What if my body was only my body?

I was reading an interview on NPR this morning in which the interviewee discusses her acceptance that fertility treatments wouldn't work for her. She's quoted as having found liberation in the thought "What if my body was only my body?" I was struck by how her journey, though quite different from my own—unlike me, she'd hoped to carry another life within her—converges with mine, meeting me where I've always wanted to be.

I got to feel like I owned my own body for a brief time, running a couple of miles on Friday and climbing the silks yesterday for the first time since mid-March. IVF cycle day 2 marked roughly the end of the safe window, a few days when my body was only my body in between healing from one egg retrieval and gearing up for the next during back-to-back cycling.

Tough as I'm finding this year's journey, there's a decent chance it may work. I may find myself in the unique position where my body will get to be only my body, and yet I may have the chance to be a biological mom, a privilege few cis-gender women in the history of our species have ever had. I'm thrilled and I'm scared and I don't want to start hoping too soon. But if, if... If this all works, I'm afraid of what people will say, of how our own families may react: the judgment, the discouraging words, the lack of support at a time when we'd need it most. I'm afraid that our child, if we're lucky enough to have one, might one day hate me for having made the choice to preserve a bodily autonomy that every father gets to enjoy by default.

Through those moments of doubt, I take comfort as did NPR's interviewee knowing that my body is only my body, a liberating thought indeed.