Realizations After an Abortion

What I mainly remember, though, is the dreams. There were three, and they came at unhurried, almost ritual intervals, over the first weeks and months after the abortion.

The first one is the least clear to me now; all I know is that he was a nursing baby. In the second dream, he was maybe a year old, in a once-piece print “footie” pajama, standing up holding onto the railing of his crib and looking straight at me. It was the third one, though, that still haunted me thirteen years later, when I wrote the following poem. It was the one in which he said goodbye:

My ghost son keeps pace with me,
long-legged as I am.
He’s twelve, or would be,
the age he was when he left me
in the third dream, in the subway,
lifting his cool boy’s hand from my shoulder
and crossing the stream.

At the time, these dreams didn’t trigger a flood of grief, as they would have if, for instance, I had lost a wanted pregnancy. What I felt was surprise. Because, first of all, he? How on earth did I know it was a he? But I knew.

It’s a strange fact that I’ve never dreamt the sex of an unborn baby wrong. When one of my sisters or friends was pregnant, I didn’t always dream about it, but when I did,, the girl or boy I had dreamt of always arrived at the end of the nine months. I didn’t see any reason to believe that I’d be right about other people’s pregnancies and wrong about my own. No, he was a boy, all right.

I can’t tell you now whether the realization came slowly, over years, or all at once; whether it arrived piecemeal, through painstaking reasoning, or sudden and complete. All I know is that at some point it dawned on me: If he had a sex, then he also had a face. And a temperament. And maybe a destiny. The die was cast. We comfort ourselves by saying, “I can always have another baby.” But this wasn’t a baby. It was that baby.

I had come upon the objective fact that that “baby,” child, embryo, wasn’t an idea in my mind. It was an individual in my womb.

This wooman's story encapsulates the many conflicting emotions, actions, and realizations that surround the abortion issue today. Do go read it all. (Via The Anchoress)