Essay: when you’ve got ovaries, every choice is a public debate
the creation story of Expiration Date
Essay by Lana Filies
When I began writing Expiration Date, a play that finally opens on the Meraki Arts Bar stage this Saturday, I was struggling to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I was living in Wollongong amid the 2021 COVID lockdowns, and I had officially crossed that imaginary line from “early” to “mid” twenties. With that transition came expectations, and tense dinner conversations with family members. I was living with my long-term partner, five years into our relationship. Everyone I knew was expecting a ring, a dog, a house, and a baby.
I spent my lockdown time feeling like a shell. Spending all my time at home, out of necessity, I found myself not wanting anything on the list of things people were expecting. I missed performing. I missed who I was while I was at work, on the stage. The thing that gave me all my spark and passion was wrapped up in a spotlight, in a theatre that was sitting dormant. I had to reckon with what gave me fulfilment and, to my dismay, I couldn’t find the answers at home.
I spent nights lying awake and staring at the ceiling, while my dearly beloved partner lay next to me. I began to journal about what I wanted and what I was thinking. I spoke to other women in my life – who each had a different take on my feelings, but all agreed that they wanted more than they were expected to want. Then, one night, after a week of sleepless nights, I finally fell asleep. Of course, I had a dream that I was trapped in an elevator with my ex.
In the dream, I stared my ex in the face as he asked:
“What do you want in life?”
I watched his face darken in anger as I asked myself:
“Do I really value my career over the prospect of starting a family?”
I woke up in a cold sweat, grabbed my journal, and began to write. I was determined to answer the questions for myself, hoping that the answers I found might be enough for everyone placing their expectations on me. As I went, I found myself unpacking years of assumptions about the life I would have, internal and external, that had dictated my choices until now. I realised that not every choice I made had been for me. In fact, most of them hadn’t been.
When I was eleven years old, I was diagnosed with Endometriosis and Polycystic Ovaries. I remember sitting across from a male gynaecologist as he explained to me that there was a cyst the size of a grapefruit on my right ovary. I remember being asked:
“Do you want to have children? Because we can try and save your ovary.”
As a child, I was asked to make that choice.
Obviously, I didn’t fully understand the question. It was full of adult words and expecting looks. If I said no, the adults in the room would have spoken over me anyway. How on earth was little me supposed to make that choice? What power did I have over my body that day when one: I didn’t even know what an ovary was or what it did, and two: I hadn’t yet been able to decide what colour dress I wanted to wear to my year six formal.
So I said yes, and that choice had huge percussions from age eleven all the way through my teenage years. I constantly went to have ultrasounds, which led to incessant rumours in my Catholic high school that I was pregnant. Now, in my twenties, in my hetero-presenting, long-term relationship the question is being asked again.
“Do you want to have children?”
But what they’re really asking is:
“When are you going to have children?”
My answer is always:
“Never. I don’t want them.”
Choice is a loaded word when you’re talking about the healthcare of women (and people with uteruses). We seem to have collectively decided that women don’t deserve to make choices about their bodies. That isn’t limited to the issue of abortion. When you ask eleven-year-old girls to make choices and don’t give them the chance to understand those choices, there is a problem. When a woman walks into a doctor's office and is dismissed until she collapses from the pain of endometriosis, there is a problem. When the healthcare of women is so often mishandled, women are at risk.
As this play developed from my inner thoughts, and my realisation of exactly which choice I wanted to make, I went again to the other women in my life. I had open, honest conversations with women I admire, many of whom are living lives I want to achieve. Others are living the opposite. All of them have had choices forced on them at some point. With these women, I felt less alone in that sense of lost choice, and I felt empowered to take my life back. In the process of writing Expiration Date, I have become secure in saying that work takes priority in my life. That I am allowed to choose my work and my passion over starting a family. That I can do all of these things without being some cold, heartless bitch.
On the day we first showed the play to people, it took on a strange sense of urgency. In a development week in June 2022, we entered the room with Roe v. Wade in place. By the time we presented the show to an audience of friends, Roe v. Wade had been overturned. This show about the personal choices I was desperate to claim back for myself became about the choices all women are denied the chance to make. As I wrote, I felt every word with my whole body as this story became a vessel of the truth that lives within me and so many other women.
Expiration Date is about the power and necessity of individual choice. It doesn’t care to cast the characters as heroes or villains. Nor does it paint me as a perfect woman. Instead, it explores the desperate need for women to be given the chance to choose their own paths. It cries out for a little understanding for those of us who don’t follow the path all the way to that storybook ending.
Expiration Date plays at the Meraki Arts Bar until 13 May. Find tickets here.
Images by Lily Hayman
Lana loves the colour pink, a cosmo and a good ocean swim (in that order). She hates when people ask her if she wants to have kids, but will definitely yell at you about it anyway.
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