I’m behind the register at a gas station/sub shop in Maine while my co-worker, a pretty brown haired almond skinned girl with dark-rimmed glasses, opens the pizza display, takes a slice without a plate and begins eating it while walking back toward the deli.
“Hey,” another coworker, a middle-aged white man known to be too friendly with the women, both employees and patrons alike, whispers. “Did you hear about her?” he asks while gesturing to our co-worker.
I shake my head.
“She’s pregnant,” he whispers. “She’s going to have an abortion.”
At the words, it’s like I’ve been training my whole life for this moment. God has bestowed this charge to me and it’s my responsibility to save this unborn life.
I watch her throughout the day, and sure enough, I catch her occasionally hold her stomach the way I’ve seen other expectant mothers. Most of my shift is spent planning how the conversation will go. Obviously, if she doesn’t want the child, she’s not going to keep it, so I guess the best thing I can do is advocate for adoption. The only question then, is when can we have this conversation?
As luck would have it, we are told to have lunch at the same time. We both go into the deli area and make our sandwiches or wraps and go outside, grab a turned over milk crate and sit down.
“So,” I ask in-between bites, “how are you?”
She looks at her sandwich and her face twists slightly. I wonder if it’s because she’s having morning sickness. “I’m pregnant and I can’t keep it. It’s such an awful time. I’m an undergrad, I need to graduate. If this had come later, like in the next five years…” the flood gates open and she goes on. “I can’t do this.”
I take another bite, careful to keep my face calm. This is my chance! This is how I can sway her! “What does time have to do with it? Five years from now versus now?”
“I can barely take care of myself, let alone a child.”
If you can’t take care of a child, maybe you shouldn’t be having sex, I think. “What about adoption?” I ask, and there. I’ve said it.
She stops eating and watches me. “I’ve done so many drugs with my partner. I’ve been partying every weekend. There’s no way this baby would be healthy. I don’t want to do that to him or her.”
And the balloon building in my chest pops. How am I supposed to save this child when she can’t afford to care for it, when it may not even survive in the first place? She surprises me by breaking down in tears. “If this was two years from now, I could do this,” she says sobbing. “I never meant for this to happen.”
I take her into my arms and hug her. A few days later, she has an abortion. I grieve for her unborn child and we never speak of the pregnancy again. I swear, I will be better than her. I will never be this stupid.
Flash forward a degree in medical biology and three years. I am in the bathroom of my three-bedroom house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina that I share with two other people. My teeth clench together. No. Dammit! Take the test!
I dig through the cabinet, pull out the bag, and read the box for instructions. After a deep breath, I pull down my pants and sit on the toilet. I spread my legs and lean forward so I can see the stream, and convince myself that I’m just late. That my body decided to skip out on a period, play a terrible joke on me because right now I can’t handle much else.
I count to five and try to ignore the fact that I’m pretty sure I’ve pissed on my hand, too. The test goes face down on the side of the bathtub as though if I watch the black words form, it will jinx a child into my uterus.
On sheer autopilot, alcohol, and fear, I pull my pants up and wash my hands. I sit on the toilet and have a staring contest with the white demon threatening to destroy my life. My knees bounce up and down like I’m on Adderall.
I’m not pregnant. I can’t be pregnant. Please, God, don’t let me be pregnant.
The urge to vomit comes from the amount of alcohol and fear, rather than the nausea I’ve been experiencing for the last few weeks. Then again, I rarely vomit from drinking too much. This is a new kind of hollow in my stomach.
My knees continue to bounce uncontrollably, my stomach continues to compete for its chance in the Olympics.
This is the longest five minutes of my life.
Alright, enough time must have passed.
My hands shake so hard it’s difficult to grasp the test. After a small struggle of self-control, and more I’m not pregnant, I can’t be pregnant. I’m just late, I take a breath and flip it over. Each black letter is like a slap in the face from Iron Man.
Pregnant
I hold my breath for a second as my stomach does about seventeen more somersaults before dropping to my feet. It takes a few more seconds for the Not to appear. That’s all. Please come. Not Pregnant. Not. Not. Not. It wasn’t a full five-minute wait. It just takes another second.
Not. Not. Not.
I stare at the ugly screen, silently begging it to add three additional letters. Please, God, I pray, let the Not come.
Nothing comes.
No, no, no, no, no. Tears creep into my eyes like acid.
Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, Oh No, No, No, No. Chanting begins in my head.
And I stop breathing.
Then I start gasping.
Then chanting out loud, “Oh God, oh God, oh God.” Then full-blown crying.
I run out of the house, my large brown dog, Baxter, close enough to me that when I slam the door and barrel down the stairs, he follows.
I collapse onto the pavement and pull out my cell phone. There is only one person I want to call. One person I want to see right now, and I cry harder and harder as I understand beyond a doubt that he’s in bed with her because it’s almost 2 am and though we’ve built years of memories together, somehow, I no longer matter to either of them. I torture myself more by assuming that they’re fucking because, within two weeks of us being interested in each other, we fucked.
Without a condom, of course.
Why would he consider my feelings at all? She is like my fucking sister. That didn’t stop either of them. Oh God, I can’t breathe.
Take a sick day, there’s no way you’ll be able to work, a small voice instructs. It’s the one that is usually rational, the one that emerged with the help of Alanon meetings and head shrinks. I call the owners of the coffee shop, sobbing and hyperventilating, and somehow manage to articulate, “I won’t be coming into work today. Sorry for calling at 2 a.m.”
I hang up, stare at the light as Baxter comes and plops down beside me, another thing he’s never done when we’re both outside. It’s one thing for him to cuddle with me on the couch, or on our air-mattress. But once freed outside, I usually have to chase him down, especially if a neighborhood cat is around.
My hands run through his dirty fur and I can’t breathe.
Three-time zones away, a former resident of the islands, Jen, answers. “Hi!”
“I’m pregnant,” I say before re-exploding in sobs.
Her words match the chanting in my head, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.”
“I want to kill myself,” I incoherently cry. I have a plan. I have a date. All I have to do is find a home for Baxter and then this nightmare can be over.
“No,” Jen says.
Jen talks to me, calms me down, encourages me to spend the night at a friend’s. I make a few more calls, but it’s so late no one allows me to come over. I take several deep breaths with Baxter by my side, making my way to my bedroom, collapse.
Before I go to sleep, I update my blog to say:
Suddenly…
Suicide is looking better and better…
2:20 am
On the air mattress, beside Baxter, I cry with my arms wrapped around him. At long last, with the knowledge of why my period is late, I pray and sob.
God, please forgive me. I’m so sorry. God, please help me, help me, help me…
This wasn’t supposed to happen to someone like me. I was a good little Christian girl, I went to church every Sunday throughout middle and high school. I went to church camp and played tambourine in the church band. I was waiting until marriage to have sex. I swore I would never be this girl.
But as the next few days pass, I hear myself making the same excuses as the women I once tried to convince to have an adoption.
But the reality is my skin has become a vise and I’m being squeezed from the inside out. I cannot be pregnant. I cannot carry this pregnancy. I want to burst out of my skin, jump off a bridge, anything so that I am no longer pregnant. I consider knitting needles so I don’t have to make an appointment. At once the light-switch that said I am Prolife and I am here to save babies turns to I cannot have this child.
When my friends find out about my plan to end my life, they beg me to stay alive, one going so far as to tell me her nephew died by suicide at the news of his partner’s pregnancy. “I cannot lose you, too,” she says. “I burned my bra in the 60’s so you have a choice now. I need you to choose to stay alive, whatever that means.”
On her strength alone, I make an appointment with Planned Parenthood. I say a silent prayer of forgiveness for all the women I’d shamed for having premarital sex and for getting pregnant and choosing this option as well.
Because I live in a state where abortion is heavily regulated, the nearest facility is three hours away, and I have three separate appointments. The first to confirm I want an abortion and discover how far along I am (eight weeks). The second, to obtain the abortion – although it turns out that I came on the wrong day and I am unable to donate the tissue. And the third, which will be to follow up and ensure my body has healed.
At the second appointment, there are protesters outside who scream, “I know you’re scared but you don’t have to do this!” when I exit the car. It is a sunny day and I am dressed in black sweatpants per the guide given to me for what to expect on the day of my abortion.
And I know at that moment, I will never ask a woman to have an adoption.
I will never try to save the unborn again.
Because as I walk through the doors into the clinic and sign my name on a slip of paper, I am making the choice for my life over that of my unborn child, and who am I to limit this decision for anyone else?
Thanks for sharing your story. It’s nice to have heard it in a poem and now as a piece of creative nonfiction! Right now I think I still have more in common with your previous self, but stories like this leave an impression.