Sunday church felt like freedom growing up. Once a week, that big yellow bus came bumping down the gravel driveway of my trailer park. Rocks crackling beneath tires that went up to my torso — my floral dress flipped and bounced across the air as I barreled out of our aluminum tin can home.
The brown leathered seats stuck to my thighs in the summertime, but en route to the service, the singing kept us out of the weather and in the moment. The excitement.
Church meant food, something that brought more tension than joy at home. The rumbling of the bus engine muffled the yells coming from our tin can. The exhaust overpowering the stale alcohol from the night before. Church meant happiness despite it all.
I won’t demonize the process. They, the God-fearing adults, wanted to instill faith in me before the world’s pain tattered my perspective. Sent shatters through a filter that softened one key part of existence. Pain.
Faith, in a God or in something larger than our own humanness, made the falls a little easier. Just live in a godly way, and he will protect you. Walk in faith, don’t commit adultery, don’t kill. Commandments that felt like second nature to a child.
Nearly thirty years later, I haven’t set foot on those grounds, but they left an impression on my skin — and soul.
So when I sat down in the West Hollywood Planned Parenthood, my thighs similarly stuck to their plastic chairs, I heard the hymns. I heard the preachings in my past that told me what I was doing was wrong.
He had cheated on me too many times. Hid truths in a second cellphone. And the familiarity of his hand around my neck or knocking the air out of my chest told me that this child wasn’t ours to bring into the world. I left that tin can long ago, but I knew this life — this familiar love. To bring a child into the world the same way I grew up felt cruel. For them and me.
A sense of urgency brushed through me after multiple positive tests. Five weeks pregnant, I booked the appointment.
I need to do this before I fall in love.
I know the science. Once the hormones reach a certain level, every cell in your body turns to protecting the life inside you. In East Tennessee’s Bible Belt, they make you listen to the heartbeat before deciding to terminate your pregnancy. I saw my high school friend shed a piece of her humanity the day she heard her child’s.
A cruelty I could never imagine overcoming. So time, and spiking hormones, were of the essence.
As I sat clammy in an ice-cold room waiting for them to call my name, those Sunday preachings clouded around me.
Never talk about this.
I was dirty. A killer. But I knew what else was at stake.
Later, when I told my southern, Christian relative, their words hit like the ten commandments slamming into my chest: “I thought you wanted children?”
I do, I responded.
I really do.
Today, a year after I terminated my pregnancy, my body reminds me how badly I want children too. Food feels out of reach. Exercise… too demanding. Grief is here, in full swing, and so is the shame.
I tell people that I lost a child. Because, to my heavy chest and crumbling, aching joints, I did.
My body is in mourning. My mind is in a constant loop of grief and shame and longing.
Because in a different world, I would have loved the opportunity to be a mother.
In that timeline, my life would be one that, now, seems unimaginable. Today, they would be three months old. I would be living in Japan with the father. Anything else past that is pure speculation, but that I know to be true.
I pray for our child, he texts me from Tokyo. Prayer feels wrong here, too. But I don’t tell him that.
My God — my omniscient, all-powerful, mighty Southern Baptist god, might have turned his head that day last May.
But for my little one, I hope they’re somewhere in the clouds bouncing on my mother’s knee. I hope they’re somewhere kind, with plenty of food and no one to say “we can’t afford that.”
If I choose to believe in a God, I would like to think that they’re holding my hand through this today, typing with me. Crying with me. Saying, it’s okay, I understand.
I want to be a mother — again. Because for just a moment, I felt what that life could be. It just wasn’t right for me, or for you.
But today I grieve. Today, I hold the heavens — your heaven — in my heart as the hymns resonate what I know to be true:
I love you. I love you. I love you.