It’s taken 24 years for God to bring me to this year 2009, when He has brought all this boiling over to the surface so that I can deal with it more openly; now that I am at a place in my life when/where I can. I am thankful for the time to deal with it, yet it is also still very painful. I am not anywhere close the girl I was 24 years ago, and I, more than desperately, want to transport who I am now back in time to that moment in the past and change what I did. But I cannot. We cannot change our past, but God can surely redeem it. My comfort now is that God will work in me and through me with regards to this past tragedy and use it for whatever good He knew all along that He would do with it at the right time.
The year was 1985, and I was 16 years old. The summer of 1984 I had dated a man who was many years older than me. While I was dating him, I carelessly decided to go ahead and have sexual intercourse with him. Once I had lost my virginity and given my body away, I became even more careless. With that much older man, I only had sex that one time. However, shortly after that relationship ended, I began dating another man. He was only four years older than me and since I had no virginity to lose, I carelessly decided to have a sexual relationship with him. I was so foolish in not thinking through the consequences that would certainly come due to my actions. In neither situation was I forced or cajoled into having sexual relations, I did it willingly. In fact, with the second boyfriend, I was the one who probably pushed in that direction. I know he wouldn’t have if I had not pursued it. Four months into our relationship, I suddenly found myself pregnant.
I am almost certain that our baby was conceived on March 8, 1985. I was trying to use the “rhythm method” as birth control, calculating the days of my cycle to avoid sex on fertile days and only have sex when it would be “safer”. However, I was careless with that too because the desires of my body easily superseded what I knew in my mind about my cycle and fertile days. I cut it too close that weekend, and a baby began to grow in my womb.
My period did not come at the expected time and suddenly, I was sobered and scared. What in the world was I going to do? I was a 16 year old girl, a Junior in high school, and now I was possibly pregnant. I didn’t even like kids that much. I took a pregnancy test and it confirmed that I was pregnant. Absurdly, my boyfriend and I asked ourselves, “How did this happen?"
On March 26th, I have an entry in my diary talking about being in an awful fight with my parents the night before and how they were so angry at me about the way I was behaving in general. In their pain, they said terrible things to me. I write that the evening had been like a nightmare and how much I had cried and cried that my eyes had stayed swollen. I recall thinking at the time of the fight: “Oh my goodness if Mom and Dad only knew that I’m probably pregnant right now. How even more awful this fight would be and how much more awful they would think I am.” I also write that if wasn’t for my boyfriend and his comfort, I wouldn’t know what to do. I still see the scene of that fight with my parents so clearly in my mind. I was sitting in my room on my bed and they were both standing before me carrying on, my dad looking so serious, my mom as emotional as I knew her to be when she got very upset. Seeing my dad standing there, so sad and serious like that really affected me that night because I wasn’t used to seeing him get as emotional with me like my mom. And when he said certain hurtful things to me, it became even more serious to me. I think that argument greatly influenced me to make up my mind once and for all that there was no way I could tell them I was pregnant. I believe I thought, “How awful was this fight already and they didn’t even know that about me!”
My boyfriend and I discussed options, one of them being abortion. I think I recall myself determinedly saying to him that I didn’t think there was any way I could face my family with the truth. He didn’t want to face his family either, but I do believe he would have done so, if I had been wanted to. He stood quietly by my side, willing to go along with me and support me in whatever I decided I needed to do. He was scared too. We were both terribly scared and panicked to find ourselves in such a serious situation. First, we decided to go to a pregnancy clinic to try to get some kind of help. The lady at the clinic had me take one of her pregnancy tests to make sure I was pregnant. She nicely informed me that she would not help me get an abortion and tried to talk and scare me out of getting one. While the test was doing its thing, she sat us down on a couch to watch some abortion video where babies where being aborted in 2nd or 3rd trimesters. I hated the video and can hardly remember much because I was staring at the TV but not really watching much of it. I really didn’t feel I could relate with the video because I had no intentions of aborting my baby at that stage whatsoever.
After the video, she confirmed that I was definitely pregnant. She suggested I was five to six weeks along; however, I knew exactly when I had conceived and knew I was only about four. She spoke to me about the formation of the baby, hoping that I would be very aware that is was surely a baby and also hoping that I would not choose abortion. She told me that at eight weeks, my baby would be aware of pain. My goal was to terminate the life of my baby prior to that time because I did not want to hurt it anymore than I was already going to. Totally messed up thinking, I realize now. The clinic lady also told me that it was possible the abortion doctor could damage my uterus, and I may not be able to bear children in the future. She mentioned that had been the case with the girl who was helping her there at the clinic, and consequently, she would never be able to have children. But I was completely overcome and overwhelmed by the fear of facing my parents and my boyfriend’s parents. That dear lady even offered to accompany me if and when I decided to tell my parents. I just kept crying and telling her there was no way I could face them with the truth. It was so awful—the thought of facing them—that I was willing to risk being sterile for the rest of my life and willing to sacrifice the life of my baby. I was willing to risk my health and the life of my baby in order to protect my own self from owning up to my foolish actions of engaging in premarital sex and doing it so carelessly. We left that clinic totally disheartened.
Next post: My Story – The Abortion
As always, the invitation is open to others who would like to submit their story via email document for posting on this blog. Anonymous submissions are perfectly fine.
As always, the invitation is open to others who would like to submit their story via email document for posting on this blog. Anonymous submissions are perfectly fine.
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