CONTENT WARNING: RAPE, ABORTION

I’m lying on a bed at a small, dingy clinic on the outskirts of town. I can’t open my eyes. I’m screaming in my head, but I don’t make a sound. My hands are clenched around my forehead, squeezing until I’m white-knuckled and my head is pounding. I do not want this. My body takes over, instinctively, and I can’t do anything to stop it. Tears stream silently down my cheeks until it’s over.

“You’re all set.” the doctor says. She momentarily places her hand on my arm, then leaves the room.

My blood runs cold.  My body feels twisted, like it’s been pulled sideways, but from the inside out. I throw up three times as I walk the two miles back into town. I send my two year old foster child to a friend’s house for the night. I curl up on the couch and pile all the blankets I own over me, trying to turn off the coldness that’s flowing through my veins.

I don’t talk for two days.

Behind every abortion is a story. Maybe that story is routine, or maybe it is complex. It may speak of anguished grief or unimaginable relief. These are the stories that aren’t told, the stories that live only in memories, or in silent hugs and hand squeezes with the only other person who knows. These are the stories we hold in the silence of our hearts, the stories that we, all to often, sit with…. alone. Mine is a story of an abortion I never thought I’d have to have. A choice that wasn’t a choice. It’s a grief I live with every single day, and a story that I will hold in silence no more.

My trip to Colorado sucked.

The flight was terrible. My sister broke her foot in the airport on the way to baggage claim, and after spending the afternoon in the Colorado Springs ER, she flew right back home again. Someone stole all my camera cards and jump drives out of my hotel room at the conference center.

We were out there for a conference – a church conference, which, for me, doubled as a work conference, since I was a full-time minister in the denomination. It was held on the grounds of a large religious group’s camp and conference center, where big horn sheep grazed, turkeys roamed free, and the vistas from the castle [yup, a castle] were breathtaking.

It was the last full day of the conference when I realized that my stuff had been taken from my hotel room, so I went to the conference office to report it missing. I was, understandably, upset, and the Major from National Headquarters who came over to assist me seemed appropriately concerned…until the others left the room, because the next worship service was beginning.

As soon as the others left and we were alone, everything changed. I didn’t know what to do. I was crying. In my head, I was screaming, although I don’t think I was actually able to make a sound. He made a loud grunting noise. I felt something hot trickle between my legs.

And then he just stopped. He backed away, buckled his pants, and said nothing. The screaming in my head silenced and all I heard was the hymn they were singing in the ballroom next door.

All that I can do is vain,

Nothing but thy blood can save me;

I can ne’er remove a stain,

Nothing but thy blood can save me.

Eventually, he told me to get up. He grabbed my uniform tunic and threw it at me. “Button it up or leave it off,” he growled, and then walked me into the worship service.

I didn’t speak.

It took me a solid three months to realize that I was pregnant.

Four tests later, I sat, staring disbelievingly at the sticks, lined up on the bathroom sink, all clearly reading PREGNANT.

I. Was. Fucked.

So fucked. So incredibly fucked.

I’d seen what happened to single officers who’d ended up pregnant. Didn’t matter that I didn’t ask for it, didn’t matter that it wasn’t “my mistake.” I was super screwed. Besides, it was only my word against his, and I didn’t even know his name. Just that he was a Major from National Headquarters.  I couldn’t deal with it, so I tried not to think about it.

I spent the next two weeks freaking out, thinking about what I had to do.  In the middle of everything, I was trying to adopt my foster child. If the church found out I was pregnant, they’d throw me out. If they threw me out, I’d lose my job. My housing. My transportation. My health insurance.

My chance at adopting. My child. My everything.

I was paralyzed by this agonizing decision I had to make. How would I live with myself? How could I sacrifice one potential child to save my chances of adopting the one I already loved? The one I was already fighting for…

An then there was the risk of being caught at the clinic. How would I get there? What if someone recognized me?  I made termination appointments and canceled them several times. It wasn’t until they told me that I was only about two weeks from the cutoff that I knew what I had to do.

So one cool, fall afternoon, I walked nearly two miles to the clinic, so my car wouldn’t be seen there, and I checked in for my abortion. During the intake, the receptionist asked briskly, “so you’re here because you want an abortion, yes?”

“No,” I whispered, “I’m here because I NEED one. This isn’t something I want.”

I needed to end my pregnancy — I didn’t want to. I don’t even believe in the death penalty…and yet there I was, on that bed, squeezing my head until it throbbed in tandem with my uterus, with tears silently sliding out of my eyes as I felt hope itself slide out of me.

The enormity of the choice I made that day was staggering.  The inevitability of it, the knowledge that I was sacrificing the fetus growing inside me to save myself and my chance at adopting the child I already loved, made it seem like I didn’t have a choice at all.

I walked home. Slowly.  Bleeding. In pain.

I curled up on the couch under every blanket I owned.

I grieved, and I still grieve, because I would have been a good mother to her, no matter how she had been conceived. I thought for a long time that maybe if I’d been more brave, or had a different job, or had more money saved, or this other child hadn’t been in the picture, then I would have done something different, especially since the adoption didn’t work out, and now I have no children.

I had two. Now I have none.

And for that, I grieve.

I grieve for the child I lost when the adoption fell through, and for the child that I’ll never know.

I grieve, and I regret. Back then, I wanted to be a mother, and knew I was terminating a potential life. But I also looked at my beautiful, sweet foster daughter and knew that I already loved her with all my heart, and if I didn’t terminate, I’d surely lose her forever.

I’m working on reclaiming the word “regret.” I no longer think regret is something to be afraid of. We all have them. We all live with them. Grief and regret go hand in hand. It’s like death and life. They exist in tandem.  Feeling regret doesn’t mean that we’ve done something wrong. It simply means that we wish things could have been different.

I want to be careful, as I write this, and I want you to be careful as you read it, to not moralize or categorize my abortion as ‘justified’ or ‘acceptable’ because I was raped, because I suffered grief and regret, because I was trying to save myself and my foster child from the unjust consequences of a pregnancy I didn’t ask for or consent to. Women deserve the right to make decisions about our bodies, PERIOD, context or personal stories be damned. We shouldn’t have to tell our stories, and expose the wounds in our souls to justify our choices, but we should be able to tell them without guilt or shame, if we so choose.

I didn’t want my abortion, just like I didn’t want to be raped by a superior officer, but I know that I needed it. I needed it to save myself, and Kiara.

To this day, I live with the grief of the abortion in the same way I live with the grief of not being able to adopt Kiara in the end. For the longest time, I didn’t want anything to do with kids.  It’s become something of a joke, that Chris doesn’t “do” children. But it is no joke. It simply hurts too much to think about what might have been.

But then my brother had two amazing boys. And my partner’s sister’s seven daughters wormed their way into my heart…..and then, I did the unthinkable – I told someone I trust deeply about the abortion. We sat on her couch, she held my hand as I sobbed, and, in that moment, I started to heal.

The child I aborted would be 11 now; Ki will be 13 in August.

Every once in a while, like on Easter Sunday, when two of our nieces snuggled in to me during church, one on each side, I get a flash of what might have been, and the grief pokes me like a pin, pricking my heart.

Sometimes, I still cry.

It’s been 12 years since I flew home from Colorado. 12 years since the rape. 12 years since the abortion.

I started a new project recently. It’s a children’s book about fairies, dedicated to all the children I love. My brother’s kids, my partner’s nieces, Kiara – they all appear in it as fairies. So I decided that the child I never knew deserved to make an appearance in the book as well…which meant she needed a name. I’d never dared to give her a one, or even look down at her as she slipped from my body, but she deserved…deserves….one.

Hope Rose.

In the book, Rose, as she’s called, lives in a tiny fairy house tucked in the bottom of a barn. No one has ever seen her, but they know her name because it hangs on a tiny plaque on the door. When people are sad and shed tears, Rose knows, and plants seeds where their tears fall – seeds of hope that bloom into beautiful, yellow flowers that turn their faces toward the dawn.