the end, finally

As Carrie Bradshaw would say, “Things are so over, we need a new word for over.” Yes, I finally broke things off with D. on Friday, and while I’m happy I did so, his passive-aggressive response to the whole thing is really dredging up bad memories of the weeks surrounding the abortion. I’m starting to view his behavior in a new light: not necessarily an indication that he’s in a lot of pain himself, but definitely a sign that he doesn’t give a damn about my own pain. This realization was so painful that I canceled my group therapy/post-abortion support group session last night. I just didn’t feel like facing those demons while struggling to cope with these new ones. Once again, the abortion — while not being an Active Issue — remains the harbinger of so, so many bad things between us. I wish he’d just grow up and move on and stop causing working so hard to be a complete asshole. Barring that, as with the abortion, all I can really do is focus on myself, my choices, my responsibility to heal myself and my refusal to react to his childishness. This isn’t about being strong; it’s about protecting myself — because surely he doesn’t give a damn about my being safe.

grieving

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s grieving. After my grandmother died, the process was so difficult I entered into several years of therapy, in which I had the chance to come to terms with plenty of other issues. But the grieving itself nearly killed me, and it’s during subsequent bouts of grief when I worry most about whether I’ll have the courage to keep going on in life. The past week has brought an entirely new episode of coming to terms with loss into my life, and once again I’m at that point where the pain seems interminable.

Doing some research about the grieving process, I found a website that isn’t so much critical of Kübler-Ross’s stages of grieving as it is honest about grieving being highly subjective. About the five stages of grief, in fact, Kübler-Ross said,

They were never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages. They are responses to loss that many people have, but there is not a typical response to loss, as there is no typical loss. Our grief is as individual as our lives.

And the site, instead, offers three general categories of grief:

1. The first reaction to loss, SHOCK can involve just minutes or last for days. You might feel numb or be in disbelief. You might be unable to make simple decisions or attend to your daily routine;
2. When the shock wears off, the SUFFERING begins and can last for weeks, months, and intermittently for years. If you’re suffering from a loss, you’ll typically experience waves of emotions that can involve sadness, anger, guilt, anxiety, or any combination of those feelings and others. The pain is as palpable a physical experience as it is emotional. You might also experience physical symptoms such as loss of appetite, sleeplessness, or chest pain, and behavioral symptoms such as withdrawal from society, mood swings, or inability to concentrate; and
3. RECOVERY represents not the end of pain over a loss but the ability to reconnect to the interesting and joyful parts of life — to refocus your attention from your pain of loss to living with meaning and purpose.

I think it’s safe to say I’ve entered the Suffering Stage over the past 48 hours. I’ll be fine for a little while but then start thinking of all that’s happened over the past ten days, and I’m reduced to a blubbering mess. I’m having to force myself to eat; nothing tastes good anymore. I can’t fall asleep until 2am, even when I’ve got an 8am class. I don’t want to leave my house. And I blanked on my Math quiz today — something that’s completely unheard of — even though we’d been covering the exact same material only moments earlier. In short, I’m a mess.

The biggest challenge, right now, is finding people to help me through the grieving process. Everyone is so busy in their own lives, and what going on with me is so largely a secret that it’s difficult to just reach out to anyone at random. I know who my friends are — thanks to K. and V. and M. in particular — but it’s still hard to be so weak so frequently. It’s hard to deal with these things at 2am, when surely no one is awake to get my “I’m so sad and I can’t stop crying” text messages. I can only take a cue from the past and realize that it gets incrementally easier at some point, and there will be some day when I don’t think about the sadness at all. It’s extremely difficult, entering this second stage, to see when that will be. Faith in myself is what it takes, I suppose.

What they don’t tell you…

I wrote this in 2002, soon after the last abortion I had before this one. I’ve been going through some of my old writing, trying to remember what the psychological aftermath is like, when I realized it was probably normal to have feelings about how I could have made a different choice if I wanted to, even though I knew what the “right” choice was. I like these paragraphs:

What they don’t tell you is that afterward, there is a lot of bleeding, with clots. They don’t tell you that your breasts will begin to produce milk and become painfully hard and leak, because your body thinks you’ve had a baby, only a bit too early. No one tells you that you’ll hunger for that baby, that you’ll scream at ghosts and beg to make your choice go away. You’ll grab your belly and claw at the bed sheets, wishing things could have been different. You lie to yourself, say you could have handled being a single mother with no support, that another child doesn’t take that much more effort, that you didn’t know it would be like this, that you would have just done something, anything, if only you could take it all back and not have this pain and not be sitting on a toilet at three in the morning, crying and sobbing as half-dollar-sized globs of blood descend from your empty uterus through a war-ravaged vagina to make a sickening plopping sound into the bottom of the toilet.

But they also don’t tell you the screaming will stop, regret will turn to relief, the bleeding will go away, your milk will dry up, you will (soon enough) be able to look at babies without crying, the pain becomes part of who you are and dissipates, one day you will wake up and you will realize that you did the only, the best thing you could do and, damnit!, you’re going to embrace that and be that “I’ve had an abortion and I lived through it and I’d do it again if I were in the same situation” kind of woman.

They don’t tell you that, one day, you will take the strong part of the core of your being — that part that made you want to be more than just a struggling, overworked single mom wondering how to pay the electric bill — and you will love and nurture that strength and thank the gods and goddesses that you had the chance to make that choice. They don’t tell you that one day you will have a child — or two — when you’re ready, and it will be as pure joy as you have felt pure pain, and you will know that life is good.

And then the aftermath…

I took B. to the North Park Village Nature Center today for the City Wilds Festival — lots of eco-friendly educational resources and a wonderful nature walk experience. No cicadas in sight (thank goodness), but at the grocery store afterward I noticed I was rather crampy and began to feel, well, damp. Arriving home, I realized I’d started bleeding, something I’ve had none of since the abortion on Tuesday.

Since about 2pm, I’ve been passing clots and I’ve been in no small amount of pain. Talked with the doctor on call, who says that if it doesn’t stop by 9pm, I should phone him and we’ll decide whether I should go to the ER (probably yes). I’ve been dosing on ibuprofen and hoping it doesn’t come to that, though it doesn’t look good (it’s 6:18pm and nothing’s gotten better).

This is the first night in some time I’ve been able to relax at my place with B., and we’re having such a good time just being in each other’s presence that it would be unfortunate to have that cut short because my body has decided to rebel now, a full four days after its violation.

Then again, nothing about this experience has gone the way I’d have hoped.

Something = not nothing

As if it were a sporting event to which we’d both purchased tickets, and I’d denied him the chance to see the big game, D. remains upset that I “forbade” him from being present at the abortion:

On Tuesday, it was completely unfair of you to not let me in that office. I had every right to be there as you did, and because you didn’t get your way you forbade me from going. Do you honestly think I would have blown up at you right there?

What he can’t seem to grasp is that no one had a “right” to be there. By virtue of circumstance, my presence was demanded; clearly no abortion would be had in my absence. I gave him every warning, every smoke signal, every humanly possible indication that, should he continue to choose to be aloof and unsupportive, he would be unwelcome in that room. And it isn’t that I was even remotely fearful he’d blow up at me; rather, I was afraid he’d continue to do just what he’d been “doing” for the previous two weeks. That is: nothing. And whether it was an unrealistic expectation or not, what I needed on Tuesday was infinitely more than nothing.

The first day after…

…crying is all that can be done.

6w5d

To describe what happened today is impossible. Sum it up to love, lots of love. Love from M., who picked me up, who brought me to CVS, where I could buy pads, who drove me to the doctor, who advised me on how much Ativan to take, who sat with me in the waiting room, who held my hand through the abortion, who waited in line for my medication while I made my follow-up appointment, who drove me back to her house, who let me sleep on her $1,300-bed, who drove me to the house where my kiddos were, who stayed with me and the kiddos, who let me sleep on the couch while she watched the kiddos, who just damned loved me through the whole damned day.

It’s so cliched, but you never know who your friends are until shit hits the fan.

I’m not happy there’s shit to be hitting, but I’m infinitely grateful that the friends are coming to the surface. I love you all.

6w4d

Today is the last full day I will be pregnant. On the surface, it’s just like any other day: I got up, went to school, and worked a bit. I will spend some time with the kiddos. I will watch television and fall asleep after reading for a bit. The only difference is that, tomorrow, when I wake up, the first thing on the agenda will be my abortion. That, of course, makes everything different.

6w3d

3:36pm — D. calls, he asks how I’m doing, we chat for a bit, he says he can’t see me tonight or tomorrow but wants to drive me on Tuesday. I say that I’m not sure how I feel about him coming on Tuesday, since he hasn’t really “been there” for me. An argument ensues, he reminds me of the supposedly “mean and horrible things” I said on the phone last week (when we were talking about privacy issues), and then he hangs up.

The following text message storm ensues:

Me: That’s really crummy for you to just hang up on me like that.

D: You’re not making it easy to talk to you. I’m tired of feeling like my best isn’t good enough. I’m tired of it all and I give up.

Me: I don’t know where any of that comes from other than you. Those are your words, not mine. What doesn’t help is you hanging up and otherwise disappearing every time things don’t go the way you want them to go. What am I supposed to do right now? Sit here and pretend everything is okay and I haven’t just spent most of the past week alone? I don’t know what you expect, but it seems unfair.

D: Like I said, I give up. You don’t want me there on Tuesday? Fine. Your things will be waiting for you when you get back.

Me: I said I didn’t know yet. You’re being unreasonable. You won’t even talk to me like an adult, but you expect me to be comfortable with you there? You need to understand how difficult that is.

D: Fuck you, A. I understand plenty.

Me: Oh just stop. That’s the way I deserve to be treated? Give me a break.

D: That entire text was uncalled for on my end. Take care.

Me: I wish you would just stop worrying about past mistakes and supposed expectations and just BE the caring person we both know you are.

D: That is something you needn’t concern yourself with anymore.

Me:

And so I’m left, once again, alone. I’m not quite sure what to do, other than to stop fighting. It’s not worth it anymore.

6w0d

One phone call, two voice mail messages, and a flurry of e-mail and I’m still no closer to feeling supported by D. His message is a broken record – I can’t work on our relationship until I fix myself – followed with my constant refrain: our relationship and this situation are two independent things. My response:

It isn’t that I don’t want to give you time to get your shit together. You’re right; I’ve waited long enough, but it’s not “a fixed-up D.” I’m waiting for. I have been clear about my boundaries, and I have no doubt that I will be able to stick to them. I don’t deserve your anger or being mistreated, and that isn’t going to change any time soon. It’s unreasonable to think I should let you treat me badly for any length of time for whatever reason. That does NOT mean I don’t “want” to give you time… what it DOES mean is that “problems D. has” is a completely separate issue from “a crisis situation A. AND D. are in.”

No matter what things are going on with you that cause you to think it’s okay to react the way you do when I say things that are reasonable (that doesn’t mean you AGREE with them, just that they aren’t psychotic), that is a separate issue from me being in a situation that we BOTH contributed to and we are BOTH responsible for. I have never asked for much in that regard — all I’ve ever wanted, since the day I found out I was pregnant, was for you not to run away, for you to not leave me here to deal with this on my own. If I wanted that, I never would have told you. Somehow, though, that’s pretty much what’s happening now.

I’m really, really sorry you’re going through whatever it is you’re going through. It can’t be easy, and since I’ve been at the point in my own life where everything was falling apart because I had issues I never dealt with (childhood, trauma, loss, whatever), I can completely understand why you might feel the need to run away. But, for Pete’s sake, I am pregnant, D., and that is your responsibility as much as mine. That doesn’t mean I want to milk this situation for all I can; I’m not that kind of person. What it means is that I wish you would, just for one minute, stop focusing on how incapable you feel and just do something. Yeah, it’s hard. Yeah, it’s not what either one of us planned for. But it’s REALITY and it’s something *I* can’t run away from, and it’s pretty darn unfair that you can — and do, and have been. No matter how many ways I tell you what I need from you (simple kindness and NOT TO LEAVE ME TO DEAL WITH THIS BY MYSELF), it’s not getting through.

Like I’ve said, you have choices. You can keep being angry at me and having your anger color everything you say or do, or you can choose to be benevolent. You can keep beating yourself up for not being “enough” (whatever that is), or you can make the choice to do what you can (even though it’s scary). I am not asking you not to be weak, not to be scared, not to make mistakes. We are all human, and we ALL do those things, and expecting you to be 100% perfect is idiotic. But I do expect for love to be more than words, D.

Of course, his response was that he needs to make himself better before he can focus on our relationship, and that he doesn’t feel “comfortable” doing much for me. My response:

What you don’t seem to understand, since you keep combining the two, is that I view “working on our relationship” and “going through this SITUATION” as two completely different things. Right now, I have no desire to even think about working on our relationship; as far as I’m concerned, that’s a secondary issue, and something that’s largely out of my control, since it so highly depends on you and choices you make.

What I am talking about the past few e-mails is something along the lines of supporting a friend, “being there” for someone you care about because it’s the right thing to do, stepping up and taking responsibility for a situation you are IN with me. This isn’t something *I* am going through and need help with incidentally. This is something that is happening to *us* and I am carrying the physical burden. You might be able to walk away, but I CANNOT and I am tired of being the only one who is forced (by circumstance) to face this head-on. And in case you don’t quite know what I mean (or believe it’s some sort of Herculean effort) by “supporting a friend” or “being there for someone you care about”, here are things my friends have done over the past few days:

* called see if there was anything they could bring me to calm my stomach,
* sent me e-mails asking how I was feeling,
* sent me cards saying they were thinking of me,
* offered to watch the boys so I could rest,
* invited me to go out and see a movie to get my mind off things,
* checked in just to see if I was okay,
* gave me a hug when I was crying,
* told me it was okay to feel scared,
* listened to me,
* asked if I needed a ride to the ER,
* expressed concern over the frequency of my vomiting, and
* offered to spend the night on my couch so I didn’t feel alone.

The last thing I want to do is lay a guilt trip on you. I am offering these as things that my friends have done that have helped, things you could do that are completely independent of “working on our relationship”. That is what I meant when I made my comment about kindness and decency. It’s what I was getting at when I sent you that link of “do’s and dont’s” a couple of weeks ago — it’s because I’ve thought, all along, that you wanted to support me through this situation we are in TOGETHER, but as time goes on I don’t even get the impression that you want to be my *friend* through any of this.

I don’t mean to sound insensitive or snarky, but part of caring about someone — even just a friend — is sometimes putting aside what’s comfortable and convenient and doing what’s needed because you care. *That* is what I meant when I said love is more than words. I can’t even begin to express how painful it is that it’s been the hip mamas who have gotten me through this so far — and they don’t even have any responsibility to do so! It wouldn’t kill you to pick up the phone and ask how I’m feeling, or to offer to bring me some Gatorade, or to stop by simply to give me a hug. As much as I want to want you to be there on Tuesday, I don’t want you there unless you’re going to be supportive before and after as well. It continues to upset me that your idea of me “not having to go through this alone” involves just Tuesday, because it’s more than that.

Well, he did call, ten minutes later. That lasted about 90 seconds before it turned mean, and it was only a couple of minutes after that when he hung up on me…an act followed up with an e-mail explaining that the reason he hasn’t been calling or coming around is because he’s so angry, as evidenced by the phone call.

Meanwhile, I’m left pondering the irony. I, who have so much to be angry about, can’t seem to scream, while D. — whose anger comes out of nowhere — is left to throw fits and run away whenever he deems fit.