It was
never going to happen
That was a fact
And it tore me up
Because I wanted a family more than I could put into words
I wonder sometimes now if I’d only been braver
Could I have gone through with it?
I went there of course, in my mind, to the what if place.
But the ‘what
if’ was too scary
And you know what the clincher was?
Letting my dad down.
Getting pregnant with no father in the picture
And maybe it would have, maybe not
In retrospect, I would have met Marty 3 months later.
Would he have stuck it out with me, with a single mom of a 3 month old?
Would I have quit drinking?
Hard to know
Too late to know now
She would be 8 now
The only time I’ve ever cried about her
Is while hearing my 8 year old niece play piano
Taking the pregnancy test, that moment
in that bathroom changed me
I held the secret baby in my mind and in my womb for about a month
Not allowed to have an abortion yet
Not willing
to be hated for a whole month
So instead I tortured myself for 3 weeks and decided Id make him hate me for
only one week
Well, forever, but you know.
I remember being in the aisle at ikea.
Him living his best life, me about to ruin it.
And being unable to keep it in anymore.
Almost saying it there.
But I couldn’t ruin Ikea for him also.
I waited till we got home
And then I ruined his life.
and I don’t remember much about how he reacted
The actual abortion was just an afternoon.
The saddest waiting room I’ve ever seen.
A black teenage boy trying to nap under his coat
The nurses were kind and asked me what happened. I didn’t know what I was
supposed to say. Should I tell them everything? But they didn’t want to hear
everything. They just wanted to make sure I wasn’t taking it lightly. How could
anyone take this lightly? It’s the heaviest I’ve ever felt in my whole life.
They directed me into the operation area. I was surprised by how many people were
getting an abortion at one time. There must have been 5 or 6 girls I passed in
any given room. One was a tom boy being loud out of nervousness. One was pretty
and athletic and younger than me. All of them my sisters now. All of them made
me feel more ok.
There was a poem painted on the wall, we all read it in our hospital gowns. It essentially
said, a woman knows when the time is right. A woman knows what is right. If the
time isn’t now that’s ok, your time will come. That was the gist of it anyway.
At the procedure I remember the doctor being really nice to me, and it felt
like it had been a long time since someone had been nice to me. I felt relief, that
while one woman is going through so much turmoil, other women can still be nice
to them.
The drugs hit me fast. Drugged up me was told it was over, and I asked 2x if
they were sure it was gone. I needed to know it had worked.
The next part was the hardest. Laying on a bed for 20 minutes in a row of other
women laying on beds recovering. That part was scary and lonely. The nausea that
had been plaguing me for weeks, finally up and left.
Chris picked me up, I could tell he was nervous. He said the wrong thing about
5x and that was it.
We didn’t even break up right away, it took another year. But that’s ok. We
both needed time in comfort to recover from what happened maybe.
