Series Six: 08. Orange Red

Deciding to decide

Story

What’s the oldest thing in your freezer? The bottom drawer of mine has chunks from two different placentas, many bags of breast milk, a few tabs of acid, and an old intrauterine device—an IUD.

I consumed most of the placentas when they were still fresh. I held on to the remaining material in hopes of one day planting it under a tree at our forever home, which hasn’t materialized yet. The breast milk is long past viable but hard earned, so I’m keeping it to plant under the future tree along with the placentas. The acid is still in there because, well, you never know.

The IUD is the one item that the freezer isn’t actually preserving. I guess I just didn’t know what else to do with it. When I got it taken out I knew I wanted to keep it (for Art of course). The nice midwife who removed it put it in a specimen jar, the kind they use to collect urine samples. Life was busy with a toddler so I must have gotten home and just chucked it in the freezer thinking I would deal with it later. When we moved houses I tossed it in a cooler with the rest of the stuff in the freezer.

When it came time to start working on Orange Red I instantly knew this piece would involve IUDs. But for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to open the freezer to actually look at the IUD before I started writing. Not unlike the IUD I have in my uterus right now, which I trust is there but can’t look at either. I kept adding “IUD photoshoot” to my to-do list and finding reasons to put it off.

That was until I found myself elbow deep in pumpkins.

That IUD made way for my second kid. He’s now in first grade. The week of Halloween, his class was doing a project called “Pumpkin Math” where they measured pumpkins, noting their circumference and weight, and counting the seeds. The teacher asked for parent volunteers but I wasn’t able to make it to the classroom that particular Wednesday morning. I felt a little bad about it. I made sure to donate a pumpkin and signed up to roast all the pumpkin seeds at home so the kids could eat them. That day his teacher handed me a plastic baggie with over 2,000 seeds! I set them out to dry on a couple baking trays, thinking I’d roast the seeds once they had released all their moisture in a day or two.

Then it was Halloween. Our street closed off car traffic for the second year in a row so there was a block party right in front of our house, people streaming in and out for hours. The seeds weren’t dry enough to roast yet so I stacked the trays out of the way and promptly forgot about them until the next night around midnight, when I came home from performing in a burlesque show as a sequin-covered pickle and saw the seeds sitting on top of the washing machine. They smelled a little funky. Looking closer a few had new black spots, tiny but undeniable.

I did not want to be responsible for ruining Pumpkin Math, but neither did I want to be responsible for poisoning a whole classroom. All 2,000 seeds went into the compost and I went to sleep, questioning my merit as a mother and a community member.

The next morning I decided I would not and could not let down the class. They would get their dang pumpkins seeds.

We still had three fully intact pumpkins on the roof, spared the knife because my daughter had painted them with the letters “B,” “O”,” and “O.” When you’re preparing a pumpkin for a jack o’lantern you have to be pretty thorough, scraping every loose strand of flesh lest it rot before Halloween. If you are carving at a party, the knives and the kids and the piles of pumpkin guts create total chaos. This was the opposite. There was something liberating about scooping seeds in the sunshine alone, peaceful even.

I got into a flow state, saving seed after seed, meditating on how wild it was to be emptying these giant reproductive organs. A little violent, but isn’t any act of food preparation? These beautiful orange cavities were not unlike wombs.

Then it occurred to me: this is where my IUD needs to be photographed.

I quickly finished scraping the seeds and set them aside, practically vibrating with anticipation. I fished the specimen cup out of the freezer, plucked out my IUD, and plopped it into the pumpkin. Orange Red: Pumpkin plus IUD with traces of blood still clinging to the strings seven years later. I guess I was saving it for Art afterall.

After thoroughly washing my hands, I laid out the new seeds on the baking trays again and put them in the oven to dry (why hadn’t thought of that before?). Then I roasted them and they were ready for Monday morning dropoff.

Maybe I imagined it, but when I handed the seeds to the teacher she gave them a little shake and gave me a suspicious look. There were a lot of seeds, but noticeably fewer than she’d given me. I told her that there was a funny story I could tell her later, but then there was never really time and the moment kind of passed.

Hopefully the kids didn’t count the seeds again before eating them.

Before I got pregnant, IUDs scared me. After getting pregnant, I got an IUD placed pretty much as soon as I could. I removed that to have a second kid, then got another put right back in.

Now I think we are done having kids. No, I know we are done having kids. But I am also done with having this thing in my uterus. It’s been great! As someone super sensitive to hormonal birth control, I am so glad and grateful the copper IUD has been an option! But I have never really experienced my post-birth body without one. And while I am not generally conscious of it all the time, my IUD is potentially the culprit for all sorts of discomforts I experience somewhat regularly, from cramps to infections. Those side effects are preferable to the side effect of unintentionally creating a human. I would totally continue to put up with them or any other method of birth control if there wasn’t another better way: vasectomy.

I’ve been prevailing on my partner to get this procedure for months, for years now. If we know we are done having kids, why not just have an outpatient procedure and move on? Why not stop sperm at the source instead of continually messing with my body in one way or another? Isn’t it his turn to take on the burden of family size management, one with practically zero side effects after recovery? Well, yes. And now he finally has an appointment. A date on the calendar. I should rejoice.

So why am I scared?

Getting an IUD says “not now.” Though technically reversible, getting a vasectomy says “not ever again.” It’s not so much the outcome as the act of declaration that’s frightening. It’s a big gesture to declare this chapter of our lives over. Of course, no form of birth control is perfectly successful, so who knows what could happen from here, but looking at each other and saying “we’re done” is exerting control over the long term arc of our lives.

It’s also scary because I am asking him to do it. What if something goes wrong? Would it be My Fault? But what about all the risk I’ve put my own body through to create this family in the first place?

And it’s not like the bodily risk ends for me. While I might experience a new kind of bodily freedom without an IUD, I would also be newly vulnerable to pregnancy again. In a political climate where some people want to restrict access to IUDs, it seems like a strange time to get it removed.

But I have to go with my gut here, which is that it is time to move on. I don’t need a precise answer for why I need it out.. Wanting it out is enough.

By the way, the IUD is back in the bottom of the freezer in that specimen cup, pumpkin guts coating the strings along with that old blood. Orange Red. Maybe I’ll take it out of the freezer again once I get this one removed and make a pair of earrings. Or maybe they’ll both live in the bottom of my freezer indefinitely.

Divinatory Meaning

Orange Red is Creation and the Body, Creation and Life. Creative Control. What you choose to create and what you choose not to create. While it can be about the creation of bodies, Orange Red also points to the start of any creative act: you need a body in order to create.

Orange Red is about establishing creative conditions: making the commitment, setting the routine, and showing up. While you can initiate the process, the result is not entirely up to you. Metaphorically or literally, the egg fertilizes or not, the zygote implants or not. At some point it’s a collaboration with forces outside of yourself. So while Orange Red is about Creative Control, it is also Surrender, making a choice and surrendering to the outcome.

The difficulty of making a decision comes from fear of relinquishing control and fear of exerting control. In the time when you are weighing a decision, everything feels like it is still possible. In fact, it’s more like suspended animation: nothing can move forward until you make that choice. All of the doors are still closed. Once you make that decision, some doors may lock, but others will actually open.

Red is life, survival, blood. The IUD in this image is made with copper, a metal as well as a color you could describe as orange red. That IUD’s job is to assure that blood keeps flowing, that the uterus it’s in doesn’t become host to a fetus. If Orange Red shows up in a reading, you may ask: where are you stagnating? Where do you need to release, maybe even energetically menstruate so you can begin creating conditions for your new dream?

Orange Red can also point to physical solutions. Rather than just an intellectual, emotional, or energetic shift, Orange Red calls for tangible adjustments, acted on decisively. These solutions can be quite practical but you may need to get creative to see them, dispensing with guilt or fear to find a way you may not have seen before. Orange Red can also help delineate what is yours to do and what isn’t yours to do, either stepping up to take responsibility or handing burdens that aren’t yours to their rightful owner.

You can think of Rainbow Squared as having seven cycles of seven. Orange Red is the first piece in the Orange cycle, but coming right after the end of the first cycle it’s like a bonus piece in the Red cycle. This is the only piece in the system where the color “bleeds” over from the last piece of one cycle into the first piece of the next first cycle. You can think of this as the Body exerting its importance, saying “I’m still here.” If you are neglecting your body in some way, now is a good time to pay attention to it.