Oh my, the irony.

Your baby's first exersaucer means so many things. It means they want more stimulation. It means they want to stand and jump. It means you finally can have free hands once in a while. In my case, while visiting her grandparents, our little girl was elated to get her first plastic micro-world of fun. However, she was a little too short for her feet to reach the ground. After searching around for just the right size foot boost, my mother came back with the perfect size book - My dad's old "Atlas of Pelvic Operations."

"Are you kidding me?" I thought to myself. But it was indeed, the perfect height. Having a father as an OBGYN is already ironic enough. Having grown up playing with a plastic uterus wreaks with irony that I, in the end, got a shoddy uterus. Now as I finally have my own baby, how peculiar to watch her jump happily on top of a book of pelvic operations. So what did I do? I of course looked up my own pelvic operations.

There, as I suspected, on page 81, was the description and diagram of my ectopic surgery. I studied the old fashion medical drawings. I looked carefully at how they rummaged around my ovaries and cut into my fallopian tube. It looked like a foreign world, a world that defeated me. It was my internal self laid out before my very eyes. Where, in these weird sausage-like organs was I? I didn't really know whether to laugh or cry. How could my body cause me so much pain? How could this fine-tuned reproductive system have gone so wrong?

I poured over them, examining the diagrams as if they were a treasure map. I wanted to find the golden key to unlock the mystery. My eyes traveled through the tissues and vessels and ligaments. With each sketchy line, I dove deeper into the emptiness of my loss.

I could only imagined the many embryos stuck inside that threadlike tubal space. I could only see these ovaries pumping out crappy eggs. I could only see this space continuing to bleed out every month failing to grow anything. These so-called nurturing life-giving organs very easily looked to me monstrous, alien, aggressive. This couldn't possible be inside of me.

As I caught myself falling down a dark hole of regret and sadness, I tried to focus on the dancing feet on top of this book. I could look at this strange visual juxtaposition of my baby and my past horrors in several ways. For one, it could be a reminder that sometimes great pain and loss gives birth to great and unexpected joy. It could be a reminder that despite my failing reproductive system, a baby symbolically grew out of me. But my most devilish side likes to see this as a big fuck you to infertility. Just as a person might dance on an enemy's grave - outliving them and celebrating their demise, my daughter was doing a dance on my infertility with the exact same sentiment.