Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
My big fear was we wouldn't be biologically able to have a child. It turned out we were emotionally unable to do so.
Aug 19, 2004 | I arrived in the cramped basement of the Washington Surgi-Clinic at 8 o'clock on a Saturday morning. Birth-control brochures and women's magazines were scattered throughout the waiting room. I lay down on my side, on one of the padded benches that lined the wall. Nausea and fatigue blotted out everything else.
It was the start of the July Fourth weekend, two summers ago, and I was there for a "no-frills" abortion, provided by the clinic for $400. Four other women were there -- young women, most with mothers or friends, one with a man who appeared to be her boyfriend. At 37, I had a good 15 years on any of them. I'd been married for seven years, my husband and I had good jobs, and I was pregnant -- isn't that what women my age wanted?
While I'd never exactly yearned to have a baby, I'd always assumed that eventually I would. I loved my husband, William, and wanted to spend my life with him; to not have a child, it seemed, would be to leave a piece of the picture missing. Although choices about the "when" and "how many" of having children have changed a great deal for women like me over the last couple of decades, the "whether" has not. The media oozes it: Having a family makes you whole. Look out, or you'll become one of those miserable women in their 30s and 40s, desperate to get pregnant, to adopt a baby from China. Motherhood still seems less a choice than a sine qua non.
William said he wanted to have a child at some vague point in the future, and I believed him. But the years went by, and it was never the right time. "When I finish my dissertation," he'd say. "When I get hired." After he got a job teaching philosophy at a local university, the answer was, "After I write my book." We avoided lengthy conversation on the topic, probably because we both sensed that the outcome would be something neither of us wanted to face.
In fact, in those last years of the marriage, we weren't talking much about anything. Our relationship was disintegrating, like a satellite slowly breaking apart in the atmosphere and falling to earth. We argued daily about everything, from my leaving a stray tea bag in the sink to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I'd threaten to leave him. He'd ask me not to, tell me things would get better. The hallway of the apartment we'd moved into a year ago was still stacked with cardboard boxes; we'd never even finished unpacking. Years ago I'd fallen in love with William -- charming, good-looking, an outstanding teacher -- but even then I knew that he was obsessed with his work. It took me longer to see his other obsession: pointing out my shortcomings. He criticized the way I talked, walked and dressed. He was unkind to me most of the time -- not abusive, but impatient, or, alternately, neglectful. I'd grown up around men I was afraid of -- my father was a frustrated academic whose unpredictable rages sent me scurrying to hide in my room -- so it didn't seem that extraordinary. And, of course, I thought I loved him too much to live without him. Absent a catalyst, like an affair or a drug problem, a bad relationship can grind on for a very long time.
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