I was 20 years old and working as a lifeguard at my hometown pool. Home from college for the summer, I was actually working with two of my best friends at the pool. One of our other best friends, Eva, had gone that day to a doctor's appointment because she hadn't been feeling well. I happened to be the one to run to the pool house when we heard the phone ring.
Eva was crying when I picked up the phone. She was still out of town, had just left her appointment. "Pal..." she wailed. "I'm pregnant." I listened to her and asked questions or made statements, and in one of them I promised not to tell our other two friends. She wanted to absorb it a bit, I figured, and to tell them herself. The girls questioned me, though, because they were expecting a call from her about what the doctor had said. I covered a bit awkwardly.
I was on the phone with Eva, alone in the pool house. My best friend was confiding in me and she was frightened and hurting, but still I didn't tell her that I was pregnant, too. I couldn't, really. I hadn't even let myself admit it. Pregnancy simply could not happen to me. To say I was a naive and unprepared girl is to give me way too much credit. Even though I'd been having sex for five years at that point, I had never once thought about birth control. My step-mother tried to talk to me about it once on a car ride somewhere in high school. She said she'd bring me to the doctor, and we'd get me on the pill. It was a kind offer, but I was so uncomfortable talking about sex, about my body, that I clammed up and shook my head. It's stunning to me now, to look back and see that girl so heavy in denial that she explained away nausea and sore boobs, and yet hoped in the back of her mind that breathing the cleaning fumes at the pool would cause a miscarriage. It was an odd place to be, almost of two minds--unable to say the word pregnant even in my head, but already planning an abortion.
The father was onto me. And he was thrilled. He loved kids, and he took to rubbing my stomach and calling me Mama. He sensed I was leaning towards abortion, when I could eventually talk about it with him, and he put me on the phone with his mother, who he had told. She prayed and I cried.
But the father was abusive. Locking me in a room is the worst thing he ever did to me, but he'd told me he beat up his ex-girlfriend's parents and his sister, and I'd seen his eyes go cold when I stayed out too late with my friends. This guy wanted me to marry him, move to California, where he was from, and have the baby. I knew this was not happening. Crazy thing is, if I hadn't been pregnant, I was stupid and desperate enough to have married him. But even with a complete lack of self-esteem and little confidence, it was firm in my head and my heart that I was not going to have his baby. At the end of the summer, I still hadn't told my best friends or anyone else, and I headed back to college.
I finally told Eva one day, or rather she encouraged it out of me (I guess I wasn't as discreet as I thought)and she agreed to go to a clinic with me. Our university's campus newspaper had an ad for a Pregnancy Care Center. Free pregnancy tests, it said, and abortion referrals. Eva drove me there. The building was downtown inside a tall, dark, old building. We climbed up silent, soft forest green stairs and down a hallway. The door looked like an office door, not a medical clinic, but we went in anyway.
It was an office. It was small and looked like it should belong to an insurance salesperson. Right away we saw one of those "abortion" pictures, and we looked at each other. Still, we stayed. I went into their small office bathroom with rust circling the sink drain, and I peed in a Dixie cup, then left it on the dish towel on top of the toilet. The elderly lady who had led me there wore old-woman pleated slacks and a sweater, and she went into the bathroom and placed an Equate brand pregnancy test stick in my piss. After she pronounced me pregnant, she asked me what I was thinking of doing, and I told her I was thinking of doing abortion. I can't remember much of what she said, but I remember this: "Have you felt the baby kicking yet?" At 13 weeks, which I was,that was, at the very least, very unlikely. The woman gave me a handout to study up on, mostly about the emotional trauma I would feel. I was worried about this, but not as worried as I was about being pregnant. In the end, the woman gave me a Thank You certificate from my fetus, as well as a pair of tiny booties. This mystified me. I wasn't sure if the smallness of the booties was supposed to bring out my maternal instincts, or if someone figured it was the lack of booties that was causing me to want to "murder" my "child." At any rate, later, the woman called my home, where I lived with two cousins, and left a message from a "friend," and then followed up with a postcard.
After we left that place, I cried all the way to Eva's dorm, and then I told her I wanted to have an abortion. One other thing I was worried about was Eva's reaction. She had told the dad, had a plan, and she was having a baby. Terminating my pregnancy was the only option I ever considered, but I was still frightened she'd think badly of me. But she scolded me for thinking it, hugged me, told me she'd go with me, and asked if she should tell our two friends. I said yes, and then I went home and phoned the local women's clinic and made an appointment.
Part 2: Coming up with the money and medical complications
