I wasn't ready

Ending my college pregnancy was the first parenting decision I ever made. It was the right one.

It’s not the kind of unplanned pregnancy tale that sways a pro-lifer. Though I’ve learned by now that none of the horror stories do.

I was 20 years old, my boxes packed to move in with my sweet college boyfriend (now husband). I’d probably have his babies someday, but obviously I was on the pill until then. Parenthood was a constellation in the distant galaxy of adulthood, and I hadn’t given it serious thought.

I’d been vomiting without stopping for a week, and we both worried I was really sick. Neither of us thought I could be pregnant. My period had come the month before, though it was really light, a few smears grazing my baby blue undies. I didn’t give that much thought, either. I was stressed about the move, tired from a recent month-long research fellowship in Cyprus, plotting my thesis, taking shifts at my barista job, and cramming in all the French classes I needed for my double major.

Maybe I’d picked up some stomach bug on my trip, or my appendix was swollen or something. Todd announced he was taking me to the ER, and loaded me and my red Powerade and clean towels into the Dodge Neon my parents bought me in high school three years before. Every speed bump we hit, bile churned from my stomach and filled my mouth.

“Sorry,” he said.

I clutched the towel, swallowing the barf back down. I couldn’t speak. My vision was blurred and my brain was hazy, like someone had wrapped my head in opaque tights. I wanted my mom. But I was a grown-up now. Wasn’t I?

Todd stayed in the waiting room while the nurse brought me back and took my temperature and had me pee into a cup. She returned a few minutes later. “Did you know you were pregnant?”

I was stunned. She asked if she should get the boy from the waiting room. I managed a nod.

He hovered a few seconds in the doorframe. “Is it contagious?” The nurse and I both laughed.

“Congratulations,” she said. “I’ll give you a minute.”

His face changed as he figured it out. He didn’t look afraid or angry. He hugged me and smiled at me. He said he would support whatever I wanted to do, and he meant it.

“I don’t know what I want.” Wasn’t I supposed to know?

It never felt real, this strange thing that happened to me. I knew I was supposed to feel ashamed and deeply torn, like Neve Campbell’s character in Party of Five.

But Neve Campbell’s character had a miscarriage before her scheduled abortion, so that story wasn’t all that informative.

Johnny’s partner in Dirty Dancing had a pre-Roe back-alley abortion and Billy had to break the door down to rescue her from a sadistic doctor who apparently travelled the Catskills in the 60s to torture women seeking abortions. Not all that helpful, either.

Those were the only abortions I knew about at age 20, but that’s just because I never had the password before.

Once I entered the realm of unplanned pregnancy, I learned how many of us had been here. Family members and friends told me stories soaked in sadness and relief.

There was no regret. I’d been told to expect regret.

Wasn’t I feeling regret?

No. Really, I couldn’t feel anything except nausea, but I did want desperately to be a good girl. To be a moral young woman. So I kept thinking it over.

What I didn’t want was to be a mom in February, when I was supposed to be finishing my thesis and awaiting grad school and fellowship decisions. I didn’t know much, but I knew that a baby at 20 meant the end of everything that was just starting for me, including a major damper on the flame of my first love.

A giant leap into a great void where my future should be.

I registered for a 300-level summer French class at Portland State. Planned Parenthood was booked, so I made an appointment two weeks out with a private clinic (the abortion pill was approved two months too late for me). It would give me time to think, I reasoned.

It was early summer and my friends were out backpacking and taking road trips. They invited me to Powell’s, to backyard parties and coffee dates, but I couldn’t go anywhere. I called in sick to work and missed the first French class. I pulled the curtains shut and curled on a mattress on the floor, vomiting into a big yellow bowl.

All I wanted was to do the right thing. I just needed to keep thinking, running my tongue over this canker sore until I found the right thing.

If I could just keep food down. If I could just stand upright. If I could just yank the thick pair of tights off of my brain, If I could just not be pregnant for five minutes and feel like myself again, I’d know what to do.

The epiphany never came, but the mandatory pre-abortion check-in did.

“The zygote is the size of a grain of rice,” the ultrasound tech said. I peered into the scattered pixels, trying to see my future, trying to feel something like love or at least regret. I vomited into a pale pink bowl the nurse brought me.

My mom came and stayed with us for a while. She tried to find food I could eat. I drank a bowl of miso soup and threw it up in my yellow bowl. I ate a bowl of rice and threw it up in a trash can.

I missed two more French classes. I tried to study, but I got vomit on my textbook and returned to the mattress.

I waited for some great knowing to wash over me, but it never did. I waited for the regret, but it never came.

I ate a piece of watermelon and threw it up. I threw up purple, red, and bright blue Powerade. I couldn’t even look at the ice cream my mom bought.

“I want this to end,” I whispered to my boyfriend, my mother and the yellow bowl.

At the clinic, I swallowed a small blue pill that was supposed to numb the pain, but I threw it up. In the tiny sterile bathroom, I checked my underwear for signs of a miscarriage. But this wasn’t a TV show.

The nurse said my mom or boyfriend could come back with me, but I went alone. I didn’t want them to see anything that might upset them.

I sucked the laughing gas and listened to the great throbbing of the vacuum and felt bile bubbling up as something tore from below.

“Tell your friend it didn’t hurt.” The doctor garbled the facts of a story I’d told him pre-op. It did hurt, but that was okay. It was done.

My recovery cot was by the window but there was a cement barrier blocking the view, shielding me from people who wanted to kill me for choosing my future over a zygote’s. I tried to feel the shame they wanted me to feel. I only felt relief, thick and honey-golden.

A tiny middle schooler cried in the cot beside me, and her mom stroked her back. “It’s okay, sweetie.” The mother’s lips clamped tight against her own tears. “It’s going to be okay.”

I hugged my abdomen and watched sunlight dance at the edge of the barrier. I heard the whirr of suction through the wall. A nurse murmured to the girl’s mother before she approached me. “Are you ready to stand?”

I stood slowly, anticipating nausea, but it had vanished. I put my clothes back on and hugged my abdomen in a different tiny bathroom. “It’s going to be okay, sweetie,” I told myself.

I went home and ate a bowl of ice cream and didn’t throw it up. I hugged my mom goodbye and unpacked my boxes and changed my sheets. I went to French class with a thick pad in my underwear. I got an A in the class, and I rocked my thesis and won a fellowship overseas.

I penned my first byline and I married Todd and I went to grad school and I wrote front-page stories.

Nine years after my abortion, I gave birth to our first child, then two more, and I curved my life around them in a way I never could have done at 20.

Which part was I supposed to regret? Wanting time to love my husband before parenthood took over our lives? Wanting to finish my degree and have a professional life? Wanting to grow up before taking on the constant care all children deserve?

I think I was right that day in the clinic. I was supposed to regret choosing myself over the zygote. I was supposed to regret wanting anything more than motherhood. It’s been 22 years, and I still don’t regret it.