April 2024

CONTENT WARNING: OVER-SHARING/TMI

A couple weeks after my triumphant victory over three years of unfiled taxes, I went to Planned Parenthood because I had another creeping anxiety: was I pregnant?

Turned out, I was. My partner had visited from Texas a month prior, while I was pet sitting. The visit hadn’t actually been that great. On the second day, he got hangry, then shut down. I didn’t even know he was pissed because of low blood sugar. Regardless, he expected me to accept responsibility for his shitty mood and behavior. When I wouldn’t, he dropped the taco that had been beckoning him all day, and observed a taught moment of silence before he mumbled, “This isn’t going to work.”

I imagined two meanings, one right after the other. First: it’s about anything except breaking up with me. Second: he’s breaking up with me. 

The second option punched me in the gut as he got up and left for the bedroom to get his luggage. The weight of his disapproval hit me like a brick and sank straight down to my sphincter. It dragged my heart and lungs and salty gushing tears down with it.

This was exactly the reaction he was after, of course; the sound and feel of me breaking under the weight of his disgust. But what he didn’t anticipate was my willingness to engage in this twisted iteration of “Yes, AND…”

He got all his belongings into the foyer. I stopped eating, overcome with grief and disgust as well, and stared into the middle distance over the kitchen island while focusing on my breath. I didn’t turn around on my barstool to speak to him. I waited for him to explain himself.

“Well, sorry it turned out this way. It didn’t have to be like this.”

I gave him nothing. He went on. “I don’t want to leave, but you won’t stop acting like this.”

I exploded. “Go on and fucking leave, then!” I yelled, having turned around to face him. “I don’t want to be in a relationship with someone who’s willing to drive seven hours in the dark just to show me how angry he is. Fucking go! I’ll talk to you later.” I broke into sobs as I turned back around, initiating my mourning process, ready to start healing and moving on without him. If this was where our dark improv had to end, so be it.

At this point he moved toward me, arms outstretched. “Can I have a hug?” he asked, like he was heroically going to assume the role of The Bigger Person. “I just want to put an end to this drama.”

Imagine the two of us with a child.

I protested and pushed him away and remained furious. One of the dogs was mirroring him and as I pushed him away she jumped up at me like she also needed a hug but I pushed her away, too. It was ridiculous and adorable but mostly ridiculous.

Eventually, we made up but it was a bit tense for the rest of the week. It didn’t stop us from having as much sex as we possibly could.

Our connection healed over the following weeks. Anyone who knew about my tax situation chastised me in their own way, but when my partner did it, I was actually moved to action. “It gets worse the more you put it off,” he had said a few days after our tussle. In the face of this simple truth, I resolved to sit my ass down and work through it at last. 

I found that as I focused, the anxiety dissolved off of me, and each page I went through on the website brought me closer to completion until, in less than 24 hours, three years of crushing tax anxiety had no more reason to exist. 

Even though I was the one who finally took responsibility and did the work, I had a sense that my partner had very casually helped saved my life. That anxiety had been so bad that I had often contemplated suicide over it. But now not only was it done and over with, I was going to be getting a nice chunk of refunds.

And then I found out I was pregnant.

There was a time in my life when I thought abortion was evil. I was eight years old, and a friend told me that abortions kill babies. When I asked how, my little friend said, “The baby gets chopped up instead of just being born like normal.” Naturally I was horrified and felt a strong urge to crusade against this monstrous procedure. How was such a thing even legal? 

Well, when I took that home to my parents – who aren’t practicing Catholics now but kept weekly Mass during my childhood – my dad sympathized with my shock and horror and said, “Yes, abortions kill babies, but not like that.”

I grew out of that shock and horror quickly. It was clear that the anti-choice side had some bad information. And here I was, 31 years later, getting an ultrasound to make sure my soon-to-be-aborted pregnancy wasn’t ectopic. 

In fact, the pregnancy was two weeks behind in development. I had been preggo eight weeks according to the menstrual math, but the “yolk sac” (eww) was only six weeks developed. Also – and this was most important of all – there was no embryonic tissue. It might’ve been because I took the morning-after pill incorrectly. 

The nurse said I was likely bound for a miscarriage, but the treatment would have been the same, and unless I wanted to, there was no real benefit to waiting for it to happen naturally. They gave me some pills to shove up my vaj at home and told me to brace myself for a sudden-onset period. 

Fuzzy fact: you can abort a pregnancy this way until maybe 10 weeks. If you’re over, you may need a different procedure.

So I took my suppositories and had a chemically induced period a few hours later, expelling from my cramping body a load of slippery, bleeding-red chunks of uterine tissue that this time included an empty yolk sac. I was weak and tired the next few days, but it was the kiss of death for the shitty feeling I’d been experiencing for weeks prior. The pregnancy was taking so much out of me and there wasn’t even anything growing in there.

The reason I thought the lack of embryonic tissue was important was because it helps me feel like I didn’t really abort anything. I had an abortion but… not really? There had been no sense of a human life growing in me at any point, and the lack of embryonic tissue confirmed that sense.

I still would have gone through with it if there had been, but I would have carried a whimsical kind of guilt after, wondering about the experience from the cluster of cells’ POV, which it wouldn’t have even had, and also wondering about the person the cells might’ve turned out to be – then feeling relief at never having to find out.

Nope: It’s just gonna be me and my partner resisting the crushing realities of life together, pulling out before climax and paying our taxes on time.