rootedbutwild-blog

[rootedbutwild-blog]

I believe that some things happen to us, and some things happen for us, and the difference there is far more than a preposition, but a matter of breathing or drowning, light and darkness, savior and sin. One version of this story is of shame and condemnation. It has a traumatic beginning and the road beyond it is very, very long. Its basis is when something happens “to” us, and it only breathes fiery fear. It does not let us take anything from it but a lifetime of guilt, and it stands in the way of everything else like stone. I’ve chosen the breathing version, the light, seeking savior over sin, forgiveness over condemnation, gentleness over abrasion. It does not lack difficulty, but at the end of the darkest tunnel, there is only room for light.

I conceived on August 7th. I barely knew him: a musician with remnants of curly blonde locks before age settled in, a kindness I hadn’t felt in a long time. Two days of good food and deep conversation and the very small, starting sparks of what could have been love.

The next day I purchased Plan B, an over the counter pill that, if taken within the first 48 hours, prevents pregnancy.  I’d been told my whole life I’d have trouble conceiving. I took the pill that evening in one swig after getting home, about 7:00. I wasn’t concerned.

Now, this is where something else comes in, something perhaps divine, perhaps universal, certainly profound. I went out into the garden. It was the loveliest evening. I ate handful after handful of little yellow sun gold tomatoes, newly ripened and warmed from the day’s sun. I went inside, took a bath, went to sleep happy. I woke an hour later terribly sick with heartburn, found myself in front of the toilet heaving. It took me several long seconds to understand what the swollen round white object was in the toilet amongst the tomatoes. When it hit me, I jumped up, did what anyone would do: fished it out, rinsed it in the sink, retook it.

I spent the next hour researching. Everything I read advised buying a new one if you'd expelled it within a few hours. I felt safe, especially since I was retaking it. I did what we all do: knew that it couldn’t happen to me.

When Renee came over with pregnancy tests on a Wednesday night just barely two and a half weeks later, it was still a joke. “Take two,” she’d said. “Drink a beer for goodness sake. Then you’ll see. Then you’ll be able to relax.”

I had been sick. Exhausted, light-headed, a little nauseous. The first test showed pregnant right away, but was missing half of another line. “Invalid!” she yelled, half-laughing, sent me back upstairs with a Yuengling, half an Ativan, and the second test. It was after 8:00. I remember the cicadas being so loud from the upstairs bathroom. I remember how quickly those lines appeared, how easily that beer went down, how I floated down the stairs with the positive test and fell to the kitchen tile in the biggest emotional shock of my life.

I will remember so much from this time of my life - the horror, the shock, the gut-wrenching tears I shed, the gripping fear I felt. Even more so, though, I will remember the kindness of my friends and family, the support I felt in which I didn’t know could exist in such all-encompassing waves. I will never, ever forget the way Renee laid on the porch bed with me until it was late and talked me through breathing. How she played videos of Mary Oliver reading her poetry aloud amongst the late summer cicadas. How deeply I was held and how suddenly it was clear that everyone in my life that I told responded from a place of love. How this circle of people I call my dearest friends are worthy and beautiful and kind, and are exactly the kind of people I want behind me.

William, back home in Santa Fe, supported me in the only way he knew how, in the only capacity he was capable of. I don’t blame him, and when I asked him how he felt about it, I made sure he knew I wanted the truth. Of course, there was a part of me that wanted him to say, “Yes, let’s do this. I’ll come out there. We’ll figure it out. We’ll do it together.”

But in the end, he is a bachelor with a futon, a life there, a good job, a selfishness I couldn't fault him for, for I felt it too. And after we got off the phone, I laid in the grass on my side and sobbed. The reality of raising this kid as a single parent became very clear, and it killed me. I’ve done so much alone. But I didn’t want to do this.

Please, let me tell you that I know I would have been good. I would have been so good, and I know I could have done it. Whether or not I was capable of doing this was never the question. The question was whether or not I wanted to, and I believe so deeply in a choice in the matter, in welcoming babies instead of fearing them. I believe, more than anything else, in the family I will someday have with the person meant to be by my side with them. I have been alone for many years. I have built this business and bought this house and traveled for months and thousands of miles alone. I eat most of my dinners on the living room couch, and raising a child by myself sucked the air out of me. It made me very, very sad. In the mornings, I was so sick I couldn't stand, with no one to get me a Sprite, or hold my hair at the toilet. In the afternoons, I had no one to touch my stomach in admiration, in support. And in the evenings, in the bed curled as far into myself as I could get, the only hand I held was the dog’s.

For five days I barely slept. I researched everything I could, I sought counseling, I weighed my options, I reached for my circle of women who let me know with unwavering reassurance they would be behind me no matter what. And that there was no wrong decision. And that I was strong. But I didn’t always have to be.

The decision was clear the night I sat in the camper and unloaded all of my weight on the phone with my parents, who, without any hesitation, were enormously supportive. They did not blame me for what I wanted to do.  They said it was okay to feel that way, that I would have this opportunity again, that they were proud of me no matter what. And in that moment, I gave myself permission to put my own life first. Which is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. Which is the most profound experience of my entire life. Which will always, always bring me to my knees. Because to say that I wanted to have an abortion is to say an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw its own leg off. There was no other way out.

The next morning, when I woke long before sunrise, in the quietest blue hour, it had already left me. I can’t tell you how I know that, but I felt that it was very much gone, only physically still there. And with it left shame, and guilt, and fear - all emotions that are toxic and unhelpful. And what it left me with was forgiveness and mercy and the most relieving feeling that everything was going to be okay, after all. It felt very much like it had come from light and went back to light, and left me with more light than I could have ever conjured up with my own hands. This experience has been profound. It has dropped me into a dimension of feeling I didn’t know existed, and will always be something that I can’t quite put into words all the way. Quite literally, it has jolted me into something else entirely, a new life waiting for me on the other side I didn’t know existed or that I needed so badly. And when I look back on my life, it will be referenced only in terms of before this happened, and after, as that is how my life looks now. It has already allowed me to have more gentleness for myself, for other people, for situations we can never, ever know what we would do until we are, too, sitting alone on a toilet with a pregnancy test in the August heat.

The morning I went for the procedure, I was exhausted in every sense - emotionally, physically, mentally - and everything felt slow and difficult, like moving through molasses. There was the crowded waiting room, my mother next to me with a Mary Oliver book, the pin prick on my finger, the urine test, the quick ultra sound to determine my term (6.5 weeks), the paperwork, the sweetest woman who counseled me beforehand. And then there was the most awful moment of my whole life, the moment I undressed and laid on the table in the blue gown, my legs in stirrups, and cried sobs that came from the deepest place of pain, the moment the anesthesiologist led me kindly into unconsciousness. I remember the bustle of nurses and the clank of tools, the counselor’s warm hand, the way I felt already completely gutted inside. And I remember how I woke minutes later with my face still wet with tears in a recovery room. I remember dreaming the most wonderful dream of a girl in the sun, happy and running. How when I woke, I was holding my own hands.

In these last few years, there have been certain instances that have snipped the strings keeping me attached to this place - the day Murphy had to be put down, the evening I found Little Murph dead in the road, the panic attack last December when I realized how the house of my dreams was never going to fulfill me in all the ways I’d hoped, the lingering feelings for Jesse I think will forever be unresolved. Lying in that hospital bed, groggy from anesthesia and pain, it was very clear to me that this pregnancy was the last snip, the last rope severed keeping me tied to a place that no longer serves me. I have never felt so awake to my own life, so unattached to the things I thought defined me: my business, this house, my stacks of books and pots of plants, these perfectly curated rooms, the gardens heavy with dahlias. Even the camper feels like a paper weight to some extent. Freedom feels only like my own warmth, the dog, my journal and camera, a few Mary Oliver poems, a handful of favorite clothes. Maybe, for the first time in my decade of life here in Lewisburg, am I finally free to go.

At 31, my life forked, or split open, or crowned. I felt firsthand what it was like to midwife at my own rebirth. I think about the life with the baby on my hip, alone in the early garden of the spring she would have been born, catapulting me into a world that surely would have been difficult but surely would have been beautiful. And then there is the life I chose in front of me today. When I was in the room in the blue gown just before the doctors came in, I pledged through my own sobs that I would always have my own back. That I knew I was capable of making difficult decisions, and that I fully trusted myself. I promised that while I knew I’d feel remorse, even trails of regret, that I had to believe if I could sit on that table knowing what was about to happen, then I was making the right choice. I promised that baby that I’d meet it again someday, and until we did, that I’d spend the rest of my days being kinder and more compassionate toward myself and others, that I would stop dragging my feet about where I really want to live or where I want to be as an artist. And so tonight, alone with the cicadas, I try to uphold these promises: I plan routes and I get my finances in order and I speak everything with intention. Because when you take a life in exchange for your own, there is nothing more important than feeling like every single moment is lived with purpose. I hope that this new path involves a new city that feels more home to me. I hope it involves a man I can love, a man who will someday come back to this place and marry me in the backyard under string lights, in my $10 wedding dress, who will someday grant me the life I dream of - kids and a creaky house and a cottage garden - the life I trusted I would have if I gave up the one handed to me.

When I tell my daughter where she came from someday, I will not be able to leave this story out, the story of when she first came around, when she was only a speck, a collection of light, a sun flare, something brief but profound, something that makes you squint at its intensity and leaves dots behind your eyelids. For she needs to know that she changed my life in ways I can’t even know yet, but can feel them deep and steady in my veins, a whole other perspective I’ve dropped into that feels only like the most special gift of love. When she comes again from dahlias and light, from sun golds and rain, I hope she brings with her the love I gave her pressed in a book, and I promise to only smile at her arrival, and let her feel chamomile tea, and warm baths, and - most of all - the hands of someone else who will speak to her right away and without reservation or seared apologies. And our words will only be “thank you,” and, “I’m so glad you have returned,” and, “We will never, ever let you go.”