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.

one word: tired

Even though D. and I almost never talk about the abortion (and the weeks before and after, when we weren’t communicating that often), I feel like it’s become a metaphor for all of our problems. All the things that happened when he found I was pregnant — disconnection, abandonment, anger, blaming, guilt-trips — crop up in smaller forms in other disagreements, and I am nearly at my breaking point. I tell myself, I should have been able to get pregnant and have an abortion (that we chose together) without my boyfriend abandoning me. And today — after a disagreement — I find myself saying, I should be able to be disappointed and angry at something he did without him refusing to talk to me. Am I in a relationship or am I in a power struggle to see how quickly my spirit can be beaten down?

a healing choice

It’s been nearly three months since I’ve blogged here, and it isn’t that the abortion has slipped out of my mind so much as I had to let it go for a while. In the intervening time, D. has come back into my life, but just as the same issues of anger and abandonment are cropping up, and he is refusing to talk to me, I’ve signed up for a post-abortion support group at the Chicago Women’s Health Center, which starts Sept 18, and I’ve reached out for therapy at the Family Institute. I’m tired of depending solely on friends to make it through such a difficult time, and I’m beginning to fully grasp the concept of being powerless over many things.

I’ve had a headache for at least eighteen hours, a dull pressure permanently furrowed into my brow and periodically accompanied by nausea. If I didn’t have an IUD, I’d think maybe I were pregnant, but the realization that I’m not doesn’t prevent the flashbacks of when I was, the day I spent alone in the hospital because D. couldn’t or wouldn’t come to stay with me, the days after when all I could do was curl up on the couch and watch mindless television in the hope that blathering idiots would take the focus off of the churning in my stomach, the cloudy morning M. drove me to the clinic, the sunny mid-day we spent afterward that I’ll never remember because I was too far gone on Ativan.

I don’t know if I’m ready for Sept 18, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready. The support group lasts three weeks and includes some grieving rituals, which I know will be helpful. What I fear is reopening old wounds, in particular the deep sadness and guilt I feel over my first two abortions, both of which were second-trimester procedures. But it helps to know I’ve found a safe space in which to expose this raw feeling, since I’m tired of wincing every time I’m in a rough spot, and something else triggers something that rubs up against them.

I am hopeful for the future. I am grateful to have come this far. I don’t know what lies ahead, but I know I will work to make my life better. And in that sense, even though I don’t know if I’m ready for next Tue, I’m just going to have to be.

more on grieving

I hate my life today. I hate crying, I hate feeling so sad and empty, and I hate that I don’t know when this will ever end. I hate spending my life at 1:32am crying and crying and crying, and getting a headache because of all the crying. I just want it all to end right now, but I don’t see how I can possibly make that happen without hurting myself, and I definitely don’t want to do that in the least. I just want the pain to go away. I’d do anything to just feel nothing right now. Why can’t someone just come and help me and take it all away? I feel so alone and abandoned and just plain unloved, even though I know I’m not. This is what 1:32 am does to me today, I guess.

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.

Finished.

The meeting with D. went badly yesterday. I’ve come to realize that he is simply incapable of empathy. The worst-case scenario was always that I’d have to go through all of this alone, and so it’s not like anything worse than what’s already transpired could possibly happen. Holding on to bitterness and anger and pain isn’t doing me any good. So I’ll just move on. That’s the only other option.

Reminder to self

If last night was crying (and crying it was), today is cleansing. I’m going through stacks of papers, sorting through work to be done, taking inventory of my home and my life. I’m beginning to remember that I was a whole person before I met D., and I will be a whole person long after he’s gone from my life (which looms sooner with each passing day). I am a strong woman — a strong woman who, inevitably, will cry herself to sleep again many more times before she dies, a fact that depresses less than it heartens.

The first day after…

…crying is all that can be done.