From the Other Side

Almost 20 years ago, I woke up from a dream and felt an extreme emptiness. In my dream, my partner had forced me to have an abortion.

A few days later, I found out I was pregnant. I had gone to bed after a negative pregnancy test, only to pull it out of the trash in the middle of the night to see a faint second line. I tried to wake up my boyfriend of 3 years: “I’m pregnant!” He didn’t wake up.

The next morning, I shared the news again, scared but excited. My heart sunk. He didn’t feel ready. He wanted to abort it. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, but was making $28k living in an expensive suburb of DC. I didn’t want to tell my parents because I knew they’d call me home. And I was just starting my career, working at the National Cancer Institute. It wasn’t my dream job, but it was a starting point at my dream workplace. So I looked into WIC, hoping I could somehow make it work on my own. But I made just enough to not qualify for WIC. I felt trapped. I decided I couldn’t live and raise a child on my own, which meant I had to give up the baby.

I remember walking into the Planned Parenthood building, protesters telling me I was killing my baby. And other volunteers blocking them from me and shuttling me inside. I remember sitting in the waiting room with my boyfriend. Some guy across from us kept looking our way. It turned out he and my boyfriend knew each other, but neither of them said a word. I remember going in to see the doctor to get an ultrasound to confirm the pregnancy and bursting into tears when I saw that tiny speck on the screen. “You’re 8 weeks along,” the doctor told me. Just 4 more weeks and many expectant mothers are announcing their good news with the world. I didn’t want to go through with it. Not after seeing what I just knew in my heart would become a little boy. The doctor patted me on the shoulder, “It’ll be OK.”

As he injected local anesthesia into my cervix, I remember embracing the pain, telling myself I deserved it. I deserved it for failing this little mass inside of me. After the procedure, a nurse gave me some pills and then I sat in the recovery area, eating a saltine cracker. I remember having sushi as my first post-procedure meal and feeling oddly happy. My boyfriend even remarked, “How can you be smiling right now?” As if he never wanted this loss. (For the longest time, I felt guilty about this, but I later learned that patients are often given Valium or some other sedative following the procedure.)

The days and weeks that followed were just awful. I didn’t feel I could lean on my boyfriend with my emotional pain because he was a big reason behind it. I resented him. After a huge fight one night, I left and drove to a park. I sat in my car, looking at the stars, bawling, apologizing to my unborn child over and over and over. I came back home, my boyfriend already in bed, and crawled into bed next to him.

I couldn’t sleep. And there he was, soundly sleeping. Not a fucking care in the world. So I got out of bed, swallowed a bottle of Tylenol PM and a bottle of ibuprofen, drank some water, crawled back into bed, and hoped I wouldn’t wake up. Some time later, I did wake up, my stomach cramping. I started to vomit all over the living room carpet, loudly enough to wake my boyfriend. He came out, at first trying to hold my hair back, but then he saw that my vomit was blue. “What is this???” When I told him, he was furious. “How could you do this?? How can I ever trust you?” He didn’t take me to the hospital. He didn’t hold me. He just watched me vomit the contents of my stomach out and went to bed.

The next morning, as I sat on the couch drinking water and eating a piece of dry toast, he left to play golf.

Our relationship wasn’t the same after that. I was incredulous when he told me one day, a couple of years later, that if I got pregnant, he felt he was ready. But I stayed. Then he suggested we buy a house together. I told him it was important to me that we were at least engaged first, but after signing the paperwork for a house I picked out and he paid for, we were still not engaged. So I left him.

All of this came up today as I drove back from the hospital where my friend’s daughter had been admitted after a friend found her unconscious, vomit in her lungs. She had tried to take her life. She was on life support, and nobody — not even her own mother — can visit her in person because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pain my friend is feeling, her immense despair… and then holding my own babies, hoping they never feel so hopeless that they might try to take their own life… and then thinking about the circumstances that led to my own attempt. It all kind of just came together and made its way to the surface as one big emotional glob. The pain of it was almost enough to push me back into an abyss. And yet, I have to keep going right? Because now I have two precious little boys to love and protect. And I still feel an enormous well of guilt for not being able to protect the very first one.