Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(12)

.

…

.…

… Guys?)

So, I pee on the thing a little bit, and on my hand a lot, and these two little pink lines appear in the line box. The first line is like, “Congratulations, it’s urine,” and the second line is like, “Congratulations, there’s a baby in it!”

This was not at all what I was expecting and also exactly what I was expecting.

My “boyfriend” at the time (let’s call him Mike) was an emotionally withholding, conventionally attractive jock whose sole metric for expressing affection was the number of hours he spent sitting platonically next to me in coffee shops and bars without ever, ever touching me. To be fair, by that metric he liked me a lot. Despite having nearly nothing in common (his top interests included cross-country running, fantasy cross-country running [he invented it], New England the place, New England the idea, and going outside on Saint Patrick’s Day; mine were candy, naps, hugging, and wizards), we spent a staggering amount of time together—I suppose because we were both lonely and smart, and, on my part, because he was the first human I’d ever met who was interested in touching my butt without keeping me sequestered in a moldy basement, and I was going to hold this relationship together if it killed me.

Mike had only been in “official” relationships with thin women, but all his friends teased him for perpetually hooking up with fat chicks. Every few months he would get wasted and hold my hand, or tell me I was beautiful, and the first time I tried to leave him, he followed me home and said he loved me, weeping, on my doorstep. The next day, I told him I loved him, too, and it was true for both of us, probably, but it was a shallow, watery love—born of repetition and resignation. It condensed on us like dew, only because we waited long enough. But “I have grown accustomed to you because I have no one else” is not the same as “Please tell me more about your thoughts on the upcoming NESCAC cross-country season, my king.”

It was no kind of relationship, but, at age twenty-seven, it was still the best relationship I’d ever had, so I set my jaw and attempted to sculpt myself into the kind of golem who was fascinated by the 10k finishing times of someone who still called me his “friend” when he talked to his mom. It wasn’t fair to him either—he was clear about his parameters from the beginning (he pretty much told me: “I am emotionally withdrawn and can only offer you two to three big spoons per annum”), but I pressed myself against those parameters and strained and pushed until he and I were both exhausted. I thought, at the time, that love was perseverance.

I’m not sure how I got pregnant—we were careful, mostly—but, I don’t know, sometimes people just fuck up. I honestly don’t remember. Life is life. If I had carried that pregnancy to term and made a half-Mike/half-me human baby, we may have been bound to each other forever, but we would have split up long before the birth. Some people should not be together, and once the stakes are real and kicking and pressing down on your bladder, you can’t just pretend shit’s fine anymore. Mike made me feel lonely, and being alone with another person is much worse than being alone all by yourself.

I imagine he would have softened, and loved the baby; we would share custody amicably; maybe I’d move into my parents’ basement (it’s nice!) and get a job writing technical case studies at Microsoft, my side gig at the time; maybe he’d just throw child support at me and move away, but I doubt it. He was a good guy. It could have been a good life.

He didn’t want to be in Seattle, though—New England pulled at his guts like a tractor beam. It was all he talked about: flying down running trails at peak foliage; flirting with Amherst girls in Brattleboro bars; keeping one foot always on base, in his glory days, when he was happy and thrumming with potential. He wanted to get back there. Though it hurt me at the time (why wasn’t I as good as running around in circles in Vermont and sharing growlers of IPA with girls named Blair!?), I wanted that for him too.

As for me, I found out I was pregnant with the part-Mike fetus just three months before I figured out how to stop hating my body for good, five months before I got my first e-mail from a fat girl saying my writing had saved her life, six months before I fell in love with my future husband, eight months before I met my stepdaughters, a year before I moved to Los Angeles to see what the world had for me, eighteen months before I started working at Jezebel, three years before the first time I went on television, four years and ten months before I got married to the best person I’ve ever met, and just over five years before I turned in this book manuscript.

Everything happened in those five years after my abortion. I became myself. Not by chance, or because an abortion is some mysterious, empowering feminist bloode-magick rite of passage (as many, many—too many for a movement ostensibly comprising grown-ups—anti-choicers have accused me of believing), but simply because it was time. A whole bunch of changes—set into motion years, even decades, back—all came together at once, like the tumblers in a lock clicking into place: my body, my work, my voice, my confidence, my power, my determination to demand a life as potent, vibrant, public, and complex as any man’s. My abortion wasn’t intrinsically significant, but it was my first big grown-up decision—the first time I asserted, unequivocally, “I know the life that I want and this isn’t it”; the moment I stopped being a passenger in my own body and grabbed the rudder.