Between the Legs by Madison Chapman

I can be many people: partner, friend, child, sibling.  But I can’t really be a woman, I tell myself.  Not like I was. 

The empty toilet has also told me this, time and time again. Still I sit, cramped in the bathroom of a creaky ski cabin, waiting for the bloom of red-brown-California poppy, sea spray and crimson tide. I sit, hoping I’ll start shedding again, as I have each month since girlhood, into a new and more vital version of myself.  The plastic seat warms under me like the baked sand of all my young, naive San Diego summers. An old faucet mocks me with fat, languid drips.

My period will not come this month— just like last month and the month before. I am not pregnant. I am not sick— not anymore. I’m somewhere between ill and well, woman and other, dried up like the California desert that raised me. 

***

The diagnosis lands my first week of exams in graduate school. Boston is blue with winter, oak trees barren outside my clapboard white house, shared with people I don’t really know, a cold woman from Minnesota and a stubborn, surly ex-Marine who is, at most, indifferent to me. Maple leaves compost beneath lilting snow, veiny tree trunks cooking up syrup for tapping in March. 

I’d sprawled prostrate on cold metallic tables all through that weak, uncertain season, cloaked in over-washed hospital gowns, plunging in and out of MRI and CT machines like a baptism, as vintage Madonna—patron saint of medical offices, of the DMV—sang “Like a Prayer” on loop. I’d remained awake on crinkling paper as long needles probed under my arm, shaking my generous breasts, vacuuming out microscopic matter, each cell sucked mercilessly into the test tube the doctor would analyze to determine if my body had abandoned me. 

Library, the evening before my first exam: I get the call confirming what I already know.

I look down at my veins, indigo soft under my forearms, twilight purple. I’d often stroked the feather-down skin just above my pulse, the only part of my arms I admired. Feminine and smooth, they’d escaped Grandpa’s hairy genetic curse.

Now each vein thumps and sighs, deceitful accomplices in the transport of contaminated blood. I clench my phone, hard, and passively pull out my dogeared notepad, astute as ever—ready to jot down the hour-to-minute schedule of where I would need to go and what I would need to do to learn if I would live. 

Stacks of books recede into the distance as I drift, trance-like, into the land of the sick.  

The lump in my neck was not Lyme disease, like my primary care physician had said, but rather, a slow-growing mass, a grain of sand, coaxed by time and pressure and inflammation into a stuck pearl, hard and oval, calcifying for who knows how long, while I slept, worked, loved.

Pivoting, I announce to no one: I need to go home.  

An hour later I lay, cradled in a friend’s lap, shocked into silence, rivulets of saltwater dripping into my mouth. 

***

When I was ten, Dad gave me my first surfing lesson. I listened intently to his instructions, straddling the too-big board as gentle waves glittered around me like fool’s gold. I could have stayed out there forever, calmed by the lullaby of seagulls, soaking up the dying rays of summer, all knobby hips and constellations of freckles spray-splattered across my nose.  Kisses from the sun, Mom called them. That was before all of it— before the bras and eyeliner and blush, before the boyfriends I kissed in the Costco parking lot. 

By the time I was in middle school, I’d already shaved my legs. The first time, I swam in a sea of little hairs, floating ant-like into my bathtub, admonishing me not to miss a spot. The older ladies in my conservative suburb told Mom I was advanced for my age, with my sleek seal calves and bronzed skin. Mom showed me how to use a tampon when I was still clipping my hair in barrettes. 

When my period finally came, heralded by thick heat between my thighs and flushed cheeks in the middle of summer camp, I sat poolside and pretended to hate swimming, while my classmates splashed and somersaulted below towering fir trees and whispered about me. The sticky fluid soiled my panties, and I learned the secret language of the initiated: slyly slipping thin plastic tubes to each other, whispering I’ve got you girl. 

Back at school that fall, I felt pursued by a news ticker: We have a woman over here! 

***

My oncologist tells me that chemotherapy might make me infertile, but there’s really no way to know for sure.

Children had always been an abstract concept rather than something I proactively yearned for, something for later. I’m only 24, after all. Yet the weight of not having descends like a soft fog, and the potential denial of something I now, to my sudden shock, desperately want, sweeps me under. 

Because it is slow-growth cancer, I have the luxury of time. Time enough to—if I want— preserve my eggs for about $12,000. 

I begin to joke: Put those babies on ice! and always receive a round of deep throated, nervous giggles. The only thing people love more than a martyr is a cancer patient who, with a hefty dose of self-deprecation, pokes fun at the invisible enemy so no one has to fidget with sympathy or sorrow or what to say. 

 Exam season bleeds into Christmas. It’s been three-weeks since that shattering phone call— treatment will begin soon. I fly home to California, hug my dogs. I ask my family for scarves, cerulean with white paisley and red, like bloody, brilliant coastal sunsets. I find Great-Grandma’s dusty bandanas in the closet and wonder what unregulated old-timey material they are made of, if they’re flammable or safe to put on my malignant neck.

When evening falls, I stalk the house, reeking with past versions of me. Innocent Prom corsages still pinned to a corkboard. A Coco Chanel quote, scrawled in a teenager’s loopy cursive on a Post-It stuck to my vanity mirror. To be irreplaceable, you must always be different. A deeply stained cloth plush doll that I once slept with nightly, known only as Special Baby. 

For the holiday, Mom buys me a cropped Eileen Fisher sweater from Goodwill. It brushes my still-small waist, cinched from outdoor soccer and dance class and women’s lacrosse, where we wore kilts instead of pants and weren’t allowed to get too rowdy. The sweater highlights my long, beach-blonde hair, especially brilliant now in the low winter San Diego sun and all too aware, perhaps, that it’s about to fall out, strand by silky strand.

My hair has always made me feel beautiful, even when I despised my changing body. It bears the stories of my adolescence: white streaks at the top from solar overexposure, brittle ends from hours playing make-believe mermaids and swallowing bitterly chlorinated pool water. Lazy sun-soaked afternoons that turned into balmy, star-studded nights. Papery Santa Ana winds, which knotted each strand until Mom had to coax out the tangles with peanut butter. Darker wisps hinting at Dad and his long-gone sweep of thick, black surfer locks. The fuzz at the nape of my neck, once slick from banana-scented Coppertone sunscreen, that grew bristlier once I sprouted hair under my arms and around my groin and grew tall enough to forge my own way. 

It tickles my back as I strut, with forced optimism, into the fertility center.

The fertility clinic is perched on a limestone cliff, the 101 slowly crumbling into the gently undulating shoreline below. Inside, white walls meet white pleather couches, white sun glints off white porcelain bowls brimming with quaint white mints, offset by gold, pink, and green, reminding me what this is: organized, clean, a place for women. 

And for now, I am still one of them. 

***

The hormone shots I keep in my parents’ freezer leave my stomach yellow and puckered. 

Each day for two weeks, I fill the syringe, flick the top to expel any extra fluid, grab a roll of stomach, and jab. One shot for the plane ride back to San Diego from Boston. One shot to the cloying jingle of Frosty the Snowman. One for the intermission of the Nutcracker, in a gilded bathroom with Spanish-revival tiling and neatly folded paper towels and older women in fur and gold-drop earrings gabbing about the prima ballerina. Toilet paper keeps sticking to my shoes and the compact stall is barely wide enough for my sharp elbows. Barely large enough for the whole ridiculous situation I’m in—pumping myself with estrogen in the Performing Arts Center where I once danced, with electric adolescent fingers, a sequined leotard, and the first hint of a chest to Material Girl. 

***

Growing up, I thought I was different. Other girls in my Southern California suburb flirted and hung out at the mall, but I was more serious. I sat on the newspaper and in the student government, read Tolstoy and Beckett, and listened religiously to NPR. A huge carafe of coffee sat atop my desk each day at school, and on the weekends, I ate Thai and Afghan food downtown. I studied late at night, watched 500 Days of Summer and then cut my bangs short like Zoe Deschanel, and wore bright red lipstick, Mac VivaGlam #1. I was practically a grown woman: refined, sophisticated, cultured. 

But I still waited anxiously for Seventeen Magazine and looked to Cosmopolitan for “10 Ways to Please a Man.” I hated my belly fat and secretly loved the murderous smell of Abercrombie and Fitch and gossiped constantly. I consulted the mirror daily as a tween and high school freshman to see if my breast buds had popped into little triangles, and then later, tangerines and grapefruits, filling out like American Girls’ Big Book of You! said they would. 

I never thought about my relationship to this script I’d been handed. I never even considered what it meant to be feminine because I’d dutifully, effortlessly claimed the role, so desperate to be good. I cleared each hurdle with ease, flourishing in the delicious structure of it all. 

***

With each shot I feel my body, my femininity, deconstructing, becoming more like a shriveled pear— less supple, bloated in its rush to begin reproducing in a few short weeks. 

My brain moves like cotton-candy clouds in a turquoise sky, always somewhere to be, never where I am. By January, 32 eggs plump, and the ultrasound technician tells me: You’re exceptionally fertile for your age! with an approving wink. I do not tell her: Good, because it may be the last chance I get! 

I cut my holiday short to have them removed and stored in a freezer somewhere in Massachusetts. As my plane crests to cruising altitude, we pass the harbor, the Coronado Bridge—Torrey Pines and hang gliders not far beyond it, caressing the tips of the waves like the gulls and pelicans do. As the familiar skyline of America’s Finest City recedes beyond my field of vision, I wonder if I’ll ever come back here, to this urban sprawl of beauty and privilege where I grew out of girlhood to face the world. 

Back in Boston, they slurp the eggs out of me with a vacuum while I’m under, they insert a long rod into me and take a trans-vaginal ultrasound, they tell me This will be cold, and While we are here, shall we replace your IUD? Even though I am already seconds away from the twilight sleep, though I can hardly say yes, heavy with artificial slumber as my body surrenders to harsh realities outside my control.  

*** 

Menopause comes quickly the next semester, especially after the Lupron shots that temporarily shut down my ovaries, so I can protect my remaining eggs throughout cancer treatment.

Injected into my right glute, the shots make sitting impossible. I’m back in graduate school now, several rounds of chemotherapy later and with thinning hair, twenty extra pounds, a double chin, and a clammy pallor. Outside, late March brings the rabid honking of geese, flying south from Canada. Tulips and daffodils begin to push out their earliest shoots, despite snow still hiding in the shady corners of colonial-era brick townhouses and a thin veneer of frost on the Charles. But I constantly fan myself with papers, books. In a professor’s office one day, she asks: Are you okay? 

We chuckle because she’d recently had a hot flash too. 

Sex is easier than expected given this hormonal rollercoaster, though they said I wouldn’t want it. For a moment, it’s enough to feel laid bare every time someone tells me I look great, as if it matters, when we all know I am hollow and haunted.

But after a few months of treatment, desire consumes me. I want to lay down naked so I can watch the newly bulbous hills and valleys of my body flatten out silkily, handsomely, so the next time I stop in front of a mirrored window I can remember that my corpse-like skin makes my breasts pinker, that anxiety and bloating make my curves fuller, and in that fullness try to find a way back to myself. 

Every glass door, every placid pond, a chance to ask, half-serious, half-mocking, whether I would look this huge when I was pregnant. 

And then I remember: I might never get pregnant. And keep walking. 

***

A year or so has passed since then, enough time to go into remission, to return to the land of the living. I push through social and medical anxiety to spend a ski weekend with my family. It’s Christmas again, but I’m still bathroom-bound. I wait, wiping incessantly until something appears, even if it’s just a spot of rust. It smells like iron. But it looks like curdled milk, like egg whites, and boots thumping up the hollow stairs jolt me. I stand, topple as if I’ve been caught, abruptly reminded that outside the stormy sea of my mind there’s this house, this tiny vacation cabin, full of people and plans. 

I schedule an appointment with the OB/GYN for the fourth, fifth time in a year, sending more photos of my discharge over the secure patient portal: What is this? My search history is full of queries to Healthline and WebMD: Why has my period stopped? Pinkish discharge, a problem? Abdominal cramps and no period, bleeding after sex—cancer? 

I’m convinced it has come for me again. I am more alert than perplexed. More shell-shocked than upset. Plenty of women lose their periods. But I am not plenty of women. 

Even in remission, I analyze every ache, on the hunt for lumps and bumps and signs the other shoe has dropped. I worry constantly that my period has gone, not for a benign reason, but because I have some other cancer, some other illness, reserved for the female body: ovaries, uterus, cervix, breasts, these things I once thought made me a woman. I am falling water, the black behind my eyelids when I sleep. I’m less a woman than the sum of dozens of organs and tissues, all of which can get sick. 

***

In the OB/GYN waiting room a few weeks later, my body is a sliver of the radiant pregnant women all around me. How would it feel to look forward to paying the parking meter, the first handshake with the doctor, the cold gel and robotic ultrasound and little head and murmurous heartbeat, in perfectly fuzzy greyscale? This once casual wish has become a core need: perhaps the softness of motherhood will make me whole again. I long to connect to the animal experience of childbirth, to be inundated with all the feral intensity of the human experience— the female experience. 

To be sick, to float between hospitals, to have yet another scan, feels natural to me now. I struggle to believe my gynecologist when he says, again, that nothing is wrong, clipping the speculum neatly. Your body has just changed. 

***

During that first surfing lesson, before the mascara and thongs and lipstick, Dad quizzed me: If you are ever caught in a rip current, what do you do? 

You swim to the side, as hard as you can, I replied. 

I have yet to fully grasp how to swim in the complex waters of illness and gender identity. I may never stop grieving the red tide that counted time for me, month after month. I will wonder whether I am fertile, and worry I’m not, until I try for a baby and fail. 

But I am sure of one thing: in a rip current, you can never go back the way you came. 

I’d never thought much about what being a woman meant to me until I lost my long hair, became less graceful, took up more space, stopped bleeding. Cancer siphoned away the femininity and bodily autonomy I’d taken for granted. Yet for all it stole away, it also forced me to be resilient. To lean on and forge community, bonds of friendship and feminism and mutual aid in a time of crisis, to embrace my values and let them guide me. To learn new ways to claim my gender, for me and me alone.

So I keep swimming to the side, hard, even if progress is slow.  It’s the path of least resistance, and the joy of one strong stroke after another, toward a new destination on the same beach. 

I can already sense what I will find there: that my womanhood is not in my politeness or beauty, or my sex drive or ability to bear a child; it is not in my errant cells, dividing the wrong way to make me ill. 

It is just who I am.

Madison Chapman is a writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, Outside, Newsweek, and elsewhere. Her work focuses on health equity, mental health and survivorship, and outdoor travel. She is a humanitarian worker based in Washington, D.C. Learn more on her Instagram: @madisoniswriting.

23 July 2026