That One Time God Gave Me An Abortion
So Sue Him, Already.
Trigger Warning: Suicidal ideation, miscarriage. Take care of yourselves, loves.
I dedicate this post to Greg Abbot, the absolute toad.
When I was pregnant with my first child, my dreams turned vivid. Nightly, in the terrible realm of my subconscious, I impaled my swollen belly: with knives, with poles, with a sharpened broomstick. The gushing blood smelled like metal and earth, just like it does in the waking world. Sometimes, in the morning, I could still taste it.
One of those nights I woke up, confused and heavy-bellied, standing in front of the opened knife drawer in my kitchen. We decided to hide the knives.
When my perfect daughter was born, daylight and nightmares swirled together. I heard her mewling cry all the time, even when she slept. The world pressed in with impossible threats and I knew I was too feeble to protect her from any of them. I picked at my skin and worried. I saw things that were not there. I did not sleep.
When she transitioned from a cradle by my bed to a crib in another room, I couldn’t bear it. I pictured her there, helpless, a tiny immortal soul all alone in the yawning void. I crawled on all fours across her floor to sleep on the ground beside her. I fretted ceaselessly about the day she would face her death without me there to smooth the white hair from her forehead.
I was suffering from post-partum depression and anxiety, but I didn’t know that. I was 26, clueless, living a country away from my family, the first of my friends to have a baby. I didn’t know anything––except that motherhood was excruciating, and I was failing, and if anyone knew they would take her away.
When I had my son, things were better for a while. He was an easy lump of a child, content at my breast, heavy and uncomplicated. I trusted him to live. He nuzzled at my skin and sighed with pleasure when he smelled me. His eyes didn’t ask questions I had no answers for.
Even so, I developed a habit of measuring the distance from the ground to the top of the stairwell in our small rented townhome. I scribbled out the feet and inches on the backs of envelopes and tried to guess how much I needed to weigh in order for a quick jump with a good rope to break my neck.
It didn’t occur to me that these were strange calculations. My mind became accustomed to scanning existence for the exits.
Outwardly, I smiled. I posted pictures with witty comments. I fashioned a dollhouse for my daughter from a diaper box using hot glue and old fabric remnants. I read the kids a thousand books and sang them a thousand hymns.
My husband watched quietly. He took me running. He took me to the gym. He bought me weed from the guy who lived in the basement. He came straight home from work, every day. He scheduled a vasectomy.
I balked, because I was trained to: life is precious! How can we close the door to something I had always been taught was unquestionably good?
You can’t do this again, he said. I can’t watch you do this again. Let me make this choice for both of us, just this once.
Not long after, we were in Texas to see family. I was sleeping through the night. Our children, one and three, posed like cherubs for photos. When my husband flew back to Toronto for work, I headed North on I-35 to spend a couple of weeks with my parents.
On the drive, I noticed something weird: a lump in my throat, like I was swallowing around a penny that I couldn’t dislodge. I had felt that lump twice before, in early pregnancy.
Impossible.
I stopped at a Dollar General and bought a dozen pregnancy tests. When I got to the house, I handed off the kids to their grandparents, shut myself in the guest bathroom, and peed on a stick. Was that a second line? Barely? I peed on another one. I waited ten minutes. I stared at it, held it directly under the light. No, I don’t think so. Maybe. I fished the first one out of the trash. Maybe.
I wouldn’t come out of that guest room for a week. I lay on the bed in the dark, unaware of time passing. I peed on stick after stick, doubting the faint line; I Facetimed my husband: Do you see it, am I crazy?
Maybe. Yes. I don’t know. Maybe it’s too early to tell for sure. The doctor says there is a window after the procedure when it’s possible to get pregnant.
I emerged to tell my pro-life mom: I need to find a Planned Parenthood. She looked at my face and didn’t argue. I called around: It was complicated; There were costs; There would be a bit of a drive, paperwork, more than one appointment.
Frustrated, I hung up. I really thought the road to damnation would be less bureaucratic.
I took myself to a gym to beat back the fog that blocked me from knowing what to do next. On the way, I casually swerved into oncoming traffic. In that wrong lane, the seconds stretched out––long enough for me to understand that I didn’t want to take anyone else out with me; long enough to watch as the mouth of the woman approaching shaped a perfect O of surprise. I jerked the wheel to the right, skidded back into my own lane, and pulled over, shaking.
I told God: I only see one way out of this, and it will kill me and this maybe-baby both. Your move, Motherfucker.
Four days later, I was on a plane to Toronto. As we tipped into the sky, relief flooded my body: I’d be home soon, with my husband and free healthcare. We would make a plan.
That relief was followed by a dull, twisting pang deep in my bowels, and the bright taste of metal and earth in my mouth.
I slipped into the tight airplane bathroom, hand on my belly. The cramps rolled over me like a second baptism while I sat there, sweating, and worried about my unsupervised toddlers eating their scattered peanuts off the dirty floor.
After what felt like forever, blood and despair and potential all disappeared together with the pressurized roar of a button. Stupidly, I pictured my maybe-baby spinning through the air in the wake of the plane.
I folded toilet paper into my underwear and stood to wash my hands of everything that had just happened. As I searched my tired face in the mirror I remembered the time God rolled across Egypt and killed everyone’s actual babies, as some kind of punishment. Maybe this was my punishment for being weak and sad. Maybe it was divine confirmation that I make a terrible mother. Maybe it was a tender blessing.
I decided I didn’t really care, one way or another. I made my way back to my seat, where my son reached up with a chubby hand to pat my face, peanuts in his toothy grin.
Some not irrelevant statistics:
Around 20% of women experience mental illness during pregnancy.
Between 1 and 2 out of every 1,000 women will develop postpartum psychosis.
Nearly one million women suffer postpartum depression annually in the United States.
If a woman has experienced post-partum depression with previous births, she is 10%-50% more likely to develop it with subsequent births.
Over 60% of women with postpartum depression also suffer from postpartum anxiety disorder.
About 5% of women report persistent postpartum depression up to three years after giving birth.
In one survey, over 90% of women agreed that mothers face societal pressure to hide the struggles, anxiety, and sadness that accompany motherhood.
As many as 50% of all pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion (miscarriage), making God the most prolific abortion provider in the universe. Don’t get mad at me about it; take that up with him.