Some of that came from me, which is hard to believe and absolutely hilarious at this very minute. I just had this conversation with Sandy last night as we sat by the fire and watched the stars come out, one by one, popping into view like fireworks. Each one a bigger surprise than the next one.
“That's the funny part,” Sandy said. “That your kids have survived all of this and are doing so well in school. I suppose it says something about John that he helps them and they have a relationship.”
“Yeah, but then there is me.”
“Well, think about it. Here you are, just a young woman really, pregnant, recently unemployed, a missing husband, and you are on the lam with a bunch of broads who could all be committed.”
“It does sound pretty ridiculous, doesn't it?”
“Well, my God, in some countries they would take you away, and we'd never see you again.”
“I'd put up a hell of a fight.”
“That's what you should have done years ago, honey.”
“But I couldn't. I had those kids, and I always thought of that old joke when the minister asks the ninety-year-old couple why they are getting a divorce after all those years and the woman says, ‘We were waiting for the kids to die.'”
“What about you, though? Didn't you have a right to something?”
“Not then. But now they're grown, it's my turn. That's what I think. Now I can do something about the rest of my life. Before this, really, how strange this sounds, but I didn't want or need anything else.”
Sandy turned away then because I know our lives have not been that dissimilar. I know that she has done some of the same things, and that she has been in her own holding pattern.
“I tried,” I said softly, putting my hand across her warm back. “That's how I got pregnant. I tried to carve out some little piece of happiness. For me that obviously meant a piece of ass and look where that got me.”
Sandy turned back toward me. Her eyes were soft and kind, and she pulled me against her shoulder.
“People get pissed off when you talk about a baby as being an accident. But some babies are accidents, and I know you will have to deal with all of that in your own time and in your own inimitable ‘Susan' sort of way. But it wasn't wrong to find some comfort in his arms. People get so whacked out about sex. Sex can just be sex. People do it all the time. Half the women in the world who are screwing right now are for sure not doing it out of love.”
“Next time, next time I'm going to pick someone with a bigger penis, though,” I said, smiling, waiting for her reaction.
“Oh, that's my girl! How about two men at once? Or hey, how about two men, a dog, four chickens and I'll come too.”
“You get the chickens and you are on.”
It felt so wonderful to laugh, to make fun of our ridiculous predicaments, the troubles we have caused ourselves. I know I can't erase all those years behind me and really, I wouldn't want to. I could have made better choices, could have changed the course of my life a long time ago, but I didn't. And really, it wasn't all horrible.
For a time, John and I did live like what half the world would consider a normal couple. We both continued to go to school, and I must have gotten pregnant about the third time we had sex. I stayed in school, and John actually worked three jobs so that we could both try and finish our degrees. But that's also how he discovered the power of his little penis. I'm certain he started fooling around when I was pregnant the first time, because the young girl he worked with at the restaurant started calling the house on a regular basis, constantly drove past our apartment, and left things like her underwear and bra in our car.
That was just the beginning. Then the baby came, and John was crazy about Erin. He finished school and started working, and I have no idea about the others, how many there might have been because those were the years of kids and John anchoring his career track and me taking three years of night classes to become an RN.
People drift apart all the time. We were so young when we married, and I cannot say that it was a ridiculous thing to marry a friend, to have two terrific children, to stay around month after month when the man I married traveled and screwed his way from one end of the country to the next. Most of the time it was enough for me to pull open the refrigerator and find food, to see my children sleeping in their beds at night, to know that someone would pay the light bill.
One Christmas, maybe nine years ago, John staggered in way too late for him to even offer up an excuse about work or meetings or the guys from the club. Maybe it was because of the holidays, or maybe I was exhausted from that year's round of the flu and bronchitis, or maybe my part-time job at the nursing home had me thinking about all those old people who were dying in my arms week after week. But I waited up for him and without knowing it, we came to a crossroads in our relationship that night.
I saw changes in John more clearly than ever before. He had filled out during those years. His wavy brown hair had been trimmed back, his eyes had deepened and darkened. His once thin face had filled in, and it was obvious that he had been spending time working out when he should have been selling computer programs. Some people might be shocked to think that I wanted to make love to him one last time, wanted to lie next to the father of my semi-abandoned children, the man who had all but deserted me and who had most likely slept with numerous other women.
Believe me, he was surprised too when I met him at the door, slipped my hand through his arm, and asked him to come upstairs with me. His puzzled look was almost as entertaining as the sex that followed. Of course I made him shower off the scent of whomever he had been with the last few hours, and of course it was not easy for this almost middle-aged man to strike up his own fire after what he must have just gone through. But he put up a hell of a front.
In the end, the last time I ever touched or made love to my husband was also the night I asked him to leave and never come back. I rolled off of him, swept a sheet off the top of the pile of bedcovers and then pulled my knees up to my chest. “John, I think you should just leave now. We can sort out everything else down the road a bit.”
“What?” Astonished, he rose up on his elbows.
“You're rarely here, you have girlfriends all over the place, the kids will be out of high school in a few years. Really, John, we should both get on with our separate lives.”
“But, I . . . the kids and . . .”
“We don't have to get divorced, but I will need money right now. The deal is, you don't need us, John, you haven't really needed me for at least, what, seventeen years or so?”
John slumped back, totally deflated, as if he had been stuck with a large pin. I couldn't even imagine what was going through his mind, because at that point I had absolutely no idea how his mind worked.
“John,” I said quietly. “It doesn't have to be such a big deal. I'll just tell the kids we're separated, and things will pretty much go on the way they have been.”
“What about you?”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. What will you do?”
“I'll do what I've been doing since the day I married you. I'll take care of the kids and the house and the bills. Then I'll go to work for a few hours, I'll get up and do the same thing all over again.”
Unfortunately the getting on with my life never quite seemed to happen. John didn't really ever move out, but he hopped from one friend's house to the next and managed to spend some nights when he was in town on the living room couch. The kids didn't seem to care that we were sort of separated because they had never seen us together much anyway. As the rest of the world and the people around me headed in one direction or another, I pretty much stood right there treading water.
One year quickly slipped into another, and there never seemed time enough for me to conceive what I wanted or where I should be or what would happen when the kids left for school, or just left. I barely looked at myself in the mirror, had absolutely no idea that anyone at all would find me attractive, and when Don slipped into my life and made a pass at me, I simply fell into his arms because it felt good to have someone touch me.
Don would rent a hotel room or show up when the kids were off on some overnighter. I didn't love him but I was grateful for the chance to have someone hold me, even if he was an old fart with a bit of a belly. He wasn't unkind, but he really wasn't much of anything else either.
Maybe someone dropped something on my head when I was sleeping or slipped some kind of complacency drug into my oatmeal, because now that I have all these huge life decisions to make, I'm kind of pissed off at myself. What in the world was I thinking anyway? To shuffle through life like I have been shuffling with one leg up in the air and the other not knowing exactly where in the hell it should plant itself.
It's this walking, I think. This walking has made me see things and feel things and think of things that I have ignored or denied. And these women, Lord, they inspire me. They inspire me to take action and to know that it's okay to continue on. As Sandy would say, “to grab life right by the crotch.”
Not everyone could understand a woman like me, could understand that having an abortion is the right decision to make. Could I even have imagined this a month ago, a year ago, that night when John and I sat on his apartment floor and looked into each other's eyes? Of course not. I would never have been able to travel to this point in my life, to this dangerous stop, to the junction where decisions are so final and lasting.
This is the real hard part for me. This abortion business. The struggle between heart, soul, mind and body. I knew right away. Before I took the test from the drugstore. Before I went to the clinic. Before I missed the first period since I had my last baby twenty years ago. That is when the terror set in. That is when I slumped to the floor of the bathroom and cried until my stomach cramped up, and there simply were no more tears.
I cried for my own stupidity, for the decision I knew I had to make, for the frightening changes that were suddenly spread out in front of me in bright, living color.
Perhaps there are sixteen-year-old girls, or other mothers, or rape victims who do not linger over this decision. Perhaps they can simply pick up the phone or drive to the clinic. Maybe not. Then again maybe they agonize and cry and imagine what her face might look like. Maybe they can feel her tiny hands reaching for her lips or that smell, that wonderful soft, clean, gentle smell of a baby's skin. Maybe they have dreamed about a different life, a life with a baby and a yard and the sounds of a happy child running up the hall and into the bedroom. Maybe they have seen a friend slip into the baby's room at night and kneel by the side of the crib just to see and hear and touch and listen to the ins and outs of a baby's breath.
There's a chance they have dreamed about those lazy mornings when the babies, who are just walking, climb into your bed and Velcro themselves to your sides. The wisps of hair on your face, and that reflex of your breasts moving toward them and your arms circling their heads and your fingers on their cheeks when they fall back to sleep, so safe and warm in your arms.
Maybe they think of what might be. They think of a life with singing in the kitchen and doors that open to a patio, and a refrigerator that is filled with everything you need just that minute to bake a pie. They think of Friday nights by the fireplace and a child's tears dripping into your hands and then that taste of tears as you kiss away all the sadness.
Those feelings of pure love could just center around that moment of birth. The release of life force that drops from your womb and into the hands of the rest of the world. Those seconds, one . . . two . . . three when your bottom rips and there is a pull that makes you wonder if your stomach has landed on your feet. When the pain sears through your back and along your spine and into your throat so there is no way, absolutely no way in hell you cannot scream, and you hope and pray in that three seconds that someone will slit your throat.
But then maybe they think about what comes next. The baby, covered in blood and mucus and screaming to fill her lungs with air. Maybe they are thinking of that baby who is laid on your stomach and who searches and searches for your breasts, for that purple nipple, until she can find it. And before that, just before that she hears you say, “Oh my beautiful, beautiful baby . . .” When she hears that, she looks for your face, your eyes, for the source of the voice that has carried her from one month to the next. She knows you. The baby knows your voice and your face and the feel of your skin from the inside out. Just that sound, your voice, makes her stop crying because she knows from deep inside of her soul that you will take care of her and love her and make everything safe and right.
That isn't all, though. That is never all. There is the magic rush of creation that swirls and swirls around you for the rest of the day. Until you can sleep and remember how to sit and wipe the blood off of everything when you forget to get the pads. There is the thought that down the hall is your baby, a piece of your soul, someone with your smile and your crooked nose and beautiful ankles. There is all of that and a lifetime of mothering and caring and wondering every single second of the day if everything is fine, if you will make it through another day and that night too, and what about tomorrow?
An abortion. An abortion. An abortion. How can anyone else understand? This decision, this seemingly reasonable choice in my life at this time. Thank God for this choice, or someone, thank all those women who marched and who went down the back alleys. Thank the women who wrote the letters and who showed the men, all those men who'd always made the decisions for the women. Thank those men who listened and who saw the little girl who was only twelve who had been raped by her uncle and had been ripped and torn from one end to the other. Thank those women who did all that, and who showed those men and the world that how dare anyone, any man, any person tell us what we can and can't do with our bodies.