This essay is the third place winner of ACM’s second nonfiction contest. Each year, the winner receives publication and a free residency at Shannaghe in Belfast, Maine.
This is also part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform:
“Trump’s Supreme Court appointees overturned Roe v Wade, eliminating a fundamental constitutional right and denying women across the nation the right to choose. The extreme act of overturning Roe, which had been the law of the land for nearly half a century, has already had devastating consequences nationwide.”
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A few years earlier, we would have been risking our lives. Those who helped us would be jeopardizing their livelihoods, their freedom. Many people want to go back to that. My mother, for instance. How could we imagine that one day, they would succeed?
We shuffle into a room, a small group of us and a nurse, leaving the waiting room—with its molded plastic chairs and buzzing fluorescent lights—to the people we brought to take us home. I brought my recent boyfriend, now ex, the only person I have.
We sit on low sofas and easy chairs, with throw pillows of lemon yellow, orange, and avocado green, all tidy and new, like a furniture store display or the Brady Bunch house. Pools of light under pottery lamps spotlight strategically placed boxes of tissues. No one is crying. Perhaps I’m remembering the mood rather than the furniture itself.
I’m sure a faint smell, metallic, antiseptic, nevertheless betrays the clinical setting, and an air conditioner hums. The calendar says March, but this is South Florida.
The nurse explains the procedure. Local anesthesia, dilation, a small tube, suction. Afterward, bleeding and possibly cramping. “It might be a bit worse than a normal period. Then it will all be over.”
I wince. My usual periods are rough enough, one reason I failed gym in my junior year of high school. I was supposed to double up the following year to meet the graduation requirements of the state of Missouri. If I had managed it, I’d be well into my first year of college, most likely. I certainly wouldn’t be in this clinic.
We’re encouraged to talk. Questions, feelings. Sharing will help, she tells us.
One young woman protests that she shouldn’t be here at all. It didn’t make sense. She was using birth control.
“It happens,” the nurse says. “No method is perfect. IUDs can dislodge. Condoms can break. The Pill’s more effective, but it’s not 100 percent. And over time, the chances of failure accumulate—it gets more likely.”
I did not know this. The only education I had about birth control was what I had gleaned from packages on drugstore shelves. I used foam. I didn’t know you were supposed to use it with a diaphragm.
To my surprise, some of the others are married. I remember one clearly because she’s older than the rest of us. “I already have five kids,” she says softly. “What about them? Wouldn’t be fair to them. Not enough to go around as it is.” The young woman sitting on the sofa next to her takes her hand.
For all we have in common, each of our stories is unique.
I wish I remembered every one of them, but I don’t even recall exactly what I said. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t explain.
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“Men only want one thing. It’s up to you to stop them.” That’s my mother’s take on sex. She speaks primarily with pamphlets. My becoming-a-woman rite consists of being handed a bulky pad and the garter belt contraption to hold it up, along with a booklet of instruction, You’re a Young Lady Now! On the cover, a girl in pedal pushers gazes in the mirror, where she wears a pink party dress. You can assume there’s a slip underneath so any light behind her won’t show the shape of her legs.
Other pamphlets appear, hand-me-downs no doubt from my older sister. She’s four years older, but the clothes girls wear in the illustrations are outdated even for her. Bobby socks and saddle shoes. Poodle skirts and sweater sets. White gloves.
Be careful how you laugh. Eat daintily and not too much. Be careful how you sit; make sure your legs stay together at all times. Don’t run; especially, don’t run after boys. Play hard to get. Don’t talk about yourself. Ask questions about the boy and let him talk. Act like what he says is riveting.
Above all, guard your reputation as you would your life. “Easy” and “fast” girls are ruined girls. No decent girl will be friends with them, and no man will want to marry them. The order is marriage, then sex. Never the other way around. The pamphlets don’t explain what sex is or use the word itself. It’s all euphemism, like “going too far.”
My mother says that when she started dating, her mother warned her “not to come home with a belly full,” so my mother would only pick at any food and would be ravenous by the time her date took her home.
I suppose the booklets beat that. At least you won’t confuse food and sex.
Prohibition of sex never stops it. Grandma’s warning to my mother in the forties has more behind it than my mother realizes.
In Grandma’s wedding photograph from 1922, a few days shy of her nineteenth birthday, she’s holding a trailing bouquet and wearing a lacy, loose-fitting sheath that falls to mid-calf. You can’t tell she is two months pregnant with my oldest uncle. She gazes directly at the camera, one side of her mouth slightly raised, like the Mona Lisa. My grandfather looks a bit stunned.
Less than three months after the wedding, Grandma’s grandma was found drowned in River Des Peres, near the Gravois bridge. Grandma blamed herself and her untimely pregnancy for her grandmother’s suicide. Grandma’s grandma had been pregnant when she married, back in Ireland. I discovered this history of my grandmothers when I researched my family history. I noticed the dates of marriage and birth. No doubt they considered themselves fortunate to marry before their babies were born.
My great-great-grandmother might have ended up in one of Ireland’s infamous Magdalen Laundries, where “fallen women” (although most were girls), along with some who were too damn attractive, paid for their “sins” by forced labor and brutality.
At first, I didn’t recognize my grandmother in the only photo I have of her as a young mother, in 1930. She’s stick thin, averting her face from the glare of the sun, her brow furrowed. She has an infant in her arms and four more children by her side, including my mother in a poofy toddler’s cap, sandwiched between her two older brothers. Before my mother turns four, Grandma will surrender her children to an orphanage because she cannot care for them.
I chewed and swallowed and digested my mother’s “orphan home” stories until they lived in my marrow, as much my memories as hers. She was kept there for over ten years. The Sisters of Charity operated it, but charity was scarce in the Depression. My mother’s toes overlap, permanently deformed by the wrong shoes—too small, two lefts, or two rights. Those were just the visible scars.
Every Saturday afternoon the nuns lined up the girls and boys according to age for baths in a gender-segregated bath house behind the main building. The girls wore nightgowns in the bath so they wouldn’t be tempted to look at their own bodies. Children’s bodies.
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Deb was not part of the group I took refuge among in high school, a loose collection of misfits, artists and queers. She was a jock, a member of one of the prestige cliques. That is, until she got pregnant. Her crowd acted like pregnancy was contagious. This offended me. Deb had always spoken kindly to me, a klutz in field hockey, hopeless at basketball.
I made a point of seeking Deb out in the cafeteria. While she chatted away about the baby clothes she bought at Goodwill, I munched on my sandwich—American cheese slices, iceberg lettuce, and yellow mustard on white bread. I passed her my pickle because I heard pregnant women crave pickles.
A few months after she left school, Deb made a visit back and brought the baby with her, a chubby infant squeezed into a yellow dress. As I came up to Deb, she handed me the baby. While we talked, she looked everywhere but at the baby. She told me she was married and living in his parents’ basement. He’d dropped out of school, too, and had a job.
“What’s it like, sleeping with someone?”
Her face softened. “It’s the best part. It’s comforting to have someone to cuddle with all night.”
I wondered what I would do in Deb’s place. I was still a virgin. You can make any choice hypothetically.
By 1973, the year Deb and I turned sixteen, the sixties were definitely over. The Summer of Love was followed by the Manson murders. The peaceful wonder of Woodstock had become the violent horror of Altamont. By 1975, the United States had left Vietnam. The dominoes of communism did not tumble. The war’s vast cost proved pointless. The president of the United States was suspected of covering up a criminal conspiracy he had set in motion in order to gain a second term. Inflation was in the double digits. Gas stations had no fuel.
Among the litter left by the convulsive street fights of the late sixties and early seventies stood the tattered “make love, not war” banner of the sexual revolution. Musical theater, romance novels, D.H. Lawrence all portrayed sex as a tumultuous power, irresistible, a surrender to pleasure that dissolved the boundaries between people. The slogan of the sexual revolution reduced it to, “If it feels good, do it.”
I would have settled for having sex because it felt good. Looking at my life from the outside, a person might have concluded I ended up in an abortion clinic because I was liberated and having a grand old time. They would be wrong.
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My mother was the queen of make-believe. When you’re a kid, that’s a lark. If grime and clutter didn’t fuel one of her rages, she would say, Who needs a clean house? Let’s go bumming! “Bumming” could mean anything from a drive to a state park or down the new interstate highway to see how far they had built it, to a trip to the newfangled mall, with palm trees growing inside. You never knew where you were going with her.
On Sundays after Mass she’d scour the paper for open houses. The ones she chose were pictures from her Ideals magazine come to life, with deep porches in neighborhoods with huge leafy trees shading lawns and sidewalks. I joined the fun, imagining a series of family photos arranged on the wall going up a stairway with a gleaming wooden banister: my parents’ wedding, formal studio sittings of the family as we grew in size and number, interspersed with candid shots of us on vacations in the mountains, at the lake, or on a beach, places we had never been. I could see us fly down those stairs in our flannel pajamas on a Christmas morning to find that Santa had indeed come down our real chimney. We’d open our presents, drink hot chocolate, and eat fresh cinnamon buns by a cheerful fire, with our parents gazing lovingly, their arms around each other. I got pretty carried away with this, but my interest in open houses waned once I clued in. We would never move, nor be that family if we did. These houses were my mother’s sky castles.
It had been her life vow to have a big, happy family, a dream that enabled her to survive being abandoned ten years in an orphanage. She still clung to that fantasy to keep the demons of doubt and despair at bay.
In her later years she would hang a shower curtain with a lighthouse on the wall of her bed/sitting room and pretended she was by the ocean. By then she had a habit of throwing up a screen and projecting the image of her choice onto anything she didn’t want to at look too closely. Like me. She told herself I dropped out of school and ran away because I was bored. She knew better.
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When I was seventeen, we were told to bring everyone who lived in our house to the offices of the St. Louis County Family and Children’s Services. The receptionist showed us into a large room.
The dimmer switch of my world had been turned down. The sun didn’t shine as brightly. Fog had crept in around the edges. To walk was to trudge through thigh-high sand. I couldn’t remember what happiness felt like.
My brother had been working in a hospital emergency room. He recognized the signs and asked if I was thinking of killing myself. I nodded. I didn’t have the energy to lie. He arranged for this session.
The therapist came in and introduced herself. Still standing in the center of the room, she turned to me, “So, you’re the problem?”
I nodded.
“No, you’re not.”
I snuck a glance across the room at my scowling mother. The therapist asked the others, “Why do you think I said that? Why would I think she’s—” Her fingers made air quotes, “‘the problem?’ Any guesses?”
When no one answered, she said, “Look at how you are seated.” I was on one side of the room. Everyone else clustered against the opposite wall. “You are not the problem,” she repeated. “This is a family problem. It’ll take the whole family to work it out.”
The idea that someone, an adult, didn’t view me as a problem and said so out loud was so odd. I wanted to sit there and let this wash over me.
As we were leaving, the therapist took my mother aside and said something I couldn’t hear.
My mother pushed the woman away. She charged out of the building with her head lowered like a bull. Once we were all in the car, she exploded.
“Who does that woman think she is? This is not my fault. We are never, ever coming back here.”
No one said a word. I scarcely breathed.
I asked my brother if he’d heard what the therapist had said. He said she suggested separate counseling for her, in addition to family therapy.
I hugged him hard. He’d tried.
I would do anything for my kids had been her refrain. But she wouldn’t do this. Evidently, her demons mattered more than my life.
I left my parents’ house a few weeks later, after my dad said, “I can’t deal with both you and your mother, and I can’t do anything about her.” I imagined myself as a female Steinbeck, riding the rails, a Kerouac, on the road. I would be one of Joan Baez’s hitchhiker kin, walking to wage war against the sorrows of a dying empire, my wild Janis Joplin hair blazing in the sunset. It turns out Janis (and Kris Kristofferson, who wrote “Me and Bobby McGee”) knew more than Joan about freedom: It means you’ve got nothing left to lose.
I lasted about six weeks on the road, sleeping rough, about half the time working in a traveling carnival. Most carnies are running from something, often the police. The day after one of us was murdered, we scattered like roaches. I was sick anyway, with bronchitis. I needed a real bed, food, and antibiotics. I didn’t know where else to go, so I took what money I had and bought a bus ticket.
I was waiting in the carport when my mother drove in. She wouldn’t look at me. “You’re back,” she said, slammed the car door and went inside. My dad had sold my bike for drinking money.
Four months later my dad said, “I hope you have kids just like you.” It was the last thing he said to me as I boarded the bus heading from the Midwest to Florida on my eighteenth birthday. It was not a blessing.
He seldom said much, my dad. Most of the time he spoke only to send one of us kids for another beer, so he didn’t have to get out of his recliner. When he did say something else, it was memorable. Like the time he said, “You were a mistake. I asked your mother if it was safe, and she said yes. She tricked me.”
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Like my mother, the owner of the clothing chain I work for in Florida is fluent in slamming doors. He bangs the front door of the West Palm warehouse behind him and shouts, “Morning!” loud enough to make all of us jump. Every time.
Soon after I was hired as an inventory clerk, I discovered discrepancies not only in the number of items but the value on the books, a waving red flag I was too inexperienced to see. I diligently set out to correct the errors and set up a sales recording system that would be more accurate.
Jim, the owner’s right hand, is his opposite, a soft-spoken, portly fellow who does his best to repair the damage the owner inflicts. So it was disturbing to hear him shouting in the owner’s office. The office staff exchanged glances. Jim stormed out of the owner’s office and slammed the hollow door behind him so hard all the inner walls of the building shook.
The owner screamed. Jim rushed back, opened the door, and stood immobilized by what he saw. The ceiling had collapsed. The upper sides of the ceiling panels surrounded the owner. They were covered with scorpions.
I ran out of the building. I had been feeling unwell as it was, with episodes of sudden weakness on and off for nearly a year. Cold sweats and shakes. My stomach wasn’t heaving but I felt like I was on a swaying boat. I had finally taken a sick day and gone to a clinic. My period was late, and now that I had a job, I could afford a doctor. I didn’t think anything of it when they asked for a urine sample.
The next day, most of the other staff had left when Jim shuffled over to my desk, his head hanging.
“We need you to do something.”
“What’s that?”
He laid a piece of paper from a yellow legal pad on my desk. Handwritten, large numbers next to words in block capital letters.
“We need you to resubmit the inventory valuations for the final quarter and the annual statements.”
“I’m sorry?”
“We need these numbers.” The company was a private one, wholly owned by the family. No other shareholders. This was for either the IRS or a bank, probably the former. Whichever, it would be fraud.
I had just broken up with my boyfriend. I was terrified I’d be back in the situation I’d been in before I landed this job not long ago. Money had gotten so tight at one point that I lived for an entire week on nothing more than a watered-down can of lentil soup.
I found out the urine test was for pregnancy, the result positive.
I couldn’t take care of a cat, much less a baby. People say ridiculous things when it comes to having kids, like “God will provide.” Tell that to my grandmother as she walks away from the orphanage where she has left her children among strangers, to grow up without a tender touch. The blows children take do not stop with them. They are passed on, often in invisible ways.
If I’d called one of the numbers on those posters plastered everywhere in the wake of the Roe decision, I would most likely have been adequately housed and fed and given basic medical care until I gave birth. If I were convinced this was the right choice for me and for a future child, I’d have done it.
I didn’t, precisely because I valued life.
What kind of start could I give a life? Should one begin haphazardly, as an accident, misfortune, or mistake? If I brought a new life into the world, I had a moral obligation to, at the very least, nurture it into being with a strong body and a willing heart. I had neither.
In order for life to be precious, it must be more than a matter of replicating cells—which can happen in a petri dish—or nascent organs, miniature ears, or doll-like fingers. Rather than DNA, doesn’t a mind aware make us uniquely ourselves, and human? Consciousness, an animating soul, when does it arrive? It is not as evident as breath.
Declaring that life begins at conception has a glaring problem. It omits the whole contribution the mother’s body makes, physically, to create a living baby. Far from honoring pregnancy, life-at-conception utterly devalues it. It frames male and female contributions to procreation as equal. But this is false.
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Days after the abortion, I’m in an all-day workshop, bodywork. I paid for it before the pregnancy test, before the scorpions descended. I pull the instructor aside and whisper that I just had an abortion.
“This will help,” she says. “I will give you modifications of the moves, so there will be no strain.” For the rest of the session, she stays close, often resting her hand on my body. Warmth flows from her body to mine.
Tears trickle from the sides of my eyes as the day goes on. Not sorrow or regret. This woman, with her light touch, the woman at the clinic who held my hand during the procedure, the clinic staff, and the women who shared their stories, have given me something I seldom encountered before in life—kindness without expectation or judgment. People had been kind to me, even loved me, like my brother. But I never had been so enfolded and upheld by the deep, generous kindness of women.
Choosing not to jump off a bridge or swallow a bottle of pills is not the same thing as embracing life. People kill themselves on the slow, like my dad. While I could get by on scraps of love, as long as I had books and trees, I deserved more. Lying on that mat, my hands cradling my belly, I breathe deep into my core. If I truly value life, I have to include mine.
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Nancie Erhard is a retired professor of religious ethics. She draws on her life experience as a dual citizen and denizen of the border between the US and Canada to explore how different social contexts form the moral imagination.
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Char Gardner is a life-long visual artist and CNF writer, who taught in the Washington, DC area for nearly twenty years before she began working with her husband, Rob Gardner. Together they made documentary films internationally for over thirty years. Now retired, they live in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where Char is at work on a memoir. Her recent drawings are made with oil sticks on Arches 22X30 paper. Imagery is derived from the human form (working directly from a live model) and from the surrounding natural world. Her essays have been published in The Gettysburg Review, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere.
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