heightened scent is a home, family, and future previously unimagined.

And yet every time I log into my fertility app, which I decided to keep despite the security concerns, it reminds me that my body was not what the developers had in mind. It uses “he” pronouns for my partner. It tells me “Have sex,” ignoring that our sex, while life-giving, is not life-creating. Instead, we order sperm from a cryobank in Virginia, and it arrives in a small vial in a liquid nitrogen container one hundred times its size. My app reminds me to have sex every day of my fertile window, but here we only have one small vial. One chance this month. My wife uses gloves to extract it, and we kiss as we wait for it to thaw, both laughing nervously with the absurdity of it. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.

But in those two weeks, we begin to suspect we are on a timetable that is not our own. A drag ban passes that puts any gender nonconforming person on the street in danger, so I call my gyno to set up a consultation to discuss more intensive interventions for the next cycle. Her nurse tells me what my husband’s role should be in an in-office insemination, not allowing me to interrupt her to tell her that I do not have a husband but a wife. She doesn’t listen when I tell her that I don’t really care how straight people do this, but to please, please tell me how I can make this work for me, my relationship. It is reiterated at every turn that in medical spaces, a binary is enforced. In this office we have male and female, sperm and egg. It’s required. And when we step into conversations about fertility, there’s always questions: Who will carry? How or why did you decide? And because we’ve learned over the years to assume that we are never safe, I do not disclose that my wife is trans. I do not disclose that I had been thinking of buying trees for the backyard when Tennessee, our multigenerational home, began debating gender affirming care bans for minors. I do not disclose that we’re scared, but almost certain, that the legislation won’t stop at policing children. That adults are next. I do not disclose that I no longer feel capable of committing to growing here, to continuing to water our roots.

So I say to anyone who asks these questions that I’ve been having dreams about my mother. She’s been dead for twenty years but has appeared to me three nights in the last week. I say “lineage.” I say my mother’s middle name would make a great name for a girl. I say, connection through experience. I say, I wish she were here. I hope I can remember mother as a verb. I hope that, for my child, who both is and is not, that mother will not also become a word of trauma, pain, and loss. Of longing for imagined futures where she could be here to hold my hand.

My period arrives and, with the tenacity of a child who never had to try to be successful, I call myself failed. My wife attempts to comfort me with statistics, but I am unable to accept the odds that perhaps nothing went wrong. I hold myself above statistics. I tell myself that I am not beholden to the laws of percentages of decaying eggs, that I could have gotten it right. But my body reminds me every day that I am beholden to its machinations. A pain in my hip keeps me from moving to release anxiety. A pain in my head makes it so I can’t sleep at night. And my lower belly cramps with the weight of my uterine lining.

The yard is overgrown, and there are paint chips on the walls that we haven’t addressed since we moved into this house last March in preparation for expanding our family. And while we are mostly unpacked, every horizontal surface is scattered with a smattering of things displaced. As if we meant to remind ourselves of action stopped in the middle. Or perhaps to simply take up the space women are usually denied. My breasts ache and already I feel that I am failing as a mother–unable to keep my house clean, even before the introduction of another agent of chaos into the mix.

I’m having competing visions at night before I go to bed. In one version, I carve out space for three raised beds in our backyard, right where the sun hits at the top of the hill. We plant indigenous fruit trees on the back of our property, and I carry a child with me while we pick peaches and apples, and I show them how to know when a blackberry is ready to eat. We have backyard chickens, or maybe ducks, and we, my child and I, gather them in the mornings. I could then spend my days writing or painting furniture or listening to my child tell me stories. I think about which stories I will tell them, what parts of myself I would like them to know. How their other mother and I met. How they were born. How we chose our sperm donor because he looked like the men in both our families. How it was important that they fit in.

And then there is the version where we no longer live in this house, where we have moved far away from our home because the government couldn’t do enough to protect us. We buy a few acres not too far outside a yet-unnamed but far away city, learn to speak another language, buy some chickens, and learn how to grow the crops that grow in our new, borrowed home. I try not to feel homesick for my own Tennessee childhood. In this version, our child is a little more unclear to me. I don’t know what parenting looks like for me here yet, much less in a place where we have no support system. But I do know that, regardless of where we are, when I picture our future with a child, what I picture is outdoors. Because when I think of childhood, I do not picture the days spent cooped up in my mother’s Nashville home, located on a street too busy to play on. Instead, I picture my summers spent on my grandparents’ subsistence-level farm: still-dirty vegetables covering the kitchen table; hay bales, perfect for jumping, in the barn. A kiddie pool, filled with a garden hose, sitting on the back deck, covered so my cousins and I wouldn’t get even more sunburned. I haven’t spoken to my grandparents since I told them I was marrying a woman. Another push to leave.

I am recording these futures here because with each passing day it becomes harder and harder to remember them, to hold them in sight when all I can see are bloodwork, test results, side effects, and dollar signs.

And, of course, there are several futures wherein we do not parent at all, where my doctor is not able to help my body overcome its shortcomings, and we are unable to conceive. I recently learned that my hormone levels are all out of whack, that, without the help of some high dose medications, I will likely not be able to conceive at home with my wife. Instead, I will need to go on a cocktail of fertility drugs, FSH injections, trigger shots, and IUI inseminations. And this would be in addition to a number of other pills to address any number of body deficiencies that I have: a bad thyroid, insulin resistance, depression. In more ways than one, my entire future hinges on the pill case on my nightstand and the whims of Tennessee’s Republican majority.

So, because I wanted to give these futures I envision a shot at fruition, I began my regimen which has left me deeply depressed, irritable, bloated, and unable to concentrate on much of anything. And I still fail. My body fails me.

I sit on my couch, my breasts naked to the air, and watch TikToks teaching me how to clean, telling me that cleaning is morally neutral, assuring me over and over again that the fact that there are dishes in the sink and pet hair on the chairs does not make me or my wife a bad person. That we are not incapable of running a household or less worthy of being loved. But the next swipe brings another woman, her perfectly organized fridge and her effortlessly styled beach waves, and though I know—I know—that my feelings of inferiority, of failure to be the woman I was expected to be, are based on garbage patriarchal assumptions, it does not make them less pressing in the moment.

And everywhere there are mothers and their wares. Targeted ads, perhaps picking up on my obsessive Google searches of “how to tell if you’re pregnant” and “early pregnancy symptoms,” have started showing me a list of items that would star in any soon-to-be-mother’s registry. My social media algorithms have already started showing me parenting content. I now feel invested in the great debate between gentle and authoritarian parenting. We watch The Sandman and Lyta experiences an otherworldly pregnancy. I go to the dentist and watch Friends on the overhead television while my cavity is filled, Ross singing to his ex-wife’s pregnant belly in “The One Where Underdog Gets Away.” And I find that I am being carried into a universal narrative, becoming part of a story that is much bigger than myself, and yet it is a story which exists profoundly in my body, writing its first chapters in the bed as I lay with my wife, my hips elevated, erasing with each pregnancy test that comes back negative.

My body is exhausted. And I don’t know how much more I can ask it to go through. I don’t know how many more months of hyped-up hormones and late-night injections I can ask it to receive. I don’t know how many more breast cancer screenings. I don’t know if I can withstand the possibility of birth. I don’t know if tomorrow I will find the strength to roll over and put my feet on the floor. And if I do, I don’t know that my feet will support me. I feel I am always one step from falling, and it is surprising to me every day when, somehow, I don’t. The perseverance that my body daily displays is miraculous, and yet I doubt it daily.

I finish the last of a bottle of scotch and sip as time hurtles toward my next ovulation date, the midterms, the 2024 election. Trump is running again, and I fear we won’t be able to wait for my body’s queer rhythms to play out. It is attempting to cross too many borders: childless to mother, citizen to immigrant. And here I sit in the middle, stretching myself into multiple realities. I try to hold all possibilities balanced within myself, and I am overwhelmed. We have given ourselves six tries to conceive, a deadline that gets us through pregnancy and infancy before the next president takes office. We’re now down to three.

Amber Stewart is an essayist and poet in transit. Born and raised in Tennessee, she and her wife are in the process of moving to Montevideo, Uruguay. She is currently working on a book on leaving, loss, and finding home.