SHARK REEF
A Publication of the Lopez Writers Guild
June 2001

.....See this picture? See the pleasant young woman with the big smile standing in front of the castle in May of 1981? At 34, she's two weeks pregnant, but she doesn't know it yet. She does know she never wants children.

.....She thinks it's because she grew up as one of seven children in a poor household with an alcoholic, mostly absent, father. She thinks it's because she watched her mother make sure the children had clean clothes to wear and enough food to eat but not be able to do the same for herself. She thinks it's because she didn't want to be fat and lost to herself, like her mother was. That's what she thinks.

.....But, then, she never thought she could get pregnant either. Her period comes every 150 to 200 days and she's always thought she doesn't ovulate. But she'd been having sex since college so, to be safe, she'd get a pregnancy test once or twice a year at the Bill Baird Family Planning Center on Boylston Street in Boston. This was earlier, in the mid-1970s, before you could buy those kits with the color-coded results at Rite Aid. She would waltz in during her lunch hour, submit a urine specimen and wait in her paper gown for the nurse to come back and tell her, as usual, that the test was negative.

.....She was in her late 20s then and had finally realized she was pretty. Her sisters and brothers had all married by the time they were 21, and most had had children. But not her. Instead she moved from Minneapolis to Boston, got a 4th floor walk-up apartment in Jamaica Plain and a better job than she thought she deserved. It was the '70s, and sex, drugs and alcohol were a prominent part of her life. She was young and free--and lost. Not like her mother was lost but lost nonetheless. She was, as the song says, "looking for love in all the wrong places."

.....She didn't think she could have babies, but she talked with her doctor about having her tubes tied anyway. "How old are you," the doctor asked that day. "Thirty," she said. "Are you married?" "No," she said. "Have you been in a long-term relationship?" "No," she said again. The doctor didn't think she should take this step then. No, the doctor said, she might regret it if, someday, she met a man she loved and then couldn't have children. So she kept on getting pregnancy tests.

.....See this picture? She's only 32 here, still young and attractive enough. But something important has happened. She's stopped taking drugs and drinking hard alcohol. She has also decided to abstain from sex for a year and then to sleep with a man only if she has feelings deeper than lust for him. She has begun to understand that God is inside her and to accept herself. Most people had always treated her as though she was a good person and now she sees it's true; she isn't a bad person, after all, not really. It is the end of the '70s now and, finally, she has met two really nice men who like her back and treat her well. A year later, she moves in with the one she has fallen in love with and looks forward to a life better than she ever expected to have.

.....Six months after moving in, in June of 1981, she is looking down at the busy street while she waits in a cubicle at the Bill Baird Center. It is a surprisingly warm and lush spring day and the window is open. Traffic sounds and fragments of conversations drift up. The nurse knocks and enters. She's big and blond and looks as though she's had a few children of her own. She has a chart in her hand. The nurse looks at her and says, without preface, "It's positive. You're pregnant."

.....Can her heart swell up to the size of a basketball in her chest in an instant? Can it sound as loud as a jackhammer in her head? Can two small words really turn her life upside so fast?

.....There must be some mistake, her brain tells her. This is not supposed to happen. Quick! Rewind the tape. Back to that night in May at the Alpenhof Hotel in St. Moritz. This time, say "Just a minute," to your lover. Then go into the white tile bathroom and insert your diaphragm. OK. Hit play and see if you can get the answer you want: "It's negative." Then go forth and sin no more.

.....But the words are out there now; they have their own life. "You're pregnant." They reverberate in her head. And she feels suddenly as though the kind of life she has been waiting for all these years might just slip away. The fear is like a jagged shard of glass being pulled across the inside of her belly.

.....Is there a way she can not tell the father, her sweetheart, the best man she has ever met. They have been together such a short time and he has already raised three boys to adulthood. He is finally feeling free. Imagine how afraid she is to tell him that he might not be.

.....She tells him later that day, in the car, on their way home. The minutes seem like days but it is still early June and outside, the trees are pushing through their tender, new growth. She turns off the radio and looks at her lover. "I went to the Bill Baird Center today," she tells him. He glances over and then back at the twisting road. His face is kind as it always is when he looks at her. "I'm pregnant," she says then, her heart in her stomach, sure she will not be able to give voice to this thing if she doesn't just get it out. "I didn't think this could ever happen," she says, "but it did."

.....He looks at her again, his brow wrinkled now, his brown eyes narrower, surprised, questioning, worried-looking, but still kind. It is as if what has happened is an arrow piercing him in the heart. This is what she sees on his face. "I'm going to get an abortion," she says then, quickly, before he can say anything. The rest of that discussion is floating in the ether somewhere. Sometimes, even today, she thinks she would like to go back and hear again what happened next. They probably just drove quietly home.

.....During the next three weeks until the "procedure," which is the word they used, her pregnancy burst forth with amazing vitality. She is enormously tired all the time, and ravenous. Her breasts are big and beautiful and sensitive. There is something else, too. "It's strange," she tells her lover, "but I have never felt so womanly."

.....She has her abortion before there are protesters standing outside clinics. She walks right in and comes out a couple hours later, feeling faint and cramped and in pain. Maybe she deserves it, she thinks, the pain. Her lover picks her up, drives her home, puts her to bed. "Are you OK," he asks, tucking her in. "Yes, I'm fine," she says. "Go to your meeting." His business is going through a rough patch so she sends him away. Not until years later does she discover that she really needed him then, needed someone. They don't talk anymore about it. A month later, she has the tubal ligation she had wanted earlier. Five years later, they marry. Today, twenty years after the procedure, she has two step-grandchildren and another on the way.

.....Their son and pregnant daughter-in-law visit in January. Lynn, an actress and writer, is joyously open about the baby growing inside her. She likes to pull her shirt up and pet her swollen center. The woman in our pictures, middle-aged now, has never seen a pregnant woman's body before and likes to look.

.....She talks with Lynn about a short story she is working on, about a woman who loses her baby before it's born. In the story, the woman gets some time with her baby to say good-bye and the woman's mother, who is there with her, thinks about the tiny dark-haired boy she herself had lost before this daughter was born, and who was whisked away from her forever, without any good-byes.

.....While talking about the story, things she didn't know were inside her suddenly begin to fall into new places. Feelings begin pushing through like the new leaves on the trees the day she told her lover about their child, though she hadn't used the words "our child." She understands now that there is another, deeper reason she hadn't wanted children, something she is ashamed of and so has buried. Coming from a family where unpredictability was the norm, she hadn't had much control, and she had not wanted to lose dominion over her body in this way. To be completely honest, she was afraid of the pain, as well. There is one more thing. She was young and pretty then. Men admired her body and she often confused that with love. She did not want to get fat, like her mother had always been, but she did want to be loved.

.....You'd think this epiphany would be enough, but it's not. In drafting her tale about the young woman who says good-by to her perfectly formed but dead infant, she sees the young woman she was who did not give her own child a chance at life. And she sees so clearly that this long-gone child has suddenly taken on new significance to her now because her husband, who is older than she is, has a disease which is gradually taking him away from her. She is losing the person he has always been to her and she does not have their child, a life created from their love.

.....She is going to give her unborn daughter a name now--she's sure it was a girl--and she's planning a small ritual to help her grieve in the way the child deserves. She'll ask the child for forgiveness, too, for not giving her a place in her life.

.....See this picture. It's the same woman and it's not. The man with his arms around her is her husband and lover. The others are sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren. There is something else. The woman who 20 years ago decided to keep the man and not the child is there somewhere as well. And the child is still there, too, inside her always, like a small white bird whose wings occasionally flutter against her ribs.

 

© Copyright 2001 Lorna Reese

Born and raised in Minnesota, Lorna Reese lived for twenty years in Boston before moving with her husband to Lopez Island in 1994. After writing other people's words for most of her professional life, she uncovered her own voice a few years ago and has been writing memoir, essays and short stories since then. Two short memoirs about Lorna and her mother were published recently in the Islands Weekly newspaper.

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