The Trauma Olympics

On Bumble, the options in front of me: have kids, want kids, don’t want more kids, not sure yet. I only know I want a family. I’ll look at a woman with an expensive purse and fantasize about how she got it. Then I’ll wonder how did she acquire enough self-esteem to let someone buy her Chanel.

I hold all my dates outside over coffee. Carefully, we fork over each other’s stories. I delicately navigate pieces of my past. I want to appear viable. One date is trivia night. Everyone is impossibly hip, beautiful and lit from within. A producer I just met jokes about how much trauma you have to have to make it in Hollywood. No matter how bad your trauma is there’s always someone with better trauma. This is the trauma Olympics, she insists. I laugh. I like her.

My trauma is the best. I smoked pot at age six, because my mother had moved us from Canada. Draped in lingerie, reading tarot cards while water bong bonding with her violent drug dealer, she was the picture of ‘chemical imbalance’. I desperately wanted to cling to being Canadian, so I did what all wholesome Canadian girls do and read Anne of Green Gables. A few years afterwards, when I am nine, maybe ten, I narrowly escape assault. I know I’ll never get the facts straight because that night under those Big Sur stars, my brain is shaken around. Some pieces stay. Some pieces don’t. I remember going into the shower so at breakfast my mother will see that my hair is still wet.

To prep for him, they give me a robe to put on. I splay my legs out in a butterfly. The hot wax she applies around my vagina is a feeling I love. She tells me to breathe in and out, and rips the hair off of my body. Are you a mom, she asks? I breathe in for three and out for four, thinking, I want to be. I smile. Ridiculous how hopeful one dinner date can make me feel. Now pull your legs up. Let’s do the asshole.

I look for the trauma option on Bumble. As I look, the trauma mushrooms. I’m divorced. Even though I’ve had endometriosis for twenty years, I’m pretty sure my left ovary has about six viable months left, and the earth itself has maybe eight months left, so having kids is still something I want. I ask my Bumble man if he wants kids. A long monologue follows about choices. I start to panic and mentally move to move to any city that will let me age because if I stay in LA, there are no men that will let me. This is what my therapist a trauma specialist (not to brag) calls ‘scanning for danger’.

The next morning, the gynecologist inserts the speculum, and asks, are you seeing anyone? Boyfriend? Girlfriend? Breathing out, I say, Noooooo, but tell her I just had a promising dinner with someone. She smiles and removes her gloves, and hands me a fifty percent off coupon for a fertility specialist. My trauma scanning radar seems to be on the fritz. I’ll have to do without it on this one.

I take the coupon like it’s a gold medal I just won.

~Ivana Shein

Ivana Shein is a second generation Canadian playwright and comic, who moonlights as an actor.