19 Jun Thinking About My Spirit-Child’s Other Parent on Father’s Day
Even though I don’t know who he is. ~ published in The Memoirist
It’s odd – and a little startling – to have a thought for the very first time in your life, especially when your life has been going on for many years and you’re one of those people who thinks obsessively about everything. But the truth is that I’ve never had this thought before, probably because I haven’t allowed myself to think about it until this year.
This is the year I’m writing my story of having an abortion when I was young. I’ve done a fairly good job of keeping this story a secret for over five decades, and now here I am, writing it down for all the world to read. It’s a hard story, and sharing it feels risky. Some days it feels terrifying, and I get paralyzed. Yesterday was like that. But other days, like today, I have enough distance and healing – or maybe grace – that I can write.
What I’m going to write about now, before the impulse vanishes, is the thought I had today for the first time: I hope the father of the child I aborted is having a good life.
I was an overweight teenager in the 60s. I grew up believing my value was determined by whether or not boys found me attractive. But I couldn’t lose weight, no matter how hard I tried, so I never made it into the “attractive” category. As you can guess, I never felt valuable.
When I went to France at age 21, I found, much to my surprise and delight, that French boys and French men found me attractive in spite of my weight. They didn’t seem to care. I was female; apparently nothing else mattered. To this day I am shocked by how quickly my longing to be desirable outweighed what I thought I believed - that good girls wait until they’re married to have sex and only bad girls are promiscuous.
A therapist once told me I had experienced sexual abuse at the hands of the boy-men I had sex with. Maybe that was true. I was never forced, but I was certainly coerced and emotionally manipulated. My good-girl self said no every time, only to be pushed aside by the self who craved validation.
There were many I did refuse, including the father of the two little girls I nannied. However, there were several who easily overcame my feeble protests. One of them got me pregnant
Of course, there is much more to this story that won’t be told here. The condensed version is that I panicked, had an illegal and very traumatic abortion, went immediately into deep denial, and spent the rest of my life alternating between suppressing and trying to heal from that trauma.
It didn’t matter who the father was because on the rare occasions when I allowed myself to feel any emotion, I hated them all.
It wasn’t until I started writing my memoir in earnest that I experienced something beyond healing. I think I would call it welcoming. The grief, regret, and pain I’ve been trying to escape all my life will probably always be with me. The difference is that now I give these feelings space to exist.
Something unexpected has happened as a result - the hatred and rage lost their cohesion and floated away. Their departure left me with a peace of mind I thought I’d never know. With that peace came the ability to look at things in a new way.
Today is also Father’s Day in France., so I’d like to send good wishes to the father of my child who lives in the World of Spirit. In spite of all the bad decisions, the suffering, guilt, and remorse, there was one good outcome. A soul was created. Even though he never had a chance to live in this physical world, nonetheless he exists.
I gave him the name Ruhi. He is helping me write our story.
So far no one has asked me if, given the chance, I would make a different decision. I’m sure once my book is published I’ll hear that question a lot, and I need to figure out my answer by then. What I do know is that I’m awfully glad my life turned out the way it did. I wouldn’t want to change anything about it.
I have three children who live in this world. They are also helping me write my memoir, and they wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for my husband. So I want to end this story with a message of gratitude to him.
Dear G, You learned my secret early on in our marriage and you responded with compassion, love, and unconditional support. That has never changed in 52 years. Even when I’m grieving, or short-tempered, or paralyzed like yesterday, you are there for me. When I spend day after day closed up in my writing room, coming down only for food and then falling into bed at 3 a.m., still you understand. I couldn’t do this without your blessing.
Happy Father’s Day.
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