I’d be signing up for this. Mr. Lady wrote an amazingly, unabashedly honest post and it knocked the usual bitching about daily drama right out of my head. So, here’s my pro-choice-esque salute.
I got pregnant the first time I had sex. January 29, 1997, to be specific.
I’d been on the pill for nearly four months – apparently three and a half – and we had a pro-d day from high school and a narrow window of opportunity when the mom of my then bf (soon to be fiance, and then later, ex) went grocery shopping.
Three weeks later, I was late and had a negative test stick in my hand. Another week later, a barely visible positive stick and yet another week or so, a doctor’s stick proclaimed the second test as a false positive. Drugs were administered to induce the monthly mayhem and it was by far the worst experience I’d had of hell week in my three short years of it.
Eleven days of bend in half cramps and vomiting and clotting later, I went back to the doctor to say, “What the fuck? When will this hell end?” and was sent for blood tests that showed a barely elevated HcG level – I had been pregnant. I no longer was.
About a year later, during one of our regular inside the car, outside the house marathon arguments, I told the bf. He cried. Felt he’d lost something he’d never knew he had had. Flash forward a few years and we’re breaking up.
I’ve been on antidepressants for the first time in my life, for nearly a year and well, we broke up. A week before our wedding date.
I was crushed. I was a wreck. I was back to drinking and smoking and doing drugs and oh yeah, did I mention that he had a new girlfriend a week later and I got raped a few days after that? Life was going pretty awesome, so I was like, screw this, I’ve got shit to be depressed about, I’m cutting the meds so I can fucking feel something.
Boy did I ever. A month later we figured out that I wasn’t just vomiting and dizzy and tired from the withdrawal – I was about 13 weeks along with fetus number four. The longest I’d gone. This time was an oops, during the lazy transition from the pill to Depo. This time, like the others, was spontaneously ended by whoeverthefuckmakesthesedecisionsgodorsomething mere moments after confirmation, it seemed. I had to have a D&C and chose to go to a hospital further away from my home, since his mom worked at the closest one. I was mortified.
So I move on. Again. I meet JDawg. We start with the marathon sex and jackhammer weekends right away. We fight lots. He drinks lots. The only thing we’re doing if we’re not fighting or fucking is drinking or smoking pot. Truly a positive situation, right?
I get pregnant for the first time with him about eight months after our crazy ride begins. I lose it a week or so later. My friend has a baby eight months later – the first of our friends to reproduce – and when we saw her at the hospital and we both held the three hour old little girl, we were attached to the idea more than ever before. It didn’t take much convincing that we should try.
About five months later, success meant I had a glowingly positive pee stick in my hand and since we’d kinda sorta planned it, we told nearly everyone we could. It didn’t occur to us to not, despite my history. So our second anniversary loomed and I took my vacation from work. His birthday was also arriving and he was going to take some time starting on that day.
Unfortunately, we went to visit my friend who’d had the baby and during the long walk from the bus station to her house, something in me broke and by the time I was peeing in her bathroom, there was already some spotting. I started crying immediately and didn’t stop for about a week as we visited the closest emergency room – they said it was just old blood dislodging and everything looked fine. My hormones, a little low, but ok.
A day later, it wasn’t old blood anymore and I’m still crying and we go to another doctor and then for an ultrasound and they can’t find a fetal heartbeat, though I’m more than two months along. There isn’t one. I’m told that it looks as though I’m not going to be able to have kids. Ever. He’s angry. Says we’ll keep trying. Says we’ll go for testing – he’ll go for testing – and we’ll make it happen.
Disturbing as it may seem, I inspect every clot of the next week. I search for signs of what was going to be and now wasn’t, again. I stay up late at night on the phone with my dad and he talks me through it as best as he can, having had the opinion that I shouldn’t have been pregnant and the irrefutable evidence that I was getting laid. I’m talking to my dad because it seems JDawg is already over it and kind of annoyed that I’m not. He’s moving on and I think he’s a monster for it. The first really real resentment between us is born.
And now, I’m broken. Really REALLY broken cuz it’s the first time I wanted it. Not found out and was going to find a way to do it. WANTED IT. We were so close and then that asshole in the sky or whoever took it away. FOR NO REASON.
So again a breakup looms and another pregnancy found out shortly after the last ‘I hate you’s are uttered.
[Disclaimer: Except for that one oops, all pregnancies were on the pill or Depo. Every single one. All were lost within 11 days of knowing about them. All made me want to be a mommy more because well, I couldn't be.]
So JDawg and I eventually start being friends again six months after our breakup. Being friends means drinking and smoking pot and screwing again. After ten months of that, Isobel was conceived on Hallowe’en – our former anniversary. But by this time, I learned my lesson.
I didn’t hope. I didn’t think she’d come to be. I marked the weeks off on the calendar only after they came and didn’t look ahead to when I’d be 14 weeks or 20 weeks or delivering until about the six month mark. I knew she was going to die and once I passed that scary 12 week marker I was even more convinced that it would happen later this time and I would have to deliver her.
I felt the first kicks at 17 weeks and she never stopped. Part of the time, I resented her from the very beginning, this thing that wasn’t even going to live, that made me cut back on my smoking, gain weight, feel like a failure if I didn’t gain enough weight, quit drinking and being high and my psych meds and made it impossible to take cold medication for the six colds I got in a four month period. I hated her for making me be on bedrest for two weeks in the beginning, to lower the risk of losing her; for causing my blood pressure to fall to scary levels and my heart to skip beats; hell, even for craving meat when I’d been a vegetarian.
She was causing so much to change and she was just going to die. I knew it.
She was born on her due date. She’s the most perfect thing I’ve ever (or likely will ever) do. She is my reason for living, eating, remaining (mostly) sober, getting out of bed in the morning. She’s the only thing I’ve ever really taken pride in.
Isobel was my eighth pregnancy in nine years. And here’s the thing. It never occurred to me to end any of them. I was going to be a mom and that’s all there was to it. I’m all about women making the educated choice. One of my own sisters was put up for adoption when she was born, I’ve had four friends who’ve had more than one abortion and a few who’ve had one. Two of them, I’ve gone and held their hand.
But for some reason, it just never occurred to me that I could do that. That I should. That if I’d had a baby at 16, in the really scary horrible throws of my eating disorder and newly displaced to living independently from parents, I just might fuck up mine and their lives.
I shake my head at myself now, that even as a 22 year old I was all about having a baby, not choosing to have a baby.
