A Ten Year Anniversary

It was ten years ago this past week that I started my healing journey with abortion. I was at my wit’s end and knew if I didn’t deal with my complex feelings from over eleven years earlier, I would probably end up institutionalized.

There were many factors contributing to my suppressed feelings of grief and shame. The biggest factor, by far, was my Catholic upbringing. While it gave me a deep faith in God, it also informed me I had committed a mortal sin. 

My Catholic roots went deep. I attended a Catholic girls’ school for four years before high school, and a Catholic college. To make matters worse, by the time I finally fell apart, my husband was enrolled in the seminary to become a deacon. Soon there would be many more eyes upon us both, looking to our family as model Catholics. After the years of parochial education, Sunday sermons and deaconate formation training, I felt like a failure as a human being. The pressure to live up to these standards was unbearable. 

Thankfully, there is a program for healing in the Catholic Church called Project Rachel. Project Rachel changed the course of my life.

Project Rachel helped me to understand the weight I had borne for over a decade. They helped me grieve and stood with me as I released my grief and asked God and my unborn daughter for forgiveness.

As with many retreats, the confidentiality of the group was a requirement of participation. Given our purpose for being together, that made absolute sense. Unlike other retreats, however, the Project Rachel retreat required secrecy in other facets of the weekend as well. Our location was secret. No one knew where we were meeting and we were advised not to share that information, except with our spouses. Also unusual was our final instruction - not to share with family or friends anything about our abortions or our weekend together. It might not be safe, and therefore was something we should keep to ourselves. For me, there was continued fear and shame as I listened to this final counsel. 


The one thing I was not able to release, my shame, stayed with me far longer than any other difficult emotion. Even Project Rachel’s Christ-like leadership and its generous love and compassion could not do for me what I so sorely needed. They could not change the language of the Catholic leadership and populace to remove condemnation or judgment. In the end, I was able to release the shame and find freedom only by looking outside the Church.

 

Since my retreat, as I listen to discussions between so-called pro-lifers and pro-choicers, I continue to wonder why the Church uses the language they do. Sinful, wrong, unthinkable, senseless murder – these are all words used in Catholic sermons and dialogs about abortion. The judgment these words evoke made it very difficult for me to release the shame of my abortion and I am certain make it difficult for most others. 

It’s unusual to talk about abortion. And while it isn’t everyone’s thing to share their story with the world, I do believe it is important that we share our stories with someone. One of the most productive things we did in the Project Rachel retreat weekend was to share our stories with each other. Sharing stories healed us because as we listened, we forgave. As we forgave and understood our sisters’ pain, we were able to access and release our own pain, and begin the process of forgiving ourselves. With greater support from Church leadership, women would be able to leave Project Rachel feeling more supported in their healing and fully releasing the shame - the contradiction and tension between emotional freedom and faith tradition would dissolve.

I hope and pray that one day soon Catholic leadership will really listen to the stories the women of the church have to tell and comprehend the compassion of the Project Rachel ministry who allowed us voice to tell them. I hope they will begin to understand and accept the experience of women that compels them to make this choice. Until we are able to speak without fear or secrecy, the road to full healing will be longer than it needs to be. 

As I reflect on my ten-year anniversary this week, I realize how lucky I am to be able to share my story today feeling strong and secure in who I really am – a woman of light and love who knows all is very well with her soul.


Namaste.

The Twins, A Lesson in Ackowledging Repressed Feelings

I do not remember birthdays very well. Anniversaries even less. But there is one birthday/anniversary that I always remember.

The twins across the street were born five months after my husband and I moved into our first home. We left a gift on their doorstep shortly after their birth, but since it was January, snowy, and both parents worked, we rationalized that a visit should wait. It did not occur to me at the time that my baby would have been born that same month, if I had not had an abortion seven months earlier.


I had repressed my experience immediately. But somewhere in my mind I knew, because I put off meeting the twins for a number of months. It was virtually unavoidable come spring, when everyone was outside, anxious to be in the fresh air after the harsh, cold winter. 

For the next four years, my husband and I were cordial, but not much more. These same neighbors invited us over for drinks and dessert upon occasion, doing their best to build community in the neighborhood. It wasn’t until we decided to have our own children that I finally opened up to the friendship offered by our neighbors.

In 1997, I had a daughter, then in 1998, a son, four and six years younger, respectively, than the twins. But the age difference did not matter. The twins were like siblings to my kids and we became very close over the grade school years. 

A beautiful relationship evolved between our families, and one that would become bittersweet for me over time as I began to allow the repressed pieces of my life to come into the light.

A miscarriage in 2003 rocked my world, reminding me of the abortion I had eleven years earlier, before I was a friend to the twins and a mother to my own children. As a devout Catholic, I was shaken to my core thinking about what I had done. And looking at my own children, knowing the miracle and beauty of them did not make it any easier. In acknowledging the totality of that choice, I realized for the first time that the twins were born in the same month as my baby would have been born. 

I wondered at the coincidence of being neighbors with these children, who were living and breathing in this physical world the way my own daughter might have been if she had been born. This knowledge was tremendously painful, and the following two years, especially, on the twins’ birthdays, it was hard to accept. 

The third year, something shifted.

 

 

Instead of living in the past, wondering what my own child might be doing, my perspective changed. I saw that God in His truly infinite wisdom had given me a chance to know extraordinary young people at a time I did not believe I deserved it, while simultaneously allowing my children to know the love of “older siblings”. 

It blows my mind to see how something once so painful to me could be made right, all the while, unbeknownst to those taking part.

The twins are at college, and we have moved away. But their family will always hold a special place in my heart and the hearts of my children. 

That is the miracle that I live with now.

Women who have chosen abortions are as worthy of these miracles as anyone else. All it takes is a step back to look at life through a new lense.

Do you have an annviersary story? Or a new perspective? Where are the miracles in your life that you have missed?

Namaste.