Paula, at 16 - Bad pic, bad choices
Inca — more Italian heritage visible in her personage than the black blood coursing through her veins — remained silent in the face of my mother’s demands for truth.
I’d better get downstairs before this girl spills the beans, I thought as the space filled with pregnant pause.
I know how persuasive and direct Mommy can be.
I’d better get downstairs before this girl spills the beans, I thought as the space filled with pregnant pause.I know how persuasive and direct Mommy can be.
I bolted down the thinly-covered stairs into our living room, which was awash in an eerie sort of dim darkness — only slightly lit by the St. Elmo’s fire blue haze of pre-dawn December light that struggled to enter our curtained windows.
“I told you, Mommy,” I said, averting her burrowing queries and walking straight toward the door, “Inca has a dentist appointment.”
“There are no dentist appointments this early…” my mother protested, as we let her litany of logic trail behind us out the door.
“Sorry.”
I apologized to Inca, grateful for the safe cocoon of her small two-door blue Chevy, a guard against the blistering Chicago cold, a haven away from Mommy’s laser-like questions.
The tone of worry…worry, worry, worry in her voice almost made me want to confess my major plight, but I’d long since learned in less than two decades to hide the truth from the woman who birthed me.
She wouldn’t understand, I reasoned.
All she would do is yell and perhaps call me stupid for doing the very thing she’s warned me not to do all these years. Or worse yet, make me keep it?
I’m in trouble deep…
It is Christmastime 1985 and I have come home for my first two-week break from Florida A&M University with more than lonely heart tales of single dorm-room beds with hard metal green railings.
I am 16 years old and nearly 3 months pregnant.
I am 16 years old and nearly 3 months pregnant.
Just months before, in August, I’d boarded a plane bound for Tallahassee, Florida — with, of course, a change of planes in Atlanta.
As my grandmother and folks had once joked, “If you go to heaven, you gotta change in Atlanta.”
I’d left Inca and my mom crying and stumbling over seats at the O’Hare gate.
Shortly thereafter, Alcoholic — a plump-lipped, burnished-skin colored lanky Detroit native who tooled around the sweaty, hilly town in a sleek sports car with pitch-black tinted windows — and I were tying our shoes together, laughing and stumbling in drunken daytime-awkward, tipsy heaps in my sister’s Palmetto Street North Apartments complex where he resided.
The false facade of intoxicated glee as well as the falser facade of having my first college boyfriend buffeted some of the fear I felt from living some 956 miles away from The City of Big Shoulders, the only home I’d ever known for 16 years.
Faithfulness be damned — fun, frolic and Jax Liquors lies…
Michael Franks, "When I start to care, then I find there is no one there..."
Sixteen and set loose in the sleepy Florida town with foreign flying Palmetto roach bugs and haunting weeping willows, I began to take some comfort in my travails with Alcoholic.
Bursting with him into his locked bedroom, interrupting the coitus of one couple, watching as the pretty girl with purple iridescent make-up highlighting her molasses dark skin sat up calmly and buttoned her blouse.
Falling asleep in the twin-sized bed jutted in the corner with one couple in the other twin-sized bed across the room.
Awaking to a different couple in the room in the morning, the model-handsome man putting a Michael Franks tape into the player near us.
“…crazy blue, like St. Elmo’s fire / A love so sharp and flat, that it’s hard to know just where you’re at…”
Mere days into my first freshman semester at FAMU, Alcoholic dropped me off “up top” — the nickname of the famous, well-traveled main strip that intersected campus, South Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard — right in front of McGuinn Hall, the all-girls dorm (switched from co-ed since the ’70s when a boy reportedly killed his girlfriend in the then-closed Diamond Hall behind ours) where I resided on the 2nd floor.
The dawn’s early light hour found only me and “Suzie” standing locked outside in the pre-sunrise shame that exposed outfits worn the day before.
An older woman, wearing a head-scarf and a just-awakened look of subtle scorn that wearily said she’d seen this scenario one too many times before, answered the locked door and let us inside.
Trouble in Tallahicky…
The bloom wilted off the new-college boyfriend rose, but I didn’t want to see it.
One pretend wrestling fight landed Alcoholic against me in a way that hurt my nose against his clavicle.
I’d wept a bit, but became definitely aware of an internal happiness that finally put me near the “abused girlfriend” stage, something I’d subconsciously been strangely waiting on, as if being hurt by someone proved their love for me.
A different night found me sitting among Alcoholic’s “you ain’t really down” Detroit-suburb friends in his room, sans him. I hung around the too-cool-for-that-hick-town-school clan, hoping my status as Alkey’s “girlfriend” somehow made me acceptable.
“Don’t burn your hair,” I said to Suzie, the same girl locked out of the dorm with me weeks before.
“I’m not,” she answered dismissively, holding a curling iron wrapped around a flat piece of her hair for several long seconds.
My presence as an interloper into the “in crowd” of people was palpable, but my desire for belonging surpassed my pride as I began to pick up on subtle clues that my boyfriend was not really my boyfriend at all.
Whether they knew or not, they did not tell me where he was.
Another evening, I strolled with friends down that same main drag toward my sister’s place on Palmetto Street — greeted by a gorgeous and thin, very fair-skinned girl that my friend “Delilah” knew from a rival high school back home, who walked facing our direction.
“People say she got her knees dirty from always being on the ground,” Delilah had already whispered in my ear about the stylish slender specimen.
We walked on, and out of the darkness appeared Alcoholic, only yards after the butter-colored, eclectically-dressed babe.
Prickling questions and pangs of jealousy and embarrassment arose within me as I stopped in the darkness to briefly listen to Alcoholic’s lame explanations feigning innocence.
I wonder was he with her? I actually asked myself, not wanting to know what I already knew was blatantly true…
Not wanting to see what I’d already seen.
I wonder was he with her? I actually asked myself, not wanting to know what I already knew was blatantly true…
Not wanting to see what I’d already seen.
And I didn’t want the new, noticeable hard lump to keep growing within me like some alien being I discovered as I sat in my parents’ deep and emptying bathtub, pressing the edge of a bar of soap against the flesh on my lower belly, no longer able to deny the truth.
The small birth control pills that had made my body puke in the upstairs bathroom — so violently that my mother had noticed and questioned my illness — would be done away with only days after I’d begun taking them.
Though I took nary a pregnancy test out of continued denial and fear, I knew Alcoholic’s baby was beginning to take root inside my womb.
But coming heart-to-heart with the powerful force of denial, I realized that ignoring the festering problem and pretending it wasn’t deep inside me was not making it go away.
It was, to my horror, like the plight of an afflicted B-movie actress, growing larger and more frightening.
At that moment, back in the same tub that some 14 years prior I’d pooped in as a child — forcing my mom to drag us out and clean it — I hated the cancerous tumor, the freakish foreign thing that scared my soul.
I wanted it gone.
“How do I know it’s mine?” he asked through the mustard yellow phone…
When I was 17, I had insomnia...till I figured out it was six months after I'd had my abortion, when the baby would've been born.
Offended that Alcoholic has asked me this question, I simultaneously pushed the fleeting memory of walking alone in a dreary drizzle up the hill outside the Palmetto Street North Apartment complexes one afternoon when Alcoholic was again MIA (so I settled for a chubby replacement who hid behind his Omega Psi Phi paraphernalia) far enough back in my mind that it almost didn’t exist.
“It’s yours,” I told Alcoholic in a low tone, having dialed the phone number I wrested out of him before we departed the capitol city and fled to our respective hometowns for the two-week Christmas break.
“And I need $200 for the abortion.”
“I don’t have any money,” he answered, or some such other defense, as I envisioned the Palace at Auburn Hills-type of surroundings he was safely ensconced within.
“But I —” my protests were suddenly met with unexpected banging noises.
He hung up on me.
He hung up on me.
I turned the phone’s yellowish receiver toward my face, staring at the myriad of small holes in the earpiece as the fact that my “boyfriend” hung up in my face settled into my cognitive domain.
As if he’d washed his hands, Pontius Pilate-style, of the situation.
A split-second compulsion to dial him back pricked me, but I let it fade. For I’d just waste time listening to a phone ringing on the hook or a continual busy signal.
Instead, I placed the receiver quietly back in the silver cradle so that it was perpendicular to the wall once more.
I felt utterly lost.
Thou shalt not steal, lie, kill…
My sister Emerald came through for me with the 200 bucks I needed to get my “problem” taken care of, promising to give me the monies I need for my forthcoming abortion.
Perhaps I was giddy with relief as we walked around Evergreen Plaza on Chicago’s South Side where 95th Street meets Western Avenue in the Beverly Area – so prolific with African-Americans that the shopping center was nicknamed “Everblack” Plaza by locals for years.
I wanted to show Emerald the ruse Inca and I had been perpetrating lately in Carson Pirie Scott’s women’s section: going into the dressing room to try on a load of fashionable clothes then wearing some of the stolen booty out without paying.
Emerald was not having it.
“Paula, I am not going to be with you while you’re stealing,” she said clearly and directly into my face.
I relented, and we left that store empty-handed and free from danger.
But I didn’t let her forget about it, teasing her as we visit others stores, ribbing her for not letting me carry out my usual five-finger discount shopping.
“I might not spend my money on you this Christmas,” I said as we visited a hip clothing store for young girls down the brighter north wing of the mall.
She turned and looked with fervent intensity into my eyes, saying softly but strongly: “I might not spend my money on you this Christmas.”
Ye-ouch.
Realizing Emerald was talking about not paying for my abortion felt like a ten-blade jabbed beneath my sternum.
I stood shocked. I grew quiet. Back to the reality of my dire situation.
It was what I deserved, of sorts.
Years later, my gut tells me Emerald’s voice of honesty saved me from being arrested that day.
But as a 16-year-old, my hurt was multiplying. I was tired of being the one hurt.
It was time for me to get smart, I reasoned.
I began hatching a plan to get back at the guy who hung up on me, pay Emerald back with interest and get something for myself, too.
The killing fields on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile
Inca and I entered the nondescript red-brown building where the Magnificent Mile of Michigan Avenue meets the winding Chicago River at Wacker Drive, a tunnel of water so frigid some days that sheaths of ice float atop the brackish, dirty surface.
After I gave the woman at the counter the estimated date of my most recent menstrual period, she said something that made my eyes widen.
“You may be too far along.”
“You may be too far along.”
I was sent to a room to receive my first ultrasound.
As I sat on a black exam table, another woman studied the grayish image with calipers and determined that I was, in all likelihood, less than 12 weeks pregnant and could go ahead with the abortion.
“Can I keep that?” I wanted to ask, but envisioned the strange look the woman may have given at my request for the morbid memento.
Instead, I remained quiet as I watched her throw the photo she’d just printed in the garbage.
“Does it hurt?” I asked…
…the haggard-looking, perhaps 30-something brunette woman who sat next to me in the hallway, both of us dressed in our pre-surgery robes.
“It feels like they’re ripping your guts out,” she answered.
Why would she say that to me? I thought, my expectations of a little motherly cushioning thwarted.
There wasn’t much hand-holding as I laid on my back in the makeshift office turned operating room, stealing glances from the uncovered glass jar container that sat on the counter to my left as it began filling with blood and pink tissue traces — back to the African-American female doctor working between my legs, spread akimbo.
“Put your head down!” she commanded, and I dropped my head quickly back down on the table.
I stared at nothing but whiteness above as tears streamed from the outsides of my eyes and rolled into my ears.
Softer next, having adopted a more motherly tone as she scraped with what felt like a dull, sharp spoon inside my numbed innards that produced an echo in my watery ears, she said, “I have to make sure it’s all out.”
Paula sleeping in more ways than one...
“You have a needle in your arm!”
One of the medical center’s workers loudly intoned to a girl attached to an IV, who writhed around incoherently in her bed.
I was glad that I didn’t opt for anesthesia more potent than the tablet or two of Valium that seemingly had no effect upon me — ever mindful of Mommy’s disdain for drugs to the point where she wouldn’t even let dentists put me nor my sister under general anesthesia.
Eager to leave with Inca — who’d waited in the lobby — and put the whole episode behind me, little did I know that my “fresh start do over” was only the beginning of a journey that would have me flashing back to that fateful so-thought hidden day a mere 6 months, then 16 years, then 24 years later, and many days in between.
“Can’t sleep at night and you wonder why? Maybe God is trying to tell you something…”
Soon after returning for my spring semester back at school, I sat in the dark in the basement of Alcoholic’s fraternity house.
He was slur-shouting over the din of the party music, going on and on with drunken poured-out emotion about his son that was no longer.
Grateful that his heart had turned around, I nodded with pitying detachment, finally understanding that I never wanted to have a baby with that man — yet still clueless about the value of my body and whose it really was.
I’d gotten $500 out of him that I’d lied and said was the cost of the abortion — telling him that if the amount went unpaid, all of our parents would be called.
From his funds I gave my sister back her money and then some, and probably spent the remainder on a new outfit.
I didn’t need him anymore and I didn’t love him anymore; there were no more ties binding us in my mind.
I moved on.
But I couldn’t sleep. So much so, I trekked down to the school’s infirmary to have them take a look at me.
The woman who examined me could find nothing wrong, and in her wisdom perhaps suggested counseling instead of the sleeping pills I’d hoped they’d dish out.
By June 1986 I am in the suburbs of Boston — inside the dusty bedroom of a Newton, Massachusetts, home that is my place of residence during my summer internship.
An overwhelming sadness overtakes me. I realize it has been six months since my abortion, around the time my baby would’ve been born.
God’s Sea of Forgetfulness, my abortion repentance…
It wasn’t the first time I played the game of “how old would they be” regarding children I’ve had aborted.
Even after I was saved and married to the man I wanted and had the baby we’d longed for growing in my womb, I couldn’t escape the memories of children who’d occupied the space prior to him.
As we drove down California’s Highway 101 and I studied the pregnancy calendar with glee, an entry near the 3 – 5 weeks gestation period caught my eye:
“Next 10 – 30 days are crucial in nervous system and heart development.”
Nervous system? As in the central nervous system? I asked myself.
That’s the system responsible for feeling pain!
“Next 10 – 30 days are crucial in nervous system and heart development.”
Nervous system? As in the central nervous system? I asked myself.That’s the system responsible for feeling pain!
I closed the folder shut, and thought of the babies I’d had suctioned out of me from years before.
Had they felt pain?
One day at church, I felt led to write down “abortions” on the top of the index cards they’d given us to write the major things we wanted to repent for.
I stood in the line and waited for my turn to throw my folded up sins into God’s “sea of forgetfulness,” a make-shift blue pool. Later in the nursery, we joked that we needed a scroll instead of 3 by 5 cards.
Another time I stole sideways glances at my friend’s 12-year-old son in the passenger seat of my minivan, about the age one of my babies might have been at that point.
“I didn’t have the right to take that life,” I said to myself, looking at the full being next to me.
And yet, the forgiveness has been received, the blood of Jesus has removed the spilled blood of those abortions that aren’t “still on me” as my new pastor preached recently. (I can’t help but flash to an interview of Joan Collins who admitted her past abortion, saying with puffed-up pride that she didn’t regret it one bit — or the 5,000 women whom I pray the Chief Shepherd visits and turns their seared consciences around as well.)
He would’ve been 24 this year, I just said to myself in 2010, as the controversy over Tim Tebow’s pro-life Super Bowl commercial erupts.
While I know the meek offering of a feeble essay in no way could ever compare to Christ’s feat on Calvary, my angels pray someone “who has hears to hear” can do better than I did.
Before I formed you in the womb I knew [and] approved of you [as My chosen instrument], and before you were born I separated and set you apart, consecrating you; [and] I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.
Jeremiah 1:5 (Amplified Bible)
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