Deeply incompetent yet so very strong

I am going back to work tomorrow, because I am a workaholic, and cannot sit still for more than 5 minutes.  I figure that if I can crawl to the bathroom, I should be able to sit and do my job.  I might regret my decision, but we'll see.  

The incision looks great, every time I look at it I feel so happy, because I remember that I have a bionic cervix!  Yay!  (insert little victory dance). If I were to get pregnant, I have an 85-90% chance of holding a pregnancy to term, as opposed to my previously dismal 25% chance.  This gives me a lot of hope, and in a strange way, I feel much more confident in my everyday life, almost like I suddenly became more competent overnight.  And I don't just mean about reproduction.  I mean, I started blogging, didn't I?  why now, after years of considering it?  It's not like I have more to say than usual.  It's just that I have more confidence in myself. Aside note -- I even went so far as to record a little clip of myself playing piano and to post it on youtube.  (For those of you who have not heard me play the piano, that translates into A LOT of confidence). 

This makes me wonder, how deeply do the roots of the cervical incompetence/infertility run in my psyche? I mean, how can a bionic cervix make me more able to speak in cyberpublic?  It is something I have only started thinking about this week, so it might not make much sense when I put it into words for the first time, but I do think it is important to acknowledge it.  Infertility and incompetent cervix both made me feel like LESS of a person, less worthy, less confident.  Less overall.  It is something fertile people cannot understand.   It is something I cannot really understand, but on a very small scale I am starting to feel it.   

Sometimes men, after their vasectomy, will talk about feeling a similar sense of diminishment.  And a vasectomy is a voluntary process, on the conscious level.   This goes to show that our reproductive ability seems to be deeply linked with our feelings of worthiness as human beings, or as members of society.  What's worse is that a big part of this self-demotion happens on a subconscious level, so many people are not even aware of it.  It might be interesting to know if infertile women or men are more likely to be involved in abusive marriages, or if they are less assertive at work.  Or perhaps even the opposite, more assertive in an effort to cover up the underlying insecurity that comes from having reproductive problems (I was going to write "reproductively defective", but that would be the Voice talking in mean terminology, and I will not allow Her to write on my blog).  

On the other hand, infertile women know that they are strong.  Stronger than the average stuff.  We are not afraid of needles, procedures, pain.  We know the art of swallowing hard and plastering a smile on, since we do it every day.  We can hold off on crying until we get off the phone.  While most people get to live through crushing disappointment every once in a while, we get to live through one every month.  Infertility molds a woman out of steel.  I can honestly say that had I conceived Adrian easily and had I never had the infertility battle to get through first, I would not have done as well as I did after his stillbirth.  I had already dealt, in part, with the feeling of dying one thousand deaths inside.  I had already come to terms with the fact that my body was not reproductively inclined.  I already knew that despite feeling desperately depressed, one day I would be able to crawl out of bed again and start living.  Somehow for me, unexplained infertility turned into strong-like-a-rock-ness, and incompetent cervix turned into...well, a bionic one.