In 1992, when I chose to have an abortion, I didn't think much past the end of my own nose. I didn't consider the moments leading up to that choice or how each moment of my life prior to that one informed my decision. I didn't think about my family tree or the possible impact to my family in the future. I didn't think about my unborn baby or what she might have wanted. I remember thinking that maybe, just maybe, if I acted quickly enough, it wouldn't be a baby yet. There was a deep, visceral fear - a fear that permeating my whole being. Was this my fear? Or the fear of generations before me?
As I researched and learned more about abortion, a bigger picture began to unravel. I felt for the first time, the double bind of the many women who become pregnant in poor or abusive relationships. I considered the conflicted feelings of a young, pregnant woman, once abused or neglected herself, struggling to hope for a better future for herself and her child. I began to explore the notion that as much as the decision to abort seemed like mine, and mine alone, it was all part of a larger symphony of souls, that never in my wildest of dreams, could I have imagined.
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Twenty years after my abortion. I thought I was done with my healing and learning from that experience. I had come to believe that there was soul contract between my unborn daughter and myself, that she had known ahead of time what my choice would be, but that she chose to enter into this contract with me anyway. I saw her as a martyr, saint, an angel, for giving up her life for my lesson. I still didn't realize that in this belief system, I was still seeing my soul as less than perfect. I still saw myself as a sinner.
Not long after I began writing, I had an encounter with an intuitive. This seer told me that my unborn daughter was very glad she had not been born. I remember wondering how she knew I had had an abortion, and if that was something she told every woman who had one - to make them feel more peace over their decision. She went on to tell me my unborn daughter, Mary, is around me constantly. But then she said something else, something that haunted me for the next four years. She said "your unborn daughter says she would not have been able to endure her sister's life. She could not have survived."
I felt like I had been hit with a ton of bricks when she said that. A recently lapsed Catholic, I was still highly prone to self-blame and flagellation and this statement gave me a lot to think about. Was I really such a terrible mother that she didn't think she could have found some happiness and joy in that life? Had I really done such a terrible thing by divorcing her father that I made all my children's lives tortuous? I had just moved my children 3,000 miles away from their father after a highly contentious divorce. I was in a abusive marriage, and leaving a man who didn't want to be left cost me a lot. Going to California seemed like the only way we would ever have peace again. Had I made a bad choice yet again?
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Fast forward to the fall of 2015. My college-age daughter shares with me for the very first time, what her life as child was really like. How her father began molesting her at the sweet age of four years old, ramping up the abuse over the years in nature and frequency of the abuse until she was twelve. For many years, I had the feeling he was having an affair...I just never imagined it was with our little girl. How does one ever imagine such a thing? Years of odd and lewd behaviors flooded my mind and my body shook with the truth of knowing. Suddenly, everything in the past made sense.
Finally, I understood for the first time what my unborn daughter, Mary, meant, when she sent me the message that she couldn't have survived this lifetime. All that time, I made it to be about me. But all that time, it was about something more, something bigger than me. I wonder now, did I make that choice to abort because I was so afraid? Or was I hearing quite loudly my daughter's voice, telling me she couldn't handle that lifetime, a lifetime that would have been filled with sexual abuse?
I have come full circle on my blog about abortion, right back to my first month of posts, where I had learned on an intellectual level, the battle that women face on daily basis in protecting themselves and protecting their children. Only today, it's not just an intellectual understanding. It is one of an emotional and spiritual understanding that we are all connected, we are all part of the same Force, and almost nothing is what it appears on the surface - including and especially the experience of abortion.
Namaste.
