My Secret Shame

This is a story that needs to be told, because I’m fed up with being judged by people who have never walked in my shoes and think they know everything. What I’m about to say won’t be a surprise to anyone that has read my novels; this situation crops up several times with mild variations.  I’ve held back in telling it mainly because I worried it would embarrass my mother.  Well, she’s gone now, so the hell with that.

                Long story short, in 2011, I fell in love.  The kind of love that is fleeting, temporary, and burns very briefly, but I didn’t know that at the time.  His name was Steve. He was the best looking guy I’d ever dated, blonde, blue eyed, tan, and so charming! I never thought a man like that would be interested in a wallflower like me.  I wonder now if my low self-esteem was partially the draw for him.  He enjoyed listing the ways I didn’t measure up, and the improvements I needed to make.  He liked telling me that of all the women vying for his attention, some of them with supermodel looks, he picked me, the chubby mousy one, because he felt I was special.

                For a short time, I was in heaven.  I felt like I was being rewarded for all my past suffering.  I ignored his flaws, like the way he went on about how great he was and rarely let me get a word in, to the point where he often repeated the same stories.  Or that I often caught him in lies.  These were minor snafus, because he was a drug.  I lived for the moments I was in his presence, and when I wasn’t with him, I lived for the next best thing, a text or a phone call.

                I didn’t see him as much as I wanted, because he had two kids and was their primary caretaker. (So he claimed, anyway).   I understood.  Like in all my relationships, I’m always very goddamn understanding of men being stingy with their time, until I find out they’re married, or seeing other women, or whatever lies behind door number three.

                Then I got pregnant.  This wasn’t a problem from my view.  I was crazy about him.  For a short time, I let myself imagine a life together, with baby making five.  My fantasy world came crashing down when I told him.  He screamed at me, like it was all my fault.  Like he didn’t know how babies are made.  Then he started threatening me, telling me what would happen if I didn’t have an abortion.  He said he’d make sure I had an accident, that he had “thuggy” cousins that lived in the Bronx (first I was hearing of that, to my knowledge he was from Virginia and moved to NY to marry his wife) and would take care of me, that his uncle who was a judge would make sure I got screwed on child support, that he would make my life a living hell for the next eighteen years and haul my ass into court every chance he got, that he would have nothing to do with our child and let it know how much he hated it, that he wouldn’t let my child associate with his real children, that he hated our baby and wanted it dead.

             Every word fell like a hammer.  After being told in various ways all my life that I didn’t measure up, I was now being told that not only was I worthless, so was my baby.  He flat out told me if I forced this child on him, he’d make it suffer.  He told me he would abuse it, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it because of his uncle the judge.  Worse, he’d consulted a lawyer friend who advised him to take the baby away from me, telling him it would be easy with my  history of mental illness (I was diagnosed with depression after my father’s death) and because he had custody of the baby’s siblings.  And then he would abuse the baby, to make me suffer.  He said if I had the baby he would hate me to the end of his days.

                The tirade went on for days, until exhausted, I gave in.  I didn’t want to, but I was scared.  I didn’t make enough money to take care of the baby by myself, and I didn’t feel much support from my family at the time.  I’d had a sad and miserable childhood and I was terrified of inflicting the same thing on someone else, even worse, because this baby would have a father that hated it.  And every time I talked to Steve (he deserves to have at least his first name out there) he made the threats about his cousins and his uncle the judge and how he would make sure our child suffered.  He was like a man gone insane.   I didn’t feel it was right to force something so monumental and life changing as a child on someone dead set against it.  It was the worst feeling in the world, like every choice I could possibly make was an awful one that would hurt people.

                When I agreed to the abortion, he was grateful for roughly a couple of days, then the next demands came.  He’d promised to pay for the entire thing, but now he didn’t have the money.  He guilt tripped me, saying I was taking money out of his kids’ mouths.  He pledged to go to all the appointments with me, but he just made it to the first one, and then he complained all the way home about how rude they were to him, because they wouldn’t let him go into the exam room with me.  (He wanted to watch me get a pelvic exam, and he asked me later if it felt good.  Yes, SERIOUSLY)!

                The first appointment was just to confirm the pregnancy, and with the second appointment set I cried my eyes out every night.  I wanted that baby so badly.  I could literally feel it growing within me.  I thought about killing myself.  I thought about telling Steve I would kill myself if he made me go through with it.  I sometimes thought about running away, just going somewhere, to save my baby.

                 I was early enough that I just needed to take a stronger version of the morning after pill.  There were actually three pills (possibly four, but my memory is fuzzy).  The first one I took during my second appointment, which he refused to attend, despite his promise to be with me every step of the way.  “I can’t go back to that awful place again,” he moaned.    I had to take the next two pills together, let them dissolve in my cheeks, and that would bring on the miscarriage.  The catch was, someone had to be with me, in case something went wrong.  Steve begrudgingly agreed to sit with me for a few hours, but he was annoyed about it.  He’d been planning to drive to Virginia to spend the weekend with his family and I was putting a monkey wrench in his plans with my frigging unplanned pregnancy.

                From start to finish, Steve behaved as though he was being forced to clean up an awful mess I’d made.  Like it really wasn’t his problem, just something he was being forced to deal with, like a parent trying to fix a disaster their old-enough-to-know-better child created.  The guilt was horrendous.  I felt guilty about doing this to my baby, and I felt guilty about getting pregnant to start with and nearly ruining Steve’s life, as he was fond of screeching.  (“You’re not only ruining my life, but my kids’ lives too!” was one of the things he relentlessly screamed at me when I kept saying I wanted the child). 

                After it was over, his interest in me hovered around zero.  After giving up my dreams of being a mother, he was all I had.  And throughout the debacle, he’d promised to consider having a child after we’d been together a year.  He even got down on his knees begging and promising.  I knew deep down he was lying, that he was willing to say whatever it took to get me that abortion, and that he’d be out the door the minute he could, but I wanted to believe so badly.  I wanted to believe that things could still turn out okay for us. 

                Not so much.  Long story short, the minute I gave him the slightest excuse (I talked back to him when he invented yet another reason for the weekend to pass without seeing one another) he dumped me.  He just stopped talking to me mid text conversation and never spoke to me again.  The only reason I can’t classify it as a ghosting was we were squabbling when it happened.  (And squabbling is accurate…it was a minor disagreement).

                For years, this story has weighed on me like a burden, a skeleton in my closet, something shameful.  For a period after it happened, especially in the blurry days after Steve dumped me, I considered committing suicide. 

                Today?  Well, I’m single and childless, and it looks like I’ll never be a mother.  Him?  Last I knew, he was happy with a woman I actually KNOW (she dated another one of my exes, only me, I swear) in fact, he moved her right on in, and the one time I made the mistake of creeping on her Facebook page I saw pictures of a happy Steve with his children and his girlfriend.  I doubt he thinks of that lost child, or me. 

                So, I guess I’m supposed to believe that God is punishing me for getting an abortion or something, and giving him a pass because he’s a man and the choice was mine and I’m the one at fault.

                The reason I am sharing this story is because every single time abortion comes up, I feel like there is red hot knife being twisted in my heart.  Statistically, one in four women will have an abortion in the United States by the age of 45, but it’s a secret eating away at our souls.  There’s a lot of us being shamed into silence.

                  I’m tired of reading thoughtless comments by people who have never gone through such an awful experience or been forced to make such a horrible choice.  The pro life brigade (who never seem to give a shit about the child after it’s born) seem to believe that I just went and got an abortion and didn’t care.  Actually, I wanted my child very badly and didn’t know what to do.  I prayed for God to help me make the right decision, but He was silent, as He always is when it comes to me.  If God was so against it, then He could have done a better job of making things just a bit easier, because it seemed everything was against me.

                You may think that being all “abortion is murder, blah blah,” makes you a wonderful human being, but you’re inflicting suffering on your fellow women.  Tonight, I had to read a comment on a politician’s site that absolutely had me seeing red.  The woman said she felt sorry for all the men who had their unborn children murdered.  Are you kidding me, lady?  Like all these men are victims of these scheming women, when my experience (and those of several of my friends, too, so this isn’t uncommon) was the man was the one who wanted the abortion and would stop at nothing to make sure it happened.

                And, another set of statistics, the group of people most at risk for being murdered in the US is pregnant women.  Wonder why?

                Perhaps people think I should be asking God for forgiveness.  Well, the amount of self flagellation I’ve done over the last seven years, I’m sure any kind of merciful God would have forgiven me a long time ago.  And if not, who cares.  Maybe I’d like hell better, then.  Because I honestly think, if there is a God, He has a lot of explaining to do, maybe it should be me forgiving Him.

                So, I wrote this blog post, for all the women out there carrying a secret shame like me.  I don’t want to be ashamed anymore.  I don’t think I should have to be, and unless people hear from women who made this awful choice they’ll go on thinking we’re just too lazy to get on the pill or something.  That’s not the way it happens for most of us.  For most of us this is a tragic, traumatic occurrence from which there is no recovery or getting over.  And before you say, what about your unborn child?  Is it all about you???  Trust me, I think about that unborn child every single day.  I hope they understand and have forgiven me.   

                I doubt Steve thinks of that lost baby.  He actually grinned when the abortion was confirmed, that’s how little it affected him.  Why does he get off scot free, and I’m being made to suffer?  Why does society continuously give men a pass in the whole abortion debate?  I think of him and that baby every single day and I doubt either of us ever cross his mind in his hedonistic trip through life. 

                Next time you want to condemn a woman for having an abortion, think about me.  Think about all the women like me.  Most women don’t want an abortion.  It’s not an easy choice.  I’m tired of being judged by people who have never walked in my shoes.  Only God can judge me, and if He does, maybe that judgmental finger should twist around back on Him.