Here’s My Story

1

One of my earliest childhood memories is hiding in my bedroom with my little brother as my father beat the shit out of my mother in the living room. Another early memory I have is seeing him throw my mother onto a cushionless sofa as he raised a fist to punch her. I don’t know if he hit her. My memory stops there, but that doesn’t make it less traumatizing. One of the last I have of him is of him yelling at my stepmom and throwing things at her and around our living room.

When my father was sober, he was one of the greatest men you’d ever meet. He drove a beat-up pickup truck that he wanted to restore, but instead, on top of clothing and feeding us, he helped boys on my brother’s football team buy the supplies they needed if they couldn’t afford them, and he drove them to practices and games if they didn’t have a ride.

However, my father was an addict. And when he was deep in drugs or alcohol, he was a monster. That same man who gave someone the shirt off his back is the same man who forced my mother to have sex with him while they were separated, resulting in her second pregnancy months after I was born. My mother chose to keep that baby. I don’t know if I could have been that strong. Many women in this world aren’t. That doesn’t make them bad people. It makes them human. Fortunately for my brother, my mom never treated him differently than me. Many mothers can’t say the same whether they know they are doing it or not.

Being raped damages a person’s psyche in a way a person who has never been violated can never understand. NEVER!!!!!! People can try to empathize with them, but they will never truly know until it happens to them. Some women can work through the damage. Many women will deny the damage, and most of the time, that’s because someone in their family told them it didn’t happen or not to tell or forget about it. People don’t understand that by doing so, they are hurting themselves and others, more often the child that came from the rape in the process. Some women think they’ve gotten over it, but rape is something you never get over. You can work through the pain, the anger, and the shame. You can mend the pieces of yourself, but you’ll never be solid. No matter how far you think you’ve come from the violation, something can always send your mind back there. To heal is a daily, lifelong process. If you don’t do it, you could end up being the abuser, maybe not sexually, but physically, verbally, emotionally, or mentally, and not always to someone else but almost always to yourself.

Growing up, I saw adults behave as if the kids around them weren’t listening and weren’t watching everything. I did. We all did. You can learn much about a person when they don’t think you’re paying attention. In my forty-two years, I’ve heard enough stories and seen how my friends and complete strangers were treated by family to know that my brother and I were lucky. My mom was strong and did her best not to take her trauma out on us. I’m not saying every mother and father who mistreats their kids were raped, but they and most likely their parents had trauma they never owned up to or worked out before having kids, and they passed that down.

My mom is an exceptional woman. Not all women could have mentally continued through that pregnancy or loved that child the way my mom loved my brother. It helped that despite my father’s actions, she still loved him and would always love him in some way, though she would eventually divorce him and refuse to have anything to do with him that didn’t involve my brother and me.

But as I’ve already said, just because she was able to carry and birth my brother doesn’t mean all women can or should.

2

When I was five, my parents divorced, and we moved in with my grandparents. My mom was hesitant, but she didn’t have anywhere else to go that wouldn’t take her far from family, which she needed. When we moved in with them, my mom sat me down and talked to me about the birds and the bees. She wasn’t overly detailed. I was a child, but we lived in a house with a child molester, so she felt I needed to know at the very least what bad touching was. And she was right to do so.

One night when I was eight/nine years old, I gave my grandfather a good night hug, and instead of patting my back, he stuck his hands between my legs and patted my vaginal area. My child’s mind knew that wasn’t right. I didn’t know how much not right it was, but I knew that was part of the bad touching my mom had told me about. Because she had warned me, I told her what happened as soon as I got to the bedroom I shared with my mom. The rest of that night and days and weeks afterward are a blur. I saw a counselor, we moved out, and worst of all, I had an aunt tell me (and I’m paraphrasing; I don’t remember her exact words) to keep my mouth shut because if I didn’t, my poppaw would go to jail. I remember telling her he should and being angry that no one saw how wrong what he did was. After that, only my mom would talk to me about what happened.

Later my husband and my other grandmother, my dad’s mom, talked about it with me. I also see a therapist.

No one else ever mentioned it.

The aunt who told me not to tell never told her daughter, so I did. Her daughter swore the man never touched her, and I believe her. I’m sure he didn’t touch her because he was her blood. We discovered when my mom was in her forties that he wasn’t her father. Apparently, he thought it was okay to do that to someone who wasn’t biologically his.

To this day, I don’t know how many of my cousins or my mom’s siblings’ spouses knew about what happened to my mom, me, and God knows how many others.

Since I’ve been in therapy and talked about everything that has happened to me (there is more to come, and I’m not sharing all of it, only what is pertinent to this conversation), I feel confident in saying that night wasn’t the first time he touched me inappropriately. Occasionally when I think back on that time of my life, vague images of other such touchings surface. Some people would have blown off the touching as no big deal. Some could have gone on about their lives as if nothing happened, never feeling any side effects from the ordeal, but I’m not one of those people. I know I got off lucky. I’ve talked to countless rape victims to know this. I also know that if what happened to me could affect me so profoundly and destroy me so completely, I might not be here today if worse had happened, so I can empathize with all the people out there who’ve gone through what I have and so much more. I can see the world through their eyes. I can understand why they’ve done the things they’ve done.

That mere fact is why I’m pro-choice. I’ve tormented myself with thoughts of what would have happened to me if I hadn’t told. How far would he have gone? What if my mother had never talked to me about sex, bad touching, and being a strong woman and telling someone…anyone when something bad happens, and what if I hadn’t been born with a deformity that I wouldn’t find out about until I was forty-two, I could have been one of those KIDS…one of those BABIES having a baby at ten…eleven…twelve. Having my grandfather’s child. Just writing that makes me want to vomit. I wasn’t, but I can empathize with those girls who weren’t so lucky and the decisions they and their families had to make. I can feel their fear, pain, confusion, loss, and brokenness.

No child should ever have to suffer through that, but as long as there have been men, and some women, in this world, there has been rape. I don’t think we can ever stop it, but we can try to minimize it by talking to our kids early about bad touching. Yes, we want them to keep their innocence, and a way of doing that is teaching them that not everyone in their life is trustworthy. As a matter of fact, no one is under certain circumstances.

My youngest niece loves my husband. I mean loves him. That’s her uncle Russell. She wants to come to my house to see her uncle Russell. She gives him nearly all of her attention when she’s here. And the feeling is mutual. That’s his baby girl. Even though she loves him so much, she will not let him help her in the bathroom. She will not let him help her change clothes. She will not let him see her naked. She calls my name when she needs help in the bathroom, never his. Not that I don’t trust him with her or that he doesn’t trust himself. We both feel that unless it is necessary, he should not have to help or see her in that way. Since she is a girl, and I’m there, I’ll be the one helping her with those things.

I cried the first time she did this. She was four. She’s six now. We’d just got back from swimming, and I had to go to the bathroom badly, so I went straight to the bathroom. She told her uncle Russell that she wanted to change out of her swimsuit, but he couldn’t help. I had to be the one to do it, and she brought me her clean clothes while I was in the bathroom. Seriously, I cried. I trust him with her fully, but I was happy she came to me. Her mother taught her well. My niece didn’t need to know anything specific at four years old other than no man was to see her private parts. That is so ingrained in her that she scolded me when I took off my shirt in front of her and my husband the other day. I nearly cried then. I explained that he was my husband and allowed to see my breast, but she was right. We don’t just go around taking our shirts off in front of people.

The next way we can minimize rape is to talk about it. Humans have a long history of pretending such things don’t exist. They do. We have to stop doing this. As I said earlier, I don’t know how many females in my family knew about what happened. I don’t think many, and that should never be the case. To a large extent, I know why my grandmother stayed with him. But she should have never denied who he was. She should have never called my mother a liar and a two-bit whore. Yet, mothers do it all the time, and statistically, these same mothers were raped when they were younger and probably by the same man raping her children. They didn’t tell. They didn’t feel like they could tell, so a part of them feels like no one should be able to either.

Bullshit.

Tell.

Always tell.

It doesn’t matter who you piss off or lose from your life.

Tell.

I’m a complex being. I love my grandmother. Yet, I harbor a great deal of anger towards her as well. I can do both. Had I had children, I would have lost her, though, because I would have never brought my children around her husband. Never.

Let me step back and admit that I never told my cousins, aside from the one. I had two reasons that I didn’t. One was the cousin I did tell spent a great deal of time with my grandparents, and nothing ever happened to her. Two, they were all his blood. I felt confident that he wouldn’t do anything to them. Okay, there is a third reason: very few great-grandchildren spent any time at his house, so to keep the peace, I said nothing. I know that was wrong. I know that’s the same justification many people and families make, and we should stop. Screw how it makes him feel. Who cares if telling everyone would have meant my family stayed away from him and my grandmother. No, my grandmother didn’t deserve that, but to an extent, she did play a part, and you can’t hide or ignore something that heinous and not expect to suffer the consequences.

Another thing we can do is let women know they have help. So many women and men stay in abusive relationships because they have no other recourse. They don’t have family they can turn to because people are shit (that’s the biggest thing we need to fix but won’t ever be able to), or they don’t have a family. They are judged if they need government help when they leave, and we have politicians threatening to take that help away. We can’t expect these people to just be able to walk away when doing so means they’ll be living on the streets are in shelters. Just because you have family and financial support to leave a bad relationship doesn’t mean everyone does. Most people will do and put up with what they have to in order to feed their kids.

Another thing we as a society can’t seem to understand is that just because one person could do something doesn’t mean everyone can. We can’t see past our own experiences. Just because your life was easy doesn’t mean others were.

Next is that we don’t take mental health seriously enough. Too many people think that someone should just get over something. It is never that easy. NEVER!!!!! Your trauma will manifest itself, especially if you don’t face it. ALWAYS!!! The sad part is that not enough people allow themselves to be self-aware enough to see it. Acknowledging that we all need help dealing with something in our lives, even if that help is just to take a vacation for a weekend, would help us so much. We don’t take care of ourselves physically or mentally the way we should, whereas as we praise those who work on the physical side, we shun those who work on the mental.

We don’t give people who’ve come from abusive situations enough time to heal, and we expect them to heal the same way we did, but their situation, no matter how similar to yours, is different. You might have been able to walk away because you had a job or a support system or could afford daily counseling and meds. You might have been able to have your abuser’s children or be able to forgive him or her, but not everyone can. So many women, and some men, rely on their spouses financially. For some people, their spouse is all the family they have. Depending on the type of abuse they don’t have friends they can turn to. A large portion of the people today who are in abusive relationships will be homeless if they leave. And our world isn’t sympathetic to homelessness. We aren’t sympathetic to people on welfare.

We want these women to have kids they can’t care for and, by doing so, will only subject the child to the same abuse their suffering from. We want these women to have jobs when they haven’t worked since they got married because they weren’t allowed to. They have no work experience, probably very little education or training, and no child care to go to work. We want all these things without understanding that we don’t live in a magical world. The US isn’t a Utopia. Everything isn’t perfect just because you want it to be. We want to tell people what to do without looking at the whole picture and seeing why that might be hard or impossible, and we definitely want to tell them what to do without helping them in any way.

We say if we can work, so can they. If we can take care of children, so can they. If we can afford to feed our families three meals a day, so can they. We say all this all the while, a majority of us are one missing paycheck away from being just like them, and we’re too blind to see it.

3

Even though what my grandfather did would be considered mild to most, and I know it could be so much worse, I was sexualized early. What my mother taught me about sex didn’t do that to me. The man who put his hands where he shouldn’t did. I think what he did is why I think I ended up in the situation I’m about to write about. Having said that, I will say that kids are curious. Kids do stupid things. They make mistakes. How we treat them affects how they go through the rest of their lives. My mother didn’t handle this next ordeal well, no mother would, but she handled it well enough that I learned a great deal from the situation.

When I was twelve, I had a boyfriend. I say that lightly because we didn’t go on dates. We might have hung out at the skate center or the mall, but I wasn’t allowed to go to any of those places alone. I saw him mostly at school because he lived close, but not close enough. The only time I was at his house, I had to walk there. I did so without anyone knowing.

If I knew his intentions, I didn’t take them seriously. I couldn’t. I was a child. If I knew his parents weren’t home, I don’t remember. Either way, I wouldn’t have thought anything about it because I was a child. Yeah, I thought I was grown. I probably thought I talked and acted as if I were grown, but I was still a child.

I can’t tell you everything we did that day. We probably hung out and watched tv. Yes, we kissed. If we hadn’t, what happened probably would have never happened, but we did. I was probably excited about the kiss. I probably thought all of it was exciting until it got real. Then I didn’t know what to do. The kids at school were just starting to talk about periods, masturbation, and sex. And I knew what he wanted to do. I knew what was about to happen but didn’t know how to process it. I didn’t know how to stop it. He was my boyfriend, so it was okay, I’m sure I rationalized. But a voice in my head said that I didn’t want this. That this wasn’t right. The more it spoke, the more terrified I became.

I never told him to stop, but I do know that my fear took over, and I froze. I stopped moving and even, at one point, passed out. Yeah, he should have stopped at that point. I can’t tell you that he didn’t because he didn’t want to and didn’t care that I’d, in a sense, left the room or if he was merely too young to register what I was doing. He was older than me, so a case can be made for both.

That was the end of our relationship. I saw him at school. He told people. They made comments, and I laughed, thinking that’s what I was supposed to do, but inside, all I felt was ashamed.

I wrote about it in my diary. I didn’t go into details. I just simply wrote: I lost my virginity. My mom read it. She was livid. Deep down, I knew she would. That’s why I wrote it. My stepdad was sympathetic and tried to show me as much love as possible while my mom went through her emotions. I honestly don’t know what my dad did. Whatever he did, he didn’t do it around me, but that was probably because he and I weren’t spending much time together and fought when we were.

My mother took me to the doctor. I wasn’t pregnant. We didn’t think I was because I didn’t have regular periods. I think I’d only barely had one, despite having had breast since I was ten. We didn’t know then that I’d never have regular periods because my body didn’t go through puberty the way it should, and my uterus was deformed.

But imagine if I had been “normal,” I could have easily gotten pregnant. I wasn’t having casual sex. I wasn’t choosing to not use protection. I was twelve. I knew about babies, condoms, and sex but mostly in the abstract. I was a stupid kid. He was a stupid kid. Yeah, people can blame him. I want to blame him, but he wasn’t much older than I was. Someone should have talked with him, and they might have, but again, in reality, we were kids. Maybe he should have known better, but so should have I. I should have never gone. I knew I wasn’t supposed to. I’d been told repeatedly that I was too young to have a boyfriend. Still, he shouldn’t have gone that far. He shouldn’t have even attempted to do such a thing. No, he didn’t hold me down because he was my boyfriend, and he was older and bigger and didn’t need to because until things got real, I was complacent.

I’m glad I wasn’t pregnant, mostly because my child’s body wouldn’t have been able to handle it. Having a baby would have shattered it. My mind was already fractured, and the ordeal widened the crack. Having a baby or an abortion would have turned that crack into a fissure.

I know children worldwide have babies at twelve, but they shouldn’t. I’m not saying we should force them to have abortions. I still believe no matter the situation, it is a choice, but I don’t think we give kids a proper choice. I think too many people lean hard on them to have the baby when if they were real with the kid, the abortion would probably be their best choice. On the other side, people lean hard on them to have an abortion when that could also break their psyche. I’m not saying it would break every person, but they need to be able to make a real choice, not one their parents or the world wants them to make. Having said that, their parents and a therapist should be able to way in if both parties can look at the situation objectively. Because we are still dealing with a child who, even after being told she is pregnant, doesn’t fully grasp what that means. To be honest, in my experience, even adults don’t have a full grasp. People want to have babies. Yes, babies are sweet and cuddly, but they don’t stay babies for long. They grow into people. People you have to care for. People, you have to prepare for the world. And that is a hard job, especially for someone who hasn’t experienced the world.

I came close to having to make a life-altering choice, and I’ve thought about it often. To this day, I don’t know what I would have decided to do back then.

4

Despite the rumors that ran through my family, I didn’t have sex again until I was seventeen and had a long-time boyfriend. He wasn’t the greatest boyfriend, but I was still young and thought I was in love. My dad had just died, and I was desperate for someone to love me, so I clung hard to him for a while, but I both wisened up and fell into a deep state of depression. I left him and found another boyfriend. That one was better, but I was broken, so that relationship didn’t last long.

For a while after that, I partied…hard. I drank a lot. I slept around…a little. Mostly, I drank…a lot. One night when I was eighteen, I got drunk at a co-worker’s house. When I say drunk, I mean blackout drunk. I woke the next day to find out I’d slept with someone I’d only met the night before. Yeah, I could say someone slept with me, but I don’t know what happened to tell you one way or another. He’d also been drinking, but to my knowledge, not like I had. As a matter of fact, everyone there had been drinking. I don’t know if everyone was as drunk as I was. They could have been. Or maybe not. They didn’t stop him if anyone there had been sober enough or even in the room with us to understand how far gone I was. I don’t know if I consented. I don’t remember the act at all. None of that should have mattered. It should have never happened. He shouldn’t have tried, and those there should have stopped us, but I also shouldn’t have been there or drank so much. I blame myself as much as anyone.

Again, I count myself lucky that I was born with certain birth defects. From the moment I hit puberty, I had random, horrific periods. Since women’s health hasn’t been a priority in this country, not how it should be, no one truly knew what was wrong with me, so they constantly poked different birth controls at me. None of them worked. Almost all of them helped mess my body up more and contributed to my weight and worsening mental health. So, I was sure I hadn’t gotten pregnant, and I hadn’t. Thankfully. I couldn’t imagine being tied to that stranger for the rest of my life. I don’t know, realistically, what I would have done had I gotten pregnant.

By then, I’d seen the world. Not every bit of it, and not really enough to make a life-altering decision. I was in high school, or I’d just graduated. I can’t remember when it happened exactly. I was working part-time a Dollar Tree making no money. Had I been pregnant and kept it, I wouldn’t have a choice but to accept every ounce of government help I could get. Most of the population, even some of you who receive the help, look down on young mothers, well, all mothers, for that matter, who need help. Maybe I would have been able to keep my head above water. Maybe I would have gone to college or got a better job. Maybe, but statistically, the odds were against it. Honestly, with how much taking care of two elderly people in the last years broke me, I don’t think I would have been able to push myself to try to give my child the life they needed. Having said that, I do love kids, so I might have tried. I honestly don’t know. I can speculate all day long. Hell, I could claim to know what I would do for a fact, but no one…NO ONE…knows until they are there.

If I had been pregnant and had the child and put it up for adoption, the child would have probably been fine. That’s where, sadly, my white privilege comes in. White, healthy babies are generally what people want. Had I been any other color or had my depression taken me past drinking and weed, that child would have most likely sat in the system or bounced around in foster care. I know some of you would prefer that to the alternative. I know many people who come out of that system unscathed…to an extent…but in reality, by giving it up for adoption, I would have most likely just been continuing the cycle as the child would have felt unloved and unwanted, done drugs, and become an alcoholic because that’s in my genes, had a baby she/ couldn’t afford, etc.

That night and many other childhood traumas I won’t get into here are why I’ve suffered from depression for nearly my entire life. I hated and still mostly hate everything about myself. I have suffered severe hatred toward my body but always have difficulty watching what I eat. That has been worsened by everyone who has ever called me fat, said I should watch my weight, said they were worried for my health, or anything else along those lines. First, the birth defect that caused me to have irregular periods destroyed my metabolic system, so I’ll never be thin as “I’m supposed to be.” Second, I’ve never been able to afford the proper mental health I needed. So I’m just now getting medication that will help because, if you haven’t guessed, my dad was bipolar. I’m genetically dispositioned to have some of what is wrong with me mentally.

The rest of my issues were given to me mostly by two men who claimed to love me and should have protected me, not broken me. The worst part is that my dad died while trying to fix his relationship with me. We should have had more years together, and for a long time, I was angry we didn’t, and sometimes I let those emotions surface, but he was suffering more, and God wanted him home, and I can respect that.

But because of my trauma, I'll never be fixed no matter how hard I work on myself. I can be better. But I’ll never be complete.

5

In the above chapters, I’ve mentioned my health problems. Well, here’s a deeper insight into them and why I’m pro-choice. By age ten, I had breasts. By age twelve, I nearly had double D breasts. When my period came, I bled for a second, then did nothing else for a year. That isn’t true. I had cramps. I had horrific cramps. I hurt so bad I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t get out of bed. I thought something was trying to rip itself out of my body. And this didn’t happen once. It happened over and over again. When the bleeding started the second time, I thought I would die. I didn’t have regular periods. I bled for weeks on end. Then I would do nothing for months. Sometimes I would end up in the hospital with the loss of blood.

Thus started my battle with birth control pills. Nothing worked. None eased my bleeding. None eased my cramps. In fact, as I’ve said, some made all of it worse and messed with my already fragile mental health and my weight.

From one of my first appointments with an OB, I was told I couldn’t have children. As a teenager, that didn’t bother me. I didn’t want kids. As a woman in my twenties, I was indifferent. I had too much “fun” working two to three jobs to pay bills while I went to college. I didn’t have time, nor could I afford to have a baby. I’d also come too close to having cancer. That near-miss came with surgery to remove everything within a stage of cancer, which involved removing a large portion of my cervix. All I knew at the time was that I had irregular periods, but what was causing the problem. But since they were so irregular and I was now missing a large portion of a vital part of my body needed to have kids, I became more cautious about getting pregnant. Because if I did, I had a high chance of miscarriage and would need constant medical help and attention to come to full term because once my baby got so big, the remainder of my cervix wouldn’t hold it.

That’s when I asked for a hysterectomy for the first time. I figured that since I was having issues with my period, my doctors said it would be impossible for me to conceive, and now my cervix wasn’t large enough to carry a full child to term, so why not give me a hysterectomy. Their answer was, well, we can’t do that because you might want kids.

Excuse me!!!!!!!

How does that make sense?

Sigh.

After that, I continued trying birth control pills on the off chance I could get pregnant even though they told me I couldn’t and shouldn’t because they’d removed a large part of my body needed to carry the child if I got pregnant.

My head hurts writing this. Does yours?

Years pass. I started taking a pill called Provera. It can cause serious birth defects, so I had to take a pregnancy test every month before taking it. I do this. Religiously. Yeah, I know my chances of getting pregnant are nill, but if it does happen, I don’t want to give it birth defects. By this point, I was in my late twenties. Getting pregnant would be hard for more than just the above reasons, but not the worse thing in the world.

To my utter shock, one day, one of those sticks pops up with a plus sign. It’s faint, but it’s there. The next test does not. The next one does, and so on. I don’t have health insurance, so I go to my GP. He says I’m not pregnant and to take my pills. So I do. My period doesn’t really come. It’s only light bleeding that doesn’t last long. I take another test. Yes. I go have an HCG test done. Yes. A few days before my first ultrasound. I bleed some after sex. I think nothing of it until there is nothing on the ultrasound and my HCG levels have dropped.

I get depressed.

I get baby fever.

I get crazy.

A few months later, I missed another period. I took a test. It says yes. I made a doctor’s appointment. Before I go, I start bleeding like a gutted pig. I bleed for weeks. Horrible bleeding. The type of bleeding I expected to happen the last time. I don’t know why I didn’t. I cancel the doctor’s appointment.

I grew even more depressed.

I hadn’t planned to have kids. I hadn’t ever factored them into my life’s plan, but I would have happily had those two. I told myself that maybe after all those years, my cervix had grown back, though I have no idea if that is possible. And if not, the doctor said they could help, and we’ve made medical advances since then. Russell and I had been together a long time. We had decent jobs. I was still in school, but that was fine. Financially things would have been a little tight but doable.

Life didn’t work out that way, and it was for the best, though I spiraled for a long time.

The month after the horrible bleeding, I had a normal period.

The Provera worked well at forcing me to have regular periods.

Until it didn’t.

Two months after the second miscarriage, I started bleeding and continued to do so for over a year. Again, I asked for a hysterectomy. The doctors denied my request because I didn’t have kids and might want them, even though I was constantly bleeding and they didn’t know why and I was pretty damn positive at that point that I didn’t ever want to chance another miscarriage. NEVER!!! I was tired of the bleeding. I was tired of all the medications we tried to stop it. I was tired.

I told them again that I didn’t want to risk another miscarriage. My body had already proven that would be the most likely outcome.

The doctor’s compromise was an IUD. I still bled for a long time after it was inserted. It got infected. Once the bleeding stopped, I spotted every time we had sex or did strenuous exercise. For five years, I put up with it. When it came out, I thought I would bleed to death. I bled horrifically for a long time.

My husband had decent insurance at that point, so I changed doctors. Finally, I found someone who would listen, run tests, and found out that I never went through puberty correctly, didn’t produce two hormones and had PCOS.

Unfortunately, the treatment came too late. The birth defect had ruined parts of my body.

My metabolic system was destroyed, and my body didn’t ovulate on its own. The doctor put me on one medication that made me feel a bit normal, and another doctor I saw, because the first left the area as all good doctors do, put me on a second, and I felt slightly more normal.

The medication also meant that I absolutely wouldn’t have children.

I was fine with that.

Obviously.

Time passed.

I did well on my meds.

Then eight months ago, I started bleeding again, and it didn’t stop. I’d had a pelvic examination and ultrasound in Sept/Oct of 2021, and everything was fine. But in November 2021, I started bleeding. We first thought it was breakthrough bleeding. It can happen on the meds. Usually not after being on them so long, but anything is possible. We adjusted my meds, and I would ease, stop for a few days, then start again. Finally, I went for another ultrasound in May. That test showed a polyp in my uterus, a good-sized polyp that wasn’t there a few months ago. Scary. No one said cancer because the chances were small, but the polyp’s size and how fast it had grown, it wasn’t off the board.

Again, I asked for a hysterectomy.

They told me no because my insurance won’t pay until we exhausted all other “therapies.” The doctor suggested a few things, and off to surgery, I went.

I had a DNC, which I don’t think I could have today because it is considered “the most common method of early abortion,” even though I needed it to remove the polyp and clear out the bleeding. Next, I had an ablation, a form of sterilization, another thing being considered in some states as something else they should outlaw. Yet, it was something I needed to completely stop the bleeding.

While doing the video of my insides to have a clearer look at what was going on, the doctor discovered that I was born with a deformed uterus.

I’m 42 years old. I never knew this.

What does this mean? For one, the ablation and DNC weren’t complete because there was a small part of my uterus that the doctor couldn’t reach. Second, I wouldn’t have been able to have kids even if I wanted them. With my deformity, I would have miscarried. The miscarriage wouldn’t have happed as earlier as my first two, but well after, the fetus became liable and grew too large for the small space living space it had. That might have only happened once, and we’d have discovered the problem afterward. Maybe. Hopefully. Had I had insurance and a doctor willing to determine what had caused the miscarriage.

My doctor said if I’d really wanted kids, I could have gotten pregnant, but they would have had to take the baby very early as it wouldn’t have room to grow. Early. Very early, and not only for that reason but because I’d had surgery in my twenties that removed a large chunk of my cervix, which would have further impeded the baby’s growth. And even with all our medical advances and if we waited to the last possible second to remove it..it might not have lived.

I know some women are reading this who would have gladly taken that chance and more, but I wouldn’t have. I know that. I’m grateful I never put myself or an unborn child through that.

After discovering my deformed uterus, the doctor discovered that one of my tubes and ovariy was turned, twisted, and fused to something inside my body. I think part of my colon. She untangled them, then took out my tubes to ensure there would never be a pregnancy. Again, this and many other forms of sterilization are being discussed in some states as unlawful.

We think Roe v Wade is just about abortion, but it isn’t. It’s about my right to do what is right for my body. They not only want to take away my decision to have a baby once I’ve conceived, but they want to take away my right to prevent conceiving. I shouldn’t be forced to have a baby if I don’t want to, and I should have to refrain from having sex on the off chance I get pregnant. Sex is an intimate act that brings two people together. It is not merely a way to procreate.

In conclusion, I want to say that there were numerous times if one thing had been different in my life, I could have been in a position to decide whether I should keep a baby I hadn’t planned to have. The biggest thing that saved me from having to make that decision was that I was born with a deformity I never knew I had. Other women, many other women, aren’t so lucky.

I’m happy for all the women who grew to old age without being molested or raped. I’m happy for all the women who had the means to support all the children they wanted. I’m happy that so many of you never had to think twice when the stick turned pink. You are the lucky ones, be grateful for that, but also be empathetic to those who are not so lucky. Remember, just because you did or think you would do something in a certain situation doesn’t mean others can or should. You are not them, and you cannot dictate what they do with their bodies.

I’m a Christian. I believe in God. I don’t believe that God makes every baby. He gave us the bodies capable of having them and not having them. Suppose he/she was deciding who had a baby and who didn’t. Do you really think we’d have so many miscarriages, so many born with birth defects, so many born to crack addicts, so many born in third-world countries where they starve of malnutrition, so many born to people who don’t want them, though have them anyway? Do you think anyone, even a supreme being, would then deny them to couples who desperately want children, who live good lives, who can love unconditionally, who can feed them, house them, and care for them the way they need to be cared for? I just can’t see it. I do believe she/he designed our bodies. I believe that she/he gave us the capability of having children, but I don’t believe she/he decides who has them and who doesn’t.

I also don’t believe that God is against abortion because I believe she/he would much rather have those babies back at home with her/him than down here suffering through all the abuse we cause one another.