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[ripples-of-thought]

Smooth Criminal

There are always two conversations between humans. There's the oral one: the one that you speak aloud and hear with your ears. Then there's the silent one: the words that are implied, the obvious omissions that seem to flash like a neon sign.

Not everybody is fluent in that silent language. Sometimes we miss important messages, or fail to communicate what we can't say aloud. Or worse, we think we "hear" a silent comment that was never intended.

I'm wondering tonight whether this is what happened to me yesterday. One important conversation I did not have aloud was about the fact that I am a law breaker.

When asked by an official about that law, I casually lied to her. "Nope, I didn't do that." The question was simple, "Did you break this law?" The implication to me was, "I don't really want to know if you did. If I wanted to know, I'd examine the evidence in front of me and not take your word for it. Feel free to tell me whatever you want. I won't press or verify it."

Did I read that right? Did I act appropriately, if not strictly according to the law? Ethically, does it matter, even if my crime was victimless? These are the questions I found myself asking today.

[ripples-of-thought]

The prophet

Summer had begun, and I had a very full day of Absolutely Nothing to do. That afternoon, I was watching music videos on MTV, as I went on filling in an entire poster sized sheet of paper with ElfQuest fan art. It was coming along pretty well... I'd sketched in portraits of the Wolfriders, many of the Sun Villagers, and I had just gotten started on the principle Gliders, when a knock came at the door.

I was 14, and not yet ready to grow up. Regardless, for years already I had been left in charge, while my single mother worked as a retail optician at the mall. I peered through the glass of our front door at a woman no taller than myself, someone I'd never seen before. I tugged the door open and greeted her cautiously. I was not in the mood for missionary work or a sales pitch.

"Hello," she replied, "I was wondering if I could talk to the homeowner about a new development that's being planned for the Garden Home area."

"Sorry, she's not in," I might have been a bored teenager, but at least I was polite to strangers.

"Have you heard about the new housing plans yet?" Clearly she was going to deliver her message to someone today, even if that person wasn't eligible to vote and didn't care.

"I haven't," was all I replied.

She held out a flyer on hot pink photocopy paper, then launched into her Why-this-is-a-really-bad-idea-and-we-should-put-a-stop-to-it-right-now pitch. This consisted mainly of the sorts of things adults cared very much about in the 80s: higher property taxes, increased vehicle traffic and poorer air quality. I accepted the flyer and told her my mother would get it, and she moved on in the hope that her next stop would yield a more enthusiastic response.

To me it seemed a futile effort. My neighborhood block had been new once. As long as someone wanted to move to the suburbs, someone else would be planning residential developments. If they didn't go up here, they'd just go up somewhere else, so what made this place immune to progress?

Spring the following year, I found the raccoons.

[ripples-of-thought]

The wilderness at my door

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest was a privilege that I was quite unable to appreciate as a child. It seemed from my earliest memories that I was never far from a delightful garden park, towering cool forest, or rich field teeming with life.

Not that I didn't love my neighborhood or the city I was raised in. I just had no idea how very rare the wealth of natural beauty that surrounded me was. Out at the edges of Portland, Oregon, a lot of the land had yet to be developed. Zoning laws were very strict to limit sprawl and the pollution that comes with it.

When I stepped outside, my lungs pulled nothing but fresh air. Traffic was a dim hush in the distance. In the morning, songbirds chorused together. In the evening, when the sun sank over the hills, the stars peppered the night sky in countless twinkling points.

Today, you would say that we were "free range kids". In those days, before cellphones, nobody had heard of "helicopter parenting" and roaming the neighborhood was just how kids met outside school. Assuming we had no homework (which almost nobody had until they reached middle school) we were allowed to go anywhere our bikes could take us, under the condition that when we saw the streetlights come on at the end of the day, we came home.

Frequently, my bike took me around the corner and down to the bottom of a little valley, where a wooden footbridge crossed a meandering creek, leading to a great mountain forest forest of fir trees, with paths running through it. It seemed to span miles - I never did find the far end of that forest, as I would usually reach an impassible point where the trails turned back or came to a stop at a small clearing, speckled white, yellow and blue with wildflowers.

To me, that forest on the other side of Fanno Creek was Middle Earth, or Narnia, or Camelot. I howled like one of Wendy Pini's Wolfriders, and I searched (in vain) for the musical unicorns of Phaze. It was a place I could escape, imagining myself a daring explorer penetrating the lush ferns, or a naturalist, studying the complexities of an ant colony. Some days I was a "mountain man" (think Grizzly Adams), rationing out the fuzzy red wild raspberries I found and "fishing" in the creek with a hook-free string dangling from the end of a stick. In the hottest days of August, I removed my shoes and socks and waded up the chilly creek in search of its source.

I would also go there to cry. So few people trod those paths that it made a really great place to find solitude and comfort. It was a bad day at school that day, and I hiked up the hill to breathe in the scent of pine needles and wood rot, and write my some moody poetry in my spiral notebook. I chose a large fallen tree to sit on, and opened to a fresh page.

Until then all I had known of woodpeckers were from Woody Woodpecker cartoons, so when I heard the rapid thunkathunkathunkathunkathunka of a bird after its next meal I almost didn't believe what I was watching. It was female, and bore no resemblance to the rascal cartoon character. As I stared, it continued hammering away at the remains of the tree that had furnished the log I was sitting on.

Suddenly, I remembered that I had brought a journal with me, so I began to try to draw what I was seeing. When it pecked at the tree, it was nothing but a blur, so that is what I ended up putting to paper. Wood chips flew all around as it bore into the soft, rotting column. It paused occasionally, cocking its head one way and another watching for any sign of danger.

A recreation of the sketch, somewhat improved from the original.

My mood shifted with the distraction. The angst was abated, but time is short for someone so young, and the woodpecker was more patient in its pursuit of bugs than I was. I closed the book, stood to return home, and startled the poor thing off.

One of the principles of my religion today is the acknowledgement that all things are interconnected in a great web, and that what affects one affects us all... touch a single thread and the whole web vibrates. My time spent within small pockets of nature, like that forest, was one of the cornerstones of that affirmation for me.

[ripples-of-thought]

Abortion in 1987

My junior year in high school I met a young man from a rival school during a New Year's Eve lock-in at a roller-skating rink. This is about what happened about 8 months later, just before my senior year.

Since I had a steady boyfriend, I started on "The Pill". My mother knew I was having sex with him and supported my decision to use birth control. At the time I was not living with her, so I went to Planned Parenthood. Although I could not have afforded them full price, PP allowed me to purchase them on a sliding scale. It worked well for months; however, as time passed I started to get a little sloppy about taking my pill on time every day. Some nights I'd forget altogether, and the next morning I'd swallow the previous night's pill with a prayer that this one time wouldn't be the one that got me pregnant. One month at the end of the summer, my period didn't show.

I was anxious about getting pregnant, so I got a home pregnancy test as soon as I was a week late. The next morning, I peed on the stick. One line was negative, two lines... yes, the two lines right there on the stick... that meant positive. I was pregnant. I told my boyfriend, the one I was "in love" with. He meant the world to me, and would be my rock. Since my menses were normally very regular, I was pretty sure there was no mistake, but before being able to do anything, I would need a doctor's confirmation anyway. Back to Planned Parenthood I went, where they were able to verify the results, again at a price even a high school student in the 'burbs could afford.

The fact that this doctor's visit, and the potentially life-changing nature of it, seemed so routine that, years after, I've nearly forgotten it, is a testament to the professionalism of the care I received at that clinic. Everything was calm that day. The anxiety of deliberation all came afterward.

I told my parents. Being a pregnant teenager is scary, but I had two parents who loved me, and a mother who told me she'd support whatever decision I made.

She very much wanted me to be able to follow my own heart and mind about this, and I admire and appreciate that. I knew the history of abortion in the USA, had seen Dirty Dancing, I knew other times and other families had provided neither the freedom nor support that mine did. I was, and am, grateful for that.

But to no fault of theirs, I was not able to freely choose what to do with my body - whether to use it to continue growing this other human, or have the procedure that would end my pregnancy. My choice was smashed to pieces by my "rock".

For, while I was weighing the options - whether my family, my education and means, had room for an infant at this time... whether I was strong enough to carry a baby to term only to give it up to an adoptive family to care for it beyond my ability... whether to terminate the pregnancy and carry on with life's plans (such as they were) as if I'd never been pregnant... my boyfriend was thinking about his future career in the military.

His only ambition his entire life was to be part of an elite military unit such as the US Special Forces (the Green Berets) or what he saw as their modern equivalent, the Airborne Infantry. He was already a career Boy Scout, and an Eagle Scout, something he took great pride in. He'd talked to recruiters and was ready to enlist as soon as he graduated. And he saw my pregnancy as a threat to that.

At least, that's what he told me. I really can't understand his reasoning now... and I'm not sure I even seriously questioned it then. When I told him that I was considering adoption instead of abortion, he refused to even consider it. He couldn't stand the thought of "his" child being "somewhere out there" ...raised by someone else. He told me that if I did not have an abortion, I would never see him again.

There's a lot of hurt behind that statement... hurt that actually has nothing to do with him. Because while he had plans for a career after high school, I did not. I had vague ideas about what I wanted to do... I wanted to be artistic. I wanted to paint and write... but beyond that... I had no idea. I certainly didn't have plans for university... I didn't have the money to pay for it myself and I didn't have the grades or extra-curricular activities to get me a scholarship.

I knew I wasn't cut out for the military. I lacked the discipline and the physical fitness for that kind of life, whatever the film STRIPES made it out to be. So that left ...what? Becoming someone's domestic help? Being a grocery checkout clerk? Becoming a ...housewife? And with graduation looming ahead, I knew my days as a carefree teen were numbered. My mother had said so, jokingly, a few years before. I took it way too literally and way too personally. Mom had quipped about my dad's brother living in his parents' house in his 30's... "When you turn 18, you're on your own, kiddo." She didn't mean it. Hell, she wasn't even really talking about me at all! It was about her ex-brother-in-law, but I didn't realize that at 14 and I didn't realize it at 17. And so it went until that day... My self-esteem defining me through my romantic partnerships, never as the hero of my own story. So when he said my pregnancy threatened his future, and said he'd walk if I didn't terminate, I saw my future, the only future I could envision, endangered. I saw this pregnancy as a threat to the marriage I expected and all the children he and I might have in the future.

When I told my mom about my decision to terminate, I didn't tell her why. She took it calmly, but told me years later that she had been hoping I would choose differently. She offered to be there for me, she paid for part of it, and my boyfriend paid the rest. She drove me there and took me home after.

The Planned Parenthood in Beaverton did not perform abortions, and they referred me to a clinic in Northwest Portland, close to downtown. I had to make one appointment for "counseling" in which I had to lie and say that nobody was forcing me to get an abortion, and then I could set the appointment for the procedure.

I suppose that, in my mind, it wasn't really a lie. If I had been a stronger personality at the time, I could have refused to abort the pregnancy and sued him for child support... I never think about this event without a list of "what-ifs" as long as my arm.

I remember it as quiet, clean, with a neutral palette. I don't remember any of the other young women. It was the most normal thing really... just a trip to the doctor... just an "outpatient procedure". The table, the stirrups, the speculum... just like any gynecological visit I'd ever been to. I didn't pay much attention to the aspirator (the machine that provides the suction) and just focused on breathing slowly and staying relaxed. I was given local anesthetic and it was over very quickly.

I remember waiting in the recovery room for my mom to take me home, and I was relieved that it was over with. I was sorry that I had felt the need to do it, and I remember even apologizing to the fetus. I had already started believing in reincarnation as a teenager, and hoped that in the future, the same spirit might grow within another body that mine would build, when I was ready to have children. This was just not that time.

What followed the next week was pretty much what I usually went through during my period. Cramps, bleeding, and then... life went on.

I do want to write about that arms-length list of "what-ifs"... but this post, this blog, is not about what could have happened. It's about what did happen. And what did happen was not nearly as traumatic as some would have you expect.

It didn't result in any more depression than I was already experiencing due to undiagnosed chronic conditions. It's far more truthful to say that my depression led to needing an abortion than that my abortion caused depression.

I was not wracked with guilt afterward... although years later when I went through a Christian conversion experience I did feel a sort of guilt about not feeling guilty...

One out of four women in the USA have an abortion at some point in their lives. The reasons they list for having one are usually complex, involving multiple facets of their life; most often some intersection of emotional and financial stability. My story is not rare. It's common. It's normal.

It's okay.

For more information about the effect of unwanted pregnancy and abortion on the women who experience it, I recommend reading The Turnaway Study.