Decisions
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I still think about how life would be different if I had had his baby. I’d be tied to him and his horrible family, forever, always struggling to keep them from indoctrinating my child. Sure, I could soak him for support, but I’d have to share the most precious thing in my life with someone I consider to have been a fluke with no right to lay claim to me or mine. I think about what a wretched father he’d be, and how I couldn’t trust his side of the family to consider anything but their own desires.
May, 2000.
We hadn’t been dating long- maybe six months or so- and had already been through a lot of what I now affectionately call ‘horseshit’. First it was my angry ex-boyfriend, and then it was his mother calling me in the middle of the night from outside my apartment to lecture me via the answering machine about how I knew nothing of what I was doing to him and his family. It would have been a little easier if it didn’t seem like he agreed most of the time, or if he hadn’t gone to such lengths to avoid confronting her and putting his foot down. Of course, I’ve never been too self-confident so it didn’t feel that strange that he wouldn’t stick up for me or for ‘us’.
My cycle has always been irregular at best. I didn’t think anything of it when I was a couple of weeks late starting my period. I didn’t really think anything of it when I was almost a month late. I figured I’d been under a lot of stress and it would come eventually- I’d had a scare when I was 16 and the condom broke which had turned out fine after I quit constantly worrying about it, so I didn’t see why this time would be any different. Nevermind that we’d been having unprotected sex almost constantly, up to and including him coming inside me. I never went through that teenage indestructibility phase, but apparently that was just taking its time, too.
I started to worry at about the month-and-a-half late mark. I avoided getting a test and finding out because I was terrified that it would be positive and then what would I do? I’d quit my job a few months before and was living on insurance money from an auto accident. My boyfriend was afraid of his mother and once hesitated to take my bathrobe home with him to wash (to keep me from having to pay for another washer and dryer at the laundromat) because he lived with his parents and didn’t want to explain it. How was he going to explain a pregnant girlfriend?
In the end I took the damned test. The directions said you have to wait at least three minutes before the result would be clear, but I could already see the ‘+’ forming before I finished peeing on the stick. I left the test on the edge of the bathroom sink and went into the living room to wait my three minutes and pray that it would be negative. I guess I should have started my supplication a little earlier- when I went to check the result was even clearer than before, as if to mock me for my ridiculous hopes. I called him at work because he knew I would be testing that morning and told him the news. You’d think I would remember every tiny detail but it’s faded some… I’m not sure if he left work and came straight to my apartment or if he finished out the workday. I think my now-biased view of him makes me want to believe the latter, but perhaps I’ll give him the benefit of doubt here.
He asked me what we were going to do. As if I knew!
He asked again.
I still had no answer.
He asked once more.
I told him I supposed I needed to look up the clinic’s info and call.
He seemed relieved.
I think he went home after that. He rarely stayed the night as it raised too many questions with the folks. I cried. I thought about taking another test since this one might be wrong. I realized that was stupid. I’d already looked up as much as I could online about the early symptoms of pregnancy and I had them all. Every. Single. One. The test wasn’t wrong- I just didn’t want to accept it. I cried more.
And then I started thinking.
I’d long said that should I ever find myself in such a situation that I would hasten to an abortion clinic ASAP. Ah, the clarity of one who has never been there… the not-quite innocent but still completely inexperienced, unaware, and unprepared. I knew adoption was out of the question- there was no way I could carry a baby for nine months, go through childbirth, and then give it away. Not that I thought that was ever an easy choice for anyone to make, but I knew myself and knew that that particular guilt would become a living hell for me.
I thought about keeping it. I tried to make a list in my mind of the people who would be able to lend emotional support but finished it much more quickly than I expected. I knew his family would indefinitely withhold any kind of assistance to show the depth of their displeasure. I also knew he would never demand otherwise. Still, I worked up a picture of us, together and raising our child and giving a big ‘fuck you’ to anyone who voiced a problem with it. It was a nice picture, and it helped me go to sleep that night.
Then I did something that should have told me everything I needed to know about him. I told him I was thinking of keeping the baby. He gently deflected my suggestions and moved to shooting them down one by one and reminding me that there was really only one option. After a few days, he finally snapped. While we were lying in bed, I was musing aloud again and he sat straight up (uncomfortable for me as my head was on his chest at the time) and said ‘I thought we agreed! You always said you’d have an abortion! Why are we even talking about this other stuff?!’ He was technically correct, but I told him I just wanted to discuss everything else thoroughly so I wouldn’t feel like I’d made the wrong choice after the fact. That didn’t really placate him, but he did stop shouting, and I suppose that was enough for me. I’ve always hated upsetting people.
So I called the clinic. The woman who answered gave me the necessary information and instructions, and I dutifully wrote everything down so I wouldn’t make any mistakes. Bathrobe and socks or slippers, check. Nail polish removed from fingers and toes, check. Maxipads, check. A bag to keep my things in, check. $500 cash, check? Oh, shit. I didn’t have $500. I knew that was about the going price, but the knowledge didn’t make any deposits into my bank account. He’d said he would help, naturally, but when I called him he said he only had half that amount and asked if I thought I could come up with the other half. I later found out he always kept more than $1000 in his account, but that he would be penalized for having a balance of less than $1000 even so he just took the amount over that and said that was how much money he had. Another warning sign missed.
I scheduled the appointment for a Friday since I knew there would potentially be many more protestors on a Saturday. He picked me up early in the morning, maybe 8 or 9-ish, and we made our way downtown. As we were getting out of the car, a man walking along the sidewalk stopped and asked if we had fifty cents. He said, ‘I ain’t gonna lie to ya- I’m just tryin’ to get a six-pack.’ We grinned at his openness and gave him three dollars. He thanked us politely and strolled away whistling. It was the only bright spot in that day for me.
We were only twenty yards or so from the door of the building, but there were a couple of middle-aged women standing around with their hands full of pamphlets. I made eye contact with them all and kept to my path. When they began speaking at the same time, all I heard was ‘Could we talk to you for just a moment?’ and ‘You don’t have to do this.’ Nothing about baby-killing and certainly no in-your-face harassment- in short, nothing like what I’d expected. We walked by and he dismissed them with a wave and a sharp word and then we were inside. I gave my name and showed my driver’s license to the woman behind the bulletproof glass and the security guard escorted us through another door into the waiting r
oom. Every woman I saw looked like I felt. I wondered if I looked that way to them, too.
I sat there and turned the anti-abortionists’ words over in my head. I didn’t have to do this? Lady, you don’t know my boyfriend, his family, my family, my life… I do have to do this. I have to save myself, and I’m using up all at once every bit of the karma I’ve built up in 20 years by always thinking of others first. This greatest of sins would be my first, and I hoped that God and all his angels would understand and forgive me. In doing anything else, I would destroy at least three lives and the repercussions would never end. I have to do this.
That’s when I tried to shut down. I knew why I was there, and I knew what would be happening to me. No one else knew except him and my best friend from high school, who had decided to suddenly return to the Catholicism of her early youth. Telling her drove the last nail into the coffin of our friendship, but I had no other confidants then. Mom and I were fighting and I was so isolated from everyone else after quitting my job. He was the person I was closest to, and he’d made it abundantly clear that further discussion on this topic was unwelcome.
Each of the women were called back in turn, and I had no idea what was next. I knew very few people who’d been party to an abortion (most of whom were guys anyway) and not one who’d ever talked about the process in detail. It hadn’t occurred to me to look it up. I understood the end result but was completely ignorant about how one got from point A to point B. Honestly, I don’t think I’d gotten that far in my imaginings- I was still stuck on the fact that I was going to do it at all.
We all sat in another room, together again, and either broadcast TV was on or it was some ‘informative’ video. One by one, we went to have our blood drawn for the official, doctor-approved, yes-you-are-definitely-pregnant test. The phlebotomist was very nice- I’d supposed it would be someone jaded and generally uninterested, but she saw my fear and uncertainty and did her best to soothe me. After that, we went back to our command central to await further instructions. Individually, we were directed to another small office where a woman behind a desk introduced herself as some kind of counselor or social services representative. She asked how old I was and who the father was. She asked what led me to this decision and if I was aware that there were other options. She asked if I was there by choice or if I was being forced. My first instinct was to respond with ‘Define ‘force” but she seemed a serious sort and I opted not to make trouble for myself. My mind started to wander, though, and I was suddenly curious about how many women- how many girls- might have been in this chair before me confessing that all they wanted was to have their babies. I wondered what kind of help anyone in the clinic could really be in those cases. I gave her the $500 from an envelope I’d put it in before leaving the house. Then, having apparently satisfied the important questions, I was led back to the room.
At some point while I was waiting, a lady told me he had asked to see me. I wasn’t allowed to go back out to the main waiting room, but I was permitted to talk to him through the bars that separated it from the reception desk. He said he just wanted to know how I was doing, and he said, ‘Sorry.’ The tears standing in his eyes just made them more watery than usual. I said it was OK but heatedly, furiously thought, ‘Then let me go home! Help me!’ I knew he wouldn’t. It was just Something That Had to Be Done.
I was thirteen weeks along. I found out during the ultrasound, with my jeans and panties below my knees so the technician had full access to my abdomen. They kept the screen turned away from the bed and I kept thinking it was so surreal- I’d never stopped to consider anything but happiness and excitement at my first ultrasound and there I was, the white elephant in the room that no one spoke to except to instruct. They were polite enough to me, but I felt more awkward and out of place than I ever had before or since. I heard ‘thirteen weeks’ and got nauseated- the cutoff then was 14 weeks. I’d almost waited too long, with my fucking about and thinking that pretending I wasn’t pregnant would make it so.
I stood up to get dressed again. Facing the wall, I turned to the right to give myself room to button up and tuck in. I turned too far to the right. My ever-searching eyes darting all over the room, they landed on the monitor. There was my baby, the one that lived inside me right now. There was my baby, exactly as it had looked two minutes before when the picture was taken. There was my baby, who in two more minutes or maybe two hours from now would be cut and sucked out of me. By my choice.
If I were the fainting kind, that would have done it. I will never, ever forget that image. My tiny, curled-up, potato-headed baby- he was real. Too early to determine sex (and they probably wouldn’t have told me anyway), I was sure it was a boy. I named him Julian, and for the rest of the time I was there I talked to him and apologized and tried to explain. I told him I felt it was fortunate that I believe in reincarnation, because that meant he’d get another chance to go to someone who could take care of him properly and spoil him the way he deserved. If he stayed with me, he’d be unhappy so much of the time. He just wouldn’t have a good life. I asked him to forgive me, and that absolution was more important to me than God’s or anyone else’s. I don’t know if he heard me, but if not it wasn’t for lack of me trying.
I still wonder what it means that I saw him and had him killed anyway.
Back in the communal room, some white-trash girl came back in crying in the not-many-tears-but-plenty-of-obviousness kind of way. She said she was nine weeks along and had twins. Twin girls. I figured she was full of shit and looking for attention, and I suspected this wasn’t her first time here.
Then it was time to put on the surgical gowns and bathrobes and hop on our gurneys. Again, the nurses were incredibly nice. We had catheters inserted into the crooks of our elbows to administer the anesthetic and whatnot. Mine hurt a little, but I was used to being poked with needles after my seizure in ninth grade. I kept trying to ascertain the point of no return, where it would be too late to say I didn’t want to go through with it. And I thought about going home with him, and I thought about him leaving me and having to do it all alone and barely knowing the first thing about being a single mother- a jobless, friendless, 20-year-old single mother. My mouth stayed shut.
Two of the nurses wheeled me into what I guess was the operating room. My pulse was checked and then a needle went into the catheter. I was asked to count backward from 10. I remember getting to six.
When I woke up, I felt like I was made out of lead. I couldn’t lift my head or hands although I could hear and see fine. A nurse helped me to sit up and to put my arms into the sleeves of my robe. She said I had done very well. After a few more minutes she helped me off of the gurney and walked me to a small area where I was given a couple of Extra-Strength Tylenol, two cookies, and a Dixie Cup of water. I wanted to ask for more cookies, but was afraid they’d think that was my priority there instead of being appropriately subdued after what I’d just been through. I was really hungry, though. I changed back into my street clothes and switched out the huge all-purpose absorbent pad for one of my oh-my-god-I’m-never-going-to-stop-bleeding maxipads. Irregular my periods might be, but my flow is consistent. I was used to seeing a lot more blood than this.
Still in a daze, I was helped back to the main waiting room. He hugged me and we went outside. No protestors, but then it was much later in the day now. I think it had been somewhere between seven and nine hours in all. He asked if I was OK- I said, ‘Fine.’ I told him I was hungry- he was, too. We were sil
ent during the ride to Subway. He never let anyone eat in his car, so I waited until we got to my apartment.
We went in and I ate my sandwich. I was tired and asked him to come lie down with me.
He said he needed to get home.
I asked him again to stay with me for just a while longer.
He had to get home right now, but he would be back later.
He lived in Mount Washington. I lived in Old Louisville.
He left.
I went to bed.
I cried again.
I apologized again, to God and Julian in equal measures.
I finally fell asleep.
We got married that October.
Jeannie
- 21.12.2021
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