Personal
Almost 50 years ago, I got to make a choice that many women may soon not be able to make today.
I went for the test, it was negative. late not because of that but because I am just anxious, not surprising, freshman year finals and all. doc gives me valium and says relax. still tired and queasy but not worried because he’s a doctor so I wait and wait and wait and go back the day before christmas break and turns out he was wrong about the just anxious. now I need a phone number address two hundred and fifty bucks which somehow we scrape even though we’re just college kids and this is top secret. it’s 1973 so our home state makes us outlaw desperadoes and we cross the border into New York. here my life & ben folds lyrics converge: i am sinking slowly 6 am this day after Christmas, only for me it’s the bus seat that is freezing and I threw my clothes on in the overhead light of my dorm room to roll out of bed nauseous and ride the Number 4 down predawn broadway. lights look so merry to someone not me but inside the clinic the lights monotonous harsh florescent make us half-dozen jittery sad knock-ups look like death before we are led behind privacy screens to gurneys to reemerge hours later swimming up from unconscious legs aching from stirrupping we don’t remember. woman next to me groans and vomits and I just lie there cramping quietly and know it is over though I bleed for weeks. It feels like penance I’ll pay for being rocked but not derailed. still. still. still. so grateful, relieved, the miraculous body that worked just like they told me it would in high school sex ed, mindless biology churning outside my dreams and intentions is my biology always and again and one hundred percent mine, i own it; the body not only mine but also me my life my choice to carry what i carried. i won’t stop at myself. i will carry this fight for generations.