pregnancy

Am I Able To Do This??
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Am I Able To Do This??

Many thoughts and questions go through my head with the world of ignorance we live in today. How do I keep going? Will I be successful? Will I be able to have the dream family, dream lifestyle, dream anything that I want? Sitting back and deeply thinking, you won’t know unless you do something for yourself and those protective around you. Being a young Afro-Latina in today’s society is hard, whether it’s in terms of pregnancy, civilization, or my own self-image. I come from a family line of women who dealt with traumatic pregnancy terms, or even reproductive issues in itself. A line of men who have suffered from cancers varying from lung to low blood cell count leading to other health issues. Thinking about starting my own family scares me. I always track back to the story my mom told me: the doctors didn’t catch my faint, irregular heartbeat at eight, almost nine months. The umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck. What if that were to be me in about 6-7 years with my first born and I’m not conscious of it? Or if I am ignorant and decide to not get check ups and discover something too late? I always tend to think the negative rather the positive, so clearly that’s a sign of something psychically that I need to work on.

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Having a Child Means Dying Here

I cried while watching Aftershock when it first premiered, and I cried again when I had to watch it for this class. Of course, it is because I am a black AFAB person. Of course, I don’t like seeing women and birthing people die because they wanted to bring a new life into the world. But I have the hardest time watching that film because my own mother nearly died trying to give birth to me.

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Things We’re All Too Young to Know

I read a lot of fanfiction. (Like, a lot.) I even write some. For those who aren’t familiar with the phenomenon, it can seem a strange and alien landscape. Some authors and actors welcome it, others revile it, but most would rather not know what their characters get up to in their readers’ and viewers’ heads. There’s even fanfiction written about real people—even if they’re in an alternate universe where magic works and the boys in that one band are firefighters or werewolves instead.

One fanfic trope that fascinates me and is particularly relevant to this class is that of mpreg, or male pregnancy. Continue reading →

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weight conscious

Forget what a doctor has told me….I’m terrified of what my family has shown me. My lovely, intelligent, role model maternal grandmother died in her early 50s. Even though, she was a neonatal nurse that walked the halls of John Hopkins, she was obese. My big hearted but small statured nana was about my height 5 feet, sadly weighed around 300 pounds. In the last years of her life I saw her suffer from diabetes, heart complications and probably other complications Continue reading →