What Could Have Been

Sometimes, the decision to not have children is more difficult than having them.

In 1970 New York State partially decriminalized abortion, making it possible for

a woman to terminate a pregnancy of up to twenty-four weeks duration. Hospitals and gynecologists geared up for a new kind of patient.

In 1970 I was not yet a woman with regrets. Touched but not dented. I lived with my college sweetheart. I had a piece of paper that told me I was a bachelor of fine arts. It implied a future in which I created works of great beauty and originality. My sweetheart and I shared the rent on a tiny apartment in the East Village, big enough for a terrier, not two adults.

While my mother and father were distraught at my living arrangement, they learned to keep silent. I had a close relationship with my mother – close but not happy. Before I moved out, we routinely screamed at each other across a void. We were separate planets. Our voices got lost in all that space. Neither of us heard what the other had to say. Years later, when retrospect and hindsight informed my thinking, I understood more about her and her fears for me.

I had dinner with my parents once a week. Each week my mother looked me over to make sure I was eating. She’d ask about Howard. I’d lose my appetite but politely pick at my food, then leave as quickly as I could.

Then one week she asked if I knew I was pregnant? The void collapsed.

I had not known until that afternoon. I’d spent a weekend hobbled by abdominal cramps so severe I could hardly stand. On a cold and rainy Monday I took a taxi to my physician’s office, to see the man who had delivered me.

I described my symptoms. He looked me over.

“When was your last period?” he asked.

I thought about it. I had been about two months. While it was true that I’d never had a regular cycle, I’d never gone two full months without a period.

“I think you’re pregnant. And maybe miscarrying. Have you been spotting in the last day or two?”

I had not, just the relentless cramping.

I’d snickered at the occasional story of a woman who gave birth without ever having known she was pregnant. I’d been excited at growing centerfold breasts, at the softening of my hipbones, padded now by warm flesh. I was happy and calm, sleeping well. The anxiety that accompanied me through my adolescence dissipated. I was in unfamiliar territory. This was how well-being felt, sensual and free.

And then , in the doctor’s office, somewhere in a nether-region of shock, ambivalence and vulnerability, I stopped feeling altogether.

“How pregnant am I?”

After a brief exam he estimated I was nearing the end of the first trimester. He gave me a prescription for donnatal to stop the cramping and called an ob-gyn while I waited in his office. He wanted me seen immediately.

I took a taxi home to my mother, who already knew my news.

The next afternoon she took me to my appointment with the gynecologist and talked about the change in the New York State law along the way. My father weighed in, and my best friends. Howard said he wasn’t ready to have a baby, in another year or two maybe, but not then. He was about to begin graduate school.

Everyone assumed I would want and would have an abortion. The gynecologist scheduled my surgery for the next Monday, six days away. An overnight stay in the hospital after a D&C. I walked through a bog; while everything around me speeded up, I slowed, stopped.

“So soon?”

“You’re coming up on eleven weeks. After that, the procedure gets very messy.” Free of the cramping, I had six days to consider the nature of connections – to Howard, to my mother, to a ten week fetus. Which ties would last, which would be cut, which would die after many years a natural death. I had six days to enjoy pregnancy.

I let go of Howard. I called friends. I accepted my mother’s offer of friendship. Then I moved inside myself and looked around – perhaps I could see what grew there. I felt it, acknowledged a presence other than my own. Said goodbye.

If anyone had asked me what I wanted, this is what I would have said. “I want to get married and have this baby.” I knew I wasn’t ready. And no one asked me.

Over the decades I’ve given this momentous event its due. I often thought about how old he or she would have been at this or that time in my life. Over the decades he or she became an idea of creation and its demands. I acquired dents and regrets – what comes of being alive.

The next Monday I went to the hospital. I was prepped by a nurse whose hands were warm and comforting. She asked me how I felt as she nicked a vein for an IV. I told her I was scared. I’m here, she said. And I heard the surgeon as I slipped off into the ether. “We’re looking for an eleven week fetus.”