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This is the is the last post in the Dear Men series. I asked my boyfriend “What does it feel like to be a man next to women going through all their bodily adventures?” Here is his answer:

Honestly, it feels like being in the dark. That’s why I appreciate your "Dear Men" series.

At first, it’s embarrassing to not know. Women are everywhere—girlfriends, moms, sisters, coworkers—but beyond the obvious, our knowledge is often surface-level. We know about eyes and, well… other external parts, but the inner workings? The "hardware" and "software" of their bodies? Culturally, it’s always been accepted that men don’t need to understand that.

I think I first got this impression in high school, trying to understand my girlfriend at the time. I was frustrated, confused by the way she acted, and then I came across a quote attributed to Oscar Wilde: "Women are to be worshiped, not understood.” I took it to heart. From that point on, I stopped trying to understand what was going on inside women’s bodies and minds.

To be fair, I don’t give much thought to my own body either—except for vanity reasons. I notice when I’m gaining weight, when I see signs of aging, or when something malfunctions. But deep introspection? Not really.

That’s why I liked this series. It broadened my perspective, opened me up in both directions. It made me realize how much more is going on in women’s bodies than I had ever considered. And not just biologically, but in terms of what it actually feels like to exist in that body.

It’s funny because, as a man, I—like many men—love women’s bodies. That’s what draws us in. If a guy looks at an inkblot test, he’s probably seeing curves. We admire women in tight dresses. But we rarely stop to consider what it’s actually like to live in that body—to experience the world through it.

This series was a little embarrassing, like being back in health class when they pull up a diagram and ask, "Okay, where’s the clitoris? Where’s the labia?" And you realize… oh. There’s so much more to know. But the scale of that realization is much wider than just anatomy—it’s about empathy.

It seems important to understand—not just in a caring, in a personal sense, but in a "big picture" way. Women make up half the world. So much of what men do—getting a job, dressing well, striving for success—centers around women in some way. And yet, we often don’t truly "understand" their experiences.

Maybe now I know a little more now than Oscar Wilde did.

And maybe the biggest change is that I now feel more open to asking: "What is your lived experience? What does this feel like for you?"

Because, really, isn’t that the question?

—

So with this Dear Men, this series has come to an end, and I hope it’s an opening to ask, because yes, that is exactly the question: What does it feel like to live in a woman’s body?

Artwork by Kyle Leuck (link to his Instagram account in comments)

Dear Men, this is the second to last post in this series on what it feels like to live in a woman’s body. This time about becoming a grandmother.

My mother was with me when I gave birth to my first child. It felt natural, and I felt very supported. She describes her first birth as “torture,” and I think it was healing for her to experience birth again through me. When I had my second—a girl—I think it resonated with her own joy of having a daughter. Her fourth child (me) was a girl, just like her firstborn, whom she had to give up for adoption.

The older I get, the more I appreciate all the support and help my parents tirelessly give me. Not least because they have reached out to my children a million times, building a close relationship with them—something that I, my children, and, I believe, my parents are grateful for. During the crazy years of building my startup, my parents became a safe and calm place for my kids, away from the storms of their parents’ lives.

I wanted to find stories about the role grandmothers play in society beyond just being babysitters. I was hoping to find accounts of the wisdom they provide in everyday life. But it’s fair to say that their wisdom isn’t exactly celebrated—online or offline.

It feels profound to know that the eggs that became my children were already developing inside me as I grew in my mother’s womb. A direct link between generations through women—another layer to genetics and epigenetic transfer. With kids aged 14 and 10, I don’t expect (nor hope) to become a grandmother anytime soon. But I think I will feel lucky if one day, I become a grandmother.

Artwork by Kyle Leuck

Dear Men, this is post 27 about what it feels like to live in a woman’s body.

It almost feels like breast cancer is this ghost station that we, as women, can all expect to stop at later in life—or maybe even earlier.

A scary probability: 1 out of 10 women being taken off the train and forced to visit that terrifying station of chemo, having their breasts removed, lymph nodes taken out, undergoing radiation, and taking poisonous anti-hormone pills while losing our hair. It is so real. I have seen people close to me go through this; I have seen the scars, the missing breasts. The women in my lineage who had cancers in their wombs had no scars to show—they simply died.

As perimenopause starts to rearrange my body and things begin happening that feel weirdly out of rhythm, I am trying to weigh the increased risk of some cancers from taking hormones against the even more diffuse sense of risk of losing myself if I don’t take them. My friend, who is a cancer doctor, lays out the statistics:

“The risk of breast cancer with estrogen Therapy is slightly increased, but only with long-term use. Statistically, all Danish women, whether they take hormone therapy or not, have a 10 percent lifetime risk of developing breast cancer.

If you take a combination of estrogen and progestogen for five years or more after the age of 50, your lifetime risk of breast cancer will increase by 1-2 percentage points, bringing the total risk to around 11-12 percent. If you continue for 10 years, the risk increase is approximately 3-4 percentage points.

For comparison, your breast cancer risk increases by a similar percentage if you drink more than two glasses of wine daily, smoke, or have a BMI over 30 after menopause.”

And then, what about ovarian or cervical cancers? I don’t know. Is this one of the things I should learn? The learning list seems to never end when it comes to female health, and even after visiting my gynecologist, I leave with even more questions.

Art by Kyle Leuck

Dear Men, is sex still a thing? Post 26 is on desire and sex when bodies age. This is one out 29 posts for men about what it feels like to live in a woman's body.

It is strange that we live in a world where aging women’s sexuality is almost totally invisible from popular culture, considering that we will live half of our sexual lives after reaching menopause!

Sexual drive is complex and involves hormones, brain, nervous system, emotions, relations, stress levels, health conditions and many more factors. It is however a shared experience by most women that sexual desire fluctuates with the menstrual cycle and often spikes around ovulation (which is about mid-cycle, if the cycle is the average length of about 29 days). However, as the cycle starts changing during peri-menopause and stops all together after the onset of menopause, sexual desire also changes for some women. While more women report peri-menopause symptoms to dampen their libido, fewer women feel that once they have transitioned entirely out of menstrual cycles. Then they feel their sexual drive go up again. What lies behind this pattern is unclear, is it a new balance of hormones, less stress from being done with a transition, or something else? We don’t know. As in so many other fields of women’s health research, there is a gaping hole.

The body reconfigures in many ways as we age. Hair and skin changes, the vaginal lining gets thinner, the vagina gets shorter and reduced lubrication can cause painful sex.

More women in this stage of life encounter erectile dysfunction in their partners, which might also play a role in women’s appetite for getting it on, I am guessing.

But even in spite of all of this, most women are interested in sex, also after reaching menopause.

The National Institute of Aging writes, “Many older couples find greater satisfaction in their sex lives than they did when they were younger. They may have fewer distractions, more time and privacy, and no worries about getting pregnant. They also may be better able to express what they want and need, which can offer an opportunity for greater intimacy and connection.”

Enjoy!

Artwork by Kyle Leuck

Dear Men, this is post 25/29 on what it feels like to have a woman’s body. This time it's about one of life’s biggest body transitions — menopause.

When a woman hasn’t had her period for 12 months, she is considered to be in menopause, meaning her periods have stopped and will never come back. It can happen in the 40s or 50s. If it happens earlier, it is considered “early menopause”. If it happens much later, I don’t know… it just doesn’t really, because this is how nature has sorted things.

For some it is a relief, free from the mess, pain and risk of pregnancy, for others it feels... like what? When you Google it, it is noticeable how physical symptoms are well described whereas the psychological and emotional aspects are less articulated other than what I just wrote: yay, I can’t get unwanted pregnant anymore, and then back to the body changes: “For other women, the menopausal transition can bring various symptoms, including hot flashes, night sweats, trouble sleeping, joint and muscle discomfort, pain during sex, moodiness and irritability, forgetfulness, difficultly concentrating, or a combination of these.”

And then there is the brittle bones, the cancer risks... Oh, great.

I continue reading on the internet, this is from the National Institute of Aging (that the Trump admin still hasn’t closed... !) “The body’s production of estrogen and progesterone, two hormones made by the ovaries, declines greatly.

Symptoms related to menopause can last for between two and eight years, though the timing and symptoms are highly variable among women. These factors are likely influenced by a woman’s genetics as well as external factors, such as race and ethnicity, culture, lifestyle, and environment.

Compared with White women, Black women are more likely to have an early onset of menopause, experience more menopausal symptoms, and have symptoms for longer, while Asian women are less likely to suffer from menopausal symptoms.

In addition, during the menopausal transition, the body begins to use energy differently. The distribution of fat in the body changes, and women may gain weight more easily. They may also experience changes in their bone density, heart health, body shape and composition, or physical function."

Some use hormone replacement therapy. Because, well, all this sounds like something you’d eat a pill against. Too bad some cancer cells feed off estrogen… and when do you know when suddenly you have one in your body. Taking hormones or not, that’s a hard choice to make… one that all women face.

And then there is the whole question of how society perceives women after their fertile years. That’s for some other time. Just, humph! for now.

Feel free to share your experience of menopause too.

Artwork by Kyle Leuck

Dear Men, this is post 24 for you about what it feels like to live in a woman’s body, this time about the big changes that happens when periods starts stopping.

The menstrual cycle is a constant ebb and flow of a handful of hormones regulating maturing and releasing eggs, building the blood lining in the womb that could feed a fetus and shedding it again when there is none. It impacts our body temperature, our vision, how we build muscles, our digestion, mood, sex drive, how social we feel, our appetite… in short, it is tremendously important in our lives. Physically, emotionally, socially. We go from girls, then we start getting breasts, we someday know we could make a baby inside our bodies, maybe we do, we bleed, and then gradually, almost unnoticeably our cycles start to change.

When these changes cannot any longer be written off as the usual variation, and it isn’t caused by some ailment, then a woman is gracefully - or maybe struggling, transitioning from the fertile age to perimenopause. Thats's the time before the cycle stops entirely, known as menopause (what a hopeless name).

For some this is a welcomed relief, for others it feels very strange. Like some foundational skeleton to life, is morphing. No more rhythm of a monthly cycle. The orientation that many develop over years to understand her changing body day for day, her mood shifts - all of that is now a mess. Mood and body in an unpredictable new-jazz flow that is hard to navigate. Her identity is reshuffling. Will her sense of being a woman change? Will her intimacy with her body feel different? There are a bunch of new questions while she again is trying to figure out her body.

Ovulation makes us more interested in sex, as if desire sits closer to the surface. An energetic kick that propels us every month. How will we go about life without this monthly high?

There are many stories of the horrors of menopause, will my bones wither, my hair fall out, the nights be awake and will hot flushes burn me 100 times a day? Will my brain be foggy and my mood erratic, will anyone still like being around me, or even find me attractive?

So my periods start to not come and this is what lies ahead?

Or is it?

This is a time of change, and yet again a woman will have to get to know how to take good care of herself.

I welcome your story too, what was perimenopause like for you or those around you?

Artwork by Kyle Leuck

Dear Men, as we go through this journey of what it feels like to have a woman’s body I need to just briefly remind you that while all the stuff has been happening; the sex, the cysts, the conditions, the breasts being there, the aftereffects of giving birth - periods are still a thing:

Typically, you bleed 4–7 days, then a week alter you ovulate, then two weeks later it starts over. It’s fairly often, sometimes it feels like it’s all the time. For the ones with short cycles, spotting, irregular cycles, long and heavy periods, things being a mess with abortions and change of birth control methods, or just the usual cycle variation caused by life’s stress and sickness - periods (and the whole menstrual cycle) may come too often, not often enough to become pregnant, or take us by surprise.

And for some a very painful one. For others a troublesome messy one, some get iron deficiency, some find it challenging to go to school or work. For some, it’s a worry when it’s late - did I become pregnant? Am I healthy? Will I ever ovulate and be fertile?

And then in the perimenopause phase of life (that's the years before the cycle stops all together) the periods might come so often that it feels like yore bleeding all the time. They might also not come...

And yet, for many the monthly bleeding is an important marker of the cyclical nature of our lives, a moment we connect with our bodies and maybe feel our ability to create life.

You get the picture, periods are still a thing!

Artwork by Kyle Leuck

Dear Men,

This is post 22 on what it feels like to live in a female body, this time on how sex and house chores are linked, and why she is so pissed all the time.

Imagine this reality, in which many women (and men) live:

Some women might find it sexy to see their romantic partner sit on the couch while she fills the dishwasher—again. I sure don’t. In fact, it’s a huge turn-off. A partner who leaves you with more than your share of the house chores, the emotional care work for the kids, and doesn’t figure out some food when the kids are hungry has definitely not started any kind of erotic build-up.

Just like picking up his dirty laundry or having to ask him to do some food shopping is. Not only does it leave women with too little time to rest, get inspired, take care of themselves so they can keep meeting all the demands of their lives, but it also makes us angry. And it kills our desire, at least for that man sitting on the couch or what ever he is doing which isn’t cleaning the plates off the dinner table. And If I have to ask him to do it, it’s even less sexy when he does it.

Days filled with the same frustrations—doing more than him, the same arguments, or the same silence to avoid arguing—leave women feeling disconnected. Intimacy suffers, and we feel unsexy too as we become bitter versions of ourselves. On top of that, there’s too little time to do sports or anything that would help us feel sexy, like we did before we had kids and men who don’t turn us on anymore.

Then neither he nor she feels sexy to her, and the desire fades. He tries to get something going, but she isn’t turned on—even if she wants to be. The spark has gone. She’s low-level angry, permanently. She rejects him sexually, and now it’s her that “has a problem” because she doesn’t want sex.

The truth is, she doesn’t want sex with a partner who doesn’t do his part in the house—someone she loses respect and attraction for slowly but surely. Her body just starts saying no.

In this dynamic, the sex, when it finally happens, isn’t as playful or exciting as it once was. The statistics say women lose interest in their partners sexually before men do. My guess? House chores have something to do with it.

So, Dear Men, want more sex with your partner? Do more dishes.

Artwork by Kyle Leuck.

Dear Men, this is post 21/29 on having sex while having small kids.

Well, it is kind of like what it was like having sex after giving birth (see post 20), except it just kind of continues like a new norm.

Acute body transformation has ended, and the body settles in some new form. The body is somewhat reclaimed, breastfeeding or getting up at night to bottle-feed, has thankfully stopped, the little ones are not tiny anymore. But that doesn’t mean they just sleep all night. They wake up thirsty, have wetted the bed, have an ear pain, growing aches, the duvet has fallen off the bed, they had a bad dream… the list goes on. And for all of those, I got out of bed to care for them. My sleep got light, I still wake up at the slightest sounds from them, on alert.

All this just to say, mum might be tired… Unbroken sleep becomes really precious. Anything that gets between peaceful sleep, blissfully free of conflict and stress, pretty much is better than anything that could keep her awake at night. That unfortunately included my romantic partner very often. That had a lot of reasons, not only having small kids, but this constant presence of small kids was definitely not an aphrodisiac for me.

Being walked in on by a kid while in the heat of things, also isn’t all that great. Yep, that happens too.

For practical reasons, and in an attempt to get the best sleep possible, one parent might sleep in one room with one kid, and the other parent with another kid someplace else. Even after the kids sleep in their own beds in their own rooms, parents might stay in separate bedrooms. While that can be no hindrance for a great intimate life, it might be for some. Just a new norm that happened.

See comments for link to the first post in this series that has links to all other posts.

Artwork by Kyle Leuck

Dear Men, this is post 20/29. This time it is about having sex after giving birth.

What can I say, maybe the most illustrative would be to leave the page half empty...




….of course, with the caveat that women experience this very differently.

Your intimate parts might, or might not, be pretty messed up. The body has a new shape, the belly is still big after it having been expanded into it's enormous round proportion. The breasts are (maybe) filled with milk, leaking, bleeding, hurting, slumping, being sucked on by the baby. Your whole body is being crawled on, pulled at, sat on, hung on if you have older toddler kids too. You are carrying a baby on your arm (my left arm biceps were so big! The right arm was kept free to do things with), the back is hurting. You are sleep-deprived, always on call for baby cries and baby needs. Your flesh seems to hang looser on the bones than before and maybe there are wounds, scars, stretched parts or more serious injuries. In short, you don’t feel particularly sexy or able to focus on sex.

Ahead are maybe work obligations that you start worrying about, older kids are envious and want your attention, your partner misses intimacy, and you just really want half a day alone. And maybe you’re annoyed with your partner too, becoming parents together is tough on relationships.

The baby is probably in the bed, or the room. You’re hormonally influenced, and you feel sensitive or moody, you could have a post-natal depression, maybe your partner does. What about birth control, becoming pregnant again feels like it would kill you. And if you in spite of all odds get something going, you can be sure the baby has a sixth sense and will wake up at the most annoying time.

Artwork by Kyle Leuck

Dear Men, this is for you, post 17/29, about feeling sad after giving birth: postnatal depression.

Being pregnant, giving birth, and then still being in that body after the baby has left equals a craaaazy hormonal ride. That’s a fact.

No wonder (!) our brains can feel hormonal spikes off the charts and react to them. Therefore, we notice it happening. We notice it big time. For some, this means getting depressed.

But hormones are only part of the explanation.

I have not suffered from postnatal depression myself (though I definitely had my blue days), so I turned to Wikipedia:

- Postpartum or postnatal depression (PPD) is a mood disorder experienced after childbirth, which can affect both men and women. Symptoms may include extreme sadness, low energy, anxiety, crying episodes, irritability, and changes in sleeping or eating patterns.

- About 20% of women who are low-income suffer from postnatal depression, while for those with more financial resources, it’s about 10%. Women with fewer resources may also be more likely to have an unintended or unwanted pregnancy, increasing the risk of PPD.

- Fathers get depressed too—about 10%. One of the strongest predictors of paternal PPD is having a partner who has PPD, with fathers developing PPD 50% of the time when their female partner has it.

- The psychosocial risk factors for postpartum depression include severe life events, some forms of chronic strain, relationship quality, and support from partner and mother.

- And 50% of women who get depressed experience it even before birth.

All of this is kind of a no-brainer: when women don’t do well, they are more vulnerable to postnatal depression. And often, they don’t do well because society is failing them. For example, racial issues take a toll on women:

African American mothers have been shown to have the highest risk of PPD at 25%, while Asian mothers have the lowest at 11.5%, after controlling for social factors such as age, income, education, marital status, and baby's health. The PPD rates for First Nations, Caucasian, and Hispanic women fall in between.

Those are heavy numbers. Everyone is at risk of PPD; I know strong, kind, smart women who felt terrible after giving birth. And people need to get help. If they don’t, both parents and children suffer. Long term, that means society suffers.

It’s simple: When women don’t thrive, we all suffer. And when women thrive, we all thrive more.

Artwork by Kyle Leuck

Post 19/29 Dear Men! About the body changing after giving birth.

In the hours after I had given birth, I felt like a truck had run me over, twice!

A year later, I wondered how it hadn’t crossed my mind before I got pregnant what bodily price I’d pay for becoming a mother. And no one had mentioned what it would feel like: All my tissue had become loose, my stomach would never have smooth, tight skin again, my breasts had been expanded to an unimaginable size and given me stretch marks, and my vagina that had a good squeeze before 20 hours of labor felt void of all strength, not to talk about my rupture scar that made sex painful… all minor things compared to all the wild things women encounter during pregnancy and giving birth. A coworker of mine had to have surgery to bring her stomach muscles close enough together again to cover the intestines. She even had to pay for it herself, as health insurance would cover the same issue if someone had had a work accident, but not given birth!

Maybe what changed the most for me was my relation to my body. It served a purpose, which was to serve the child: arms for carrying it, what felt like, all the time. Breasts for milk. Hands for cleaning and carrying. My vagina, not for very much.

I wondered how we would think about birth if it left marks on the dad's body too? One size smaller condoms for every child?

All of this has changed almost back to what it was before, though not quite. A C-section scar has been added to the marks in my body. I have gone down several bra sizes from my pre-pregnancy baseline. But I have reclaimed my body; it serves me and my pleasure again, and I have my autonomy back.

And I am in awe of what a woman’s body can do, and our ability to create life is nothing less than miraculous. I have so much gratitude for its strength and for the pleasures it gives me.

How did yours change?


Artwork by Kyle Leuck

Dear Men, this is post 18/29 on what it feels like feeding a baby.

It’s tempting to start with the marvels of breastfeeding, breast milk, of breasts really. But I will just let that be a given, and instead talk about what it feels like to feed a baby.

I breastfed both my kids for about a year, and it was easy. So, I was very lucky, for some it's so hard, on both nipples and mind with cracked and bleeding nipples, too little milk or the baby wont suck right. But when I say easy, maybe you get the wrong idea. Yeah, the milk got into the babies and yet it was pretty demanding getting it there. In my life, it was a no-brainer to sleep in the same bed at the baby, and to breastfeed lying down. This might seem like details, but it was a world apart from having to get out of bed at night or having to be awake enough to sit up even. This allowed me to fall asleep with the baby. Both in the night and very often during the day too.

A cry from my baby would give this distinct prickling sensation in the nipples and the milk would start flowing, or actually, in my case, spray out. I cannot tell you how often I had big wet spots on my clothes. Then I would have an acute thirst: I would call who ever was around, please get me some water (or I will instantly die of thirst!)!

Breastfeeding does leave the dad out of the feeding process (except for getting water), and it tethers the mum to the baby. Those are two big things.

I travelled quite a lot and I had a baby sling where I could breastfeed the baby while it was in it. That made many tricky situations like queuing in an airport so much easier. Because a nipple is not only to feed a baby, it is also to calm a baby and stretch its patience.

For me breastfeeding was painful at times, with breast infections that made my breasts hard like a football, a cramping neck, I even had (temporary) nerve damage in my arms from lying down breastfeeding. At the same time, all those deeply intimate and connected moments with the baby were so precious, sometimes so deeply peaceful and always abundant with love. It was emotionally tough to wane the kids. But once I was on the other side, my breasts were for my own pleasure again, which had been a bit lost while breastfeeding.

There could be a whole separate post in this series about pumping, bottles, donating milk for premature born babies, baby formulas and workplace policies around pumping and breastfeeding.

>I welcome all experiences, shared in the comments.

I have only limited experience with that, but enough to make me appreciate how simple it is to just pull out a breast and not having to clean bottles, pump and maybe be away from your child more than you want to. Others find bottles easy and freeing. If mothers are well-informed and the world supports them, then I am sure each mother knows best what is right for her and her baby.

Artwork by Kyle Leuck

Dear Men, this is post 15/29 on what it feels like lose a pregnancy

Between having my son and daughter I was pregnant. And then at around three months I started bleeding. I was on holidays so it took some days before I could make it to my gynaecologist while I kept bleeding. She did an ultrasound scan and told me, there is a pregnancy but no baby. It took me a little while to understand that there was the sack in my uterus where the baby should have been but it was empty. My body had realised there was a problem and had started to expel the whole thing. I needed to just wait and then try again. I was sad. It felt like I had lost a baby though there had never been one. Now I can say it was a small grief and healed fast but as I walked out the doctors office I cried.

Losing a wanted pregnancy spontaneously, early or late is really, really sad. For some it happens again and again. It is often entirely invisible to the world and it is so hard core.

Sometimes an abortion, and also a late one, is a choice that has to be made by the mother and doctors to save the mother or to avoid unavoidable and hopeless suffering for the child. Having to have an abortion when you wish to have a child is an option you only choose if you absolutely have to.

If we don’t give her that option, we will loose lives. We already are.

Artwork by Kyle Leuck

Dear Men, post 16/29 on giving birth.

Giving birth is maybe one of the most unifying human experiences that any group of people have had in the history of humanity, aside from a few basics like eating, and having sex maybe. Every woman who has given birth vaginally understands something that people who haven’t will never quite understand. And yet every birth is unique, even for the same woman.

Some will experience ecstatic orgasms (at least so they say) to torturous trauma, and for some, it means death, as in actual death. For most, the experience is probably somewhere in the middle, which means extremely painful, but also wild, amazing, and powerful. At least that describes my own experience pretty well.

There is a link to an article about my birth experiences in the comments.

More and more women globally will have a C-section, or a cesarean. Some because giving birth naturally is dangerous for the mother or child, but most are done because healthcare systems incentivize both mothers and doctors to choose them.

About one in three births in the U.S. are C-sections, well above the 10-15% rate that the WHO considers "ideal." The national C-section delivery rate increased in 2023 to 32.4%, up from 32.1% in 2022, (CDC).

Cesarean section use continues to rise globally, now accounting for more than 1 in 5 (21%) of all childbirths, (WHO).

I have a lot to say about that; I wrote about it in the mentioned article.

I had one myself because I had a class 4 rupture (the worst kind, where the sphincter muscle (eh, the a-hole) is completely torn apart) when I had my first baby. Long story short, you can stitch that up OK the first time, but the second time the scar tissue is not great to patch together again. And you really want that part of the body to work.

You can imagine it doesn’t if you give birth in a place where you don’t get a first-class surgery like I did. I cringe thinking about that.

Oh, and yes, it hurt. A lot. But I am fine now.

Here I realize that I should have a post about the body after giving birth. For many, giving birth is the beginning of lifelong serious trouble. If they survive. Right now a rising number of women, especially women of colour are dying giving birthing the US. Abortion restrictions doesn't help.

How and where, and even when women give birth is shaped by our systems and culture. I wish it could be shaped more by women themselves. Things would go better; the data shows that is the case. When women have doulas and midwives and not only doctors, and have a safe space and enough time, things flow better. No wonder, since this is, after all, a bodily process where a woman has to open up her body in the most extreme way.

Artwork by Kyle Leuck

My article on giving birth in two different ways

Dear Men, this is post 13, on pregnancy.

Pregnancy starts with a hunch. Maybe. We don’t know the moment we become pregnant - though we do know when we might have become pregnant!

And then at some point the period doesn’t come, and maybe the body starts feeling different. I got car sick riding a motorcycle, for instance. Something which doesn’t happen. And it also wasn’t the road’s curves that made me sick, it was my hormonal curves (progesterone) going off the charts and morning sickness (which by the way often lasts all day).

I knew I was pregnant when two lines on a test told me. I guess most women are told the news by this piece of plastic. The first two times I found out I was pregnant, I was in a public bathroom somewhere.

The body goes through a totally wild process. The uterus is the part of a human body that can transform the most. From fist sized to humongous and back again. Even our feet tend to go a size up (joints get looser). I can’t even begin to list all the expected and weird bodily experiences women have: cravings, the pregnancy glow, skin changes, mood, aches and an unexplainable ability to guess the gender of the baby (research has shown a 75% score) and on top of that the risk of pregnancy diabetes, preeclampsia and a myriad of other scary things that can happen to the mother.

Being pregnant is also a time of preparation. To the home maybe, to your identity, to giving birth. When I was pregnant with my first (not counting the two times I am pretty sure I was pregnant but had spontaneous abortions and my actual abortion) I did a birth preparation course focused on breathing. I swam 1 km every other day, ate zero sugar and lots of fish. I was tuned into my changing body, and pregnancy took a lot of mental space. Four years later when I was pregnant with my daughter I ran a startup, had a toddler, lived in a new country where I didn’t speak the language. I worked till the Friday before my planned c-section on Monday. Pregnancy had had to be almost unnoticed by myself, the world and also by my partner it felt like. I would have done this differently today, but that was how it went.

I have had easy pregnancies, and have liked seeing my belly grow and feel life inside. For others it’s hell. Physically and emotionally.

It’s nice when people give you their bus seat when you’re visibly pregnant but I needed it when I was so sick in the beginning. The world could just always assume a woman might be pregnant and know that she is vulnerable to chemicals, heat, emotional and economic distress and remember that when we build the world… and once she has a kid by the hand know that she has gone through the wildest thing.

Artwork by Kyle Leuck

Dear Men, this is post 11 on Being But Not Wanting To Be Pregnant.

I was 29 and I had sex with a man I had met four weeks earlier. To my big surprise, he came in me. I definitely should have used a condom and assuming, that he would pull out was really stupid. To this day, I don’t fully understand how that happened. But it did. And we agreed to marry and have the child. We made a date at the city hall. He was very, very poor. And I was just poor. I looked into immigration laws and realized I couldn’t afford to bring him with me to Denmark. How we would make a life in the US was a big unknown. And yeah, I also didn’t love him enough to go through anything to create a life with him. The morning of our planned wedding appointment, I woke up with a clear no. I told him and got a flight back to Denmark.

Many years later, I spent two years in a woman’s circle talking only about abortions from all imaginable angles. It was a wide and deep exploration, and it was healing and also painful. Not just to revisit my own story, but to feel deeply into this event that so, so many of us share. More than 50% of all pregnancies in the US are unplanned.

It made me understand how unable we are as society to help women make this incredibly hard decision, to think it through with them, to help her process it, mourn even when it’s a decision she makes herself. We, as societies, are absolutely crap at meeting and holding women in the process it is to find out you are unwanted pregnant, to feel the magic of growing a child, to decide to not go through with the pregnancy for a million reasons, to do the procedure, to live on after.

I know for a fact that the only one who has full information access is the woman herself. She, and only she, can and should make that decision. Held and supported by the dad if appropriate, by her web of caring humans, by the health care systems, and by society and in culture. She needs us.

Artwork by Kyle Leuck

Dear Men this is for you: post 14/29 on not becoming pregnant, sadly.

I have been lucky, but I have seen friends and women around me endure fertility treatments, freeze and thaw eggs, scramble money together, succeed or have it not work out. It is brutal.

I attended a conference on fertility treatment, and one number stood printed into my mind after: only 23% of the people who walk in the door to a fertility clinic walk out the door with a baby. That is 77% for whom it doesn’t work. And with the current infertility crisis (which is global) that a lot of hearts broken.

Not getting pregnant isn’t a woman’s problem. 40% of the times he has a fertility issue, 40% it’s hers, and in the last 20% we can’t see any obvious reasons for it not working.

Who gets to have paid fertility treatment is a political decision where the traditional heterosexual family structure is still being favored, so if you fall outside that norm you can add lack of access, rights and high costs to your list of agonies.

Infertility offers us some peculiar contradictions:

-We are possibly too many on the planet and yet some parts of the world have many old people and few young to care for them, so in for instance Europe and Japan there is a big political wish to encourage more child births.
-More chose not to have children while there are also more who experience the heart break of not having the children they wish.

As someone standing by as an onlooker, I have worries about where we draw ethical lines for technology in reproduction. That’s a separate issue, but potential one people have to grapple with too on their journeys.

I would love to hear your stories. What does it feel like not becoming pregnant when you want to have a child?

(Dear Men, the intro to this series on what it feels like to have a woman’s body in the comments.)

Artwork by Kyle Leuck