Welcome to RMB’s Naked Pictures of Faceless People, a series of guest posts from diverse anonymous bloggers. (Read more about NPFP’s origins.) These are the posts that are jumping to get out of us, but for whatever reason — safety, embarrassment, conflict of interest, protection of loved ones’ reputations or feelings, or so on — we don’t or won’t or can’t post at our own blogs. Anyone, whether blogger or reader only, is welcome to submit or discuss a potential post by emailing me at arwyn at raisingmyboychick dot com.

Trigger Warning: There is a trigger warning on this post for emotional descriptions of abortion and medical practitioner callousness.

Five Years Later

Next month is the five-year-mark of what turned out to be the most complicated and difficult and liberating and devastating experience of my life – my life as a mother, my life as a woman and a spouse, as a feminist, as a professional.

A few weeks after moving my family – spouse, preschooler, baby – from our funky but expensive city neighborhood to a distant but affordable suburb, I found out I was pregnant. At first blush this sounds like the beginning of someone’s “how we came to love our little surprise, without whom our family would not be complete, who gives us endless joy and whom we can’t imagine being without” story. That’s not this story.

My IUD failed, by virtue (apparently) of coming out unannounced and unnoticed. It turns out I didn’t know how to check for proper placement, or had somehow forgotten how in the months since it was inserted by my midwife, at my six week postpartum checkup. My baby was just over a year. I noticed I was late, trudged to the drugstore, peed on a stick in my new bathroom. I was pregnant again. For a split second, I felt total joy, and then immediately an overwhelming sense of dread and panic.

I knew, solidly and in my bones, that I could not complete my graduate program with yet another baby. I was years from finishing as it was, had just decided to move further from the library and my faculty so my children could attend a decent public school and have their own bedrooms. I faced a very, very clear choice: keep this surprise third child and quit my program and settle into a life I decidedly did not want in this new neighborhood and live there forever, having failed to enter my chosen profession. Or I could have an abortion, pretend like nothing happened, start my fellowship in the fall, finish according to plan, and have the life I’d plotted out and planned for.

I had the abortion. Scheduled it at a distant Planned Parenthood, where it turned out my husband could drop me off and then take the kids to the park for the morning. Although he didn’t pressure me, exactly (how do you pressure someone to do something they already want to do?) my husband was more on board than I was. He did not for a moment consider the offer I made: if he wanted me to keep the baby and quit my program I would do it, hands down, no persuasion required, but it wasn’t my first choice. I could not imagine ending a pregnancy he wanted to keep. But he didn’t. When I made the appointment for the abortion, he was only worried that it wasn’t soon enough, that I might change my mind in the intervening week.

It was horrible, although the staff tried to be nice. I couldn’t get anesthetic, because I had arrived alone and they didn’t trust me when I assured them I had a ride home. They lectured me on my carelessness, or at least that’s how it felt. When I said my husband planned to get a vasectomy, the doctor sighed. “Everybody says that,” he told me. It was terribly, terribly painful. When it was over, I was glad I hadn’t had the drugs, since all the other women (mostly very young, most I assume not stable mothers of two who could frankly have accommodated another child in their tidy suburban houses) looked miserable and out of it.

After a day or two, my husband told me he couldn’t talk about it anymore. He refused to listen if I wanted to talk. When I noticed I was drinking rather a lot in the afternoons, and told him I really wanted to see a therapist, he responded in a way that, looking back, was the beginning of the end of the marriage. He refused to let me access the health insurance, so that I could find a therapist. At first I thought he just was too busy to look up the information for me; I asked to call the HR people at his office and he wouldn’t tell me who I should speak to. If I called him at work to ask, he yelled at me. If I wanted him to sit down with me in the evening to show me how to find someone who took our insurance, he told me it had to be done from his office (which was a lie, of course.) Finally I gave up asking. I don’t know what motivated him in this particular bout of selfishness – he claimed later that he was worried I would blame him, and I thought, well, you’ve got that right.

I never went to therapy. I soldiered on. I did my fellowship. I curtailed the drinking on my own. I occasionally considered what it meant to have destroyed another human life. I am a staunch and ardent feminist; I am pro-choice in my thinking and my voting and my advice to others. I would counsel my own beloved daughter to do as I did. And yet the feeling of being someone who loved herself more than her unborn child has been hard to shake. I always thought of myself as a person who would choose her family, would choose her children, above all other things, but I am not that woman, it turns out. (Neither, of course, is my husband that man.)

It has been a complicated five years; I have made a series of choices in the interim that I don’t necessarily recommend, but that turn out to have been powerful in their way. I finished the damn degree, and am now more or less happily employed in the field which would have been forever closed to me if I had dropped out of school. The marriage is almost fully unraveled. I tend to think that would have happened either way. I wish, some days, especially when I spend time with a child who is the age my never-born child would have been, that I had created a happier ending for us. When my now school-aged younger child went through a phase of begging for a baby sister or brother, I felt grieved and sorrowful. I think occasionally about a trip I took to the park during the week before my abortion, pushing the stroller and guiding my daughter on her bike, knowing I was pregnant, knowing that this was the only time these three small beings would be present in my life as I did this everyday thing, and the sadness of it just washes over me.

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