In which I tell you a story about my sordid past.
Tonight I’m going to a birthday party at TiRi’s with this cute kid I met the other day. He’s nineteen. I watched him try to seduce a drunken redneck who thought he was a girl, and the look on the kid’s face when he realized the object of his affection didn’t understand he had one too was priceless. I fell instantly in love with him.
It’ll be fun to go out with him tonight. There will probably be lots of giggling. Befriending a nineteen-year-old is a little sketch, maybe, but I liked him and I’m a total fag hag not an ageist… even though I do think I’m old enough that I had an abortion the year he was born.
Which reminds me of my Weird Psychic Abortion story, which I’ve meant to write about for years and so I might as well now.
The first time I got pregnant (in junior college, by a dumb trumpeter I’d mistaken for deep) I had no emotional or spiritual experience with regards to the future personhood of the zygote at all. I’d simply been incredibly miserable.
My physiology does not get along with pregnancy hormones, not one bit, and every time I’ve ever been pregnant has totally, utterly, unabashedly sucked. I get morning sickness from hell, my mental facilities fail spectacularly, I sob endlessly, I puke randomly, and I bloat. All within ten days of implantation.
I remember pulling off of a busy road one day dressed in my Dickens’ Carolers costume, opening my car door, and puking my guts up into a parking lot. In broad daylight. While hurrying to a gig. “I’ll never forget this moment,” I thought at the time, punching my voluminous crinoline underskirts back under the steering wheel, “because I’m wearing this fucking dress.”
The abortion I underwent to terminate my first pregnancy was unusually awful due to the fact that they used oral rather than intravenous Valium, and I’d eaten a meal – the last cheeseburger I was ever to eat, actually – before presenting for the procedure. I wasn’t even half as drugged as I should have been when they wheeled me into the room. Let me tell you, you want your Valium by IV whenever possible. Trust me on this one.
When I was about twenty-three or so, I missed two periods. Having been pregnant before I knew exactly what it felt like and I had all the symptoms, not to mention I knew I’d been unbelievably half-assed with birth control. But unlike the first time, I felt someone. Someone was there. Already. A boy child.
He’d be dark haired, I knew, with a high forehead and hazel eyes even though neither I nor the father looked anything like that. He had chosen me, for some reason, and arrived awfully early in the process. After getting over my initial terror of pregnancy and motherhood, I liked him. I loved him. I talked to him for a couple of weeks. My boobs hurt, but I didn’t mind so much. The queasiness was bad, but manageable. He was always around, an intangible yet somehow very real presence.
Yet I had The Fear. Was I ready to give my life up to another? Who would I become, if I had that child? I’d never go back to school, probably, never travel. I knew myself to be selfish and somewhat reckless, and doubted my self-discipline. (In those days, I had heavy judgments about how people should raise children, and I didn’t think I passed my own specs. Nobody did, but it took me years to realize that my standards were artificially high and that total idiots raise children to adulthood every day.) I was honest enough with myself to know that I didn’t want to exchange my lifestyle for motherhood. I was also pretty sick with the prospect of having another clinical abortion, but that was my own damn fault.
I didn’t want a baby, in fact didn’t want kids at all, but I wanted him. I didn’t want to be pregnant. I didn’t want to have to be dealing with it! What kind of idiot was I, getting pregnant again?
And I could feel him there, hanging out with me, sweet and mine. I agonized over it.
But one night I decided, and the next evening I walked to a nearby park and sat on a swing. I thought, Hey, baby. You need to go. I can’t have you now, but you can come back later. I can’t care for you properly. You have to go. And I felt such sadness, but also a certain amount of pragmatism in myself. I thought, There’s more than one door, baby. If you have to come in now, pick another woman. Or if you wait, maybe I can be your mother later. But not now. Please, not now, can’t you see?
And it was sunset, and cars drove by, and I sat on the swing. By and by I couldn’t feel him any more. I walked slowly home. When I got there I started bleeding.
It’s not often that one remembers something that didn’t happen with such clarity. I’ve come to regard that place in time as one of the larger branches of my personal choice-tree: if I’d had him, my whole life would have been different. I would be a totally different person. I would never have come to Iowa, met the people I love, done the things I’ve done. I would have chosen a path on which I was a woman with children: totally different than this path, the one I’m living now.
What had never occurred to me before the other night was that I might one day meet him, because he wanted in so badly and since I never birthed him someone must have. What a cool feeling that would be, to meet him and know that I was almost his mother.
Anyway. That’s the story of my psychic abortion. (The easiest transition from pregnant to non-pregnant I ever went through! I recommend it as the preferred method.)
In other news, I’m glad it’s Friday ’cause I wanna rock!
