It had nothing to do with love—Mardel dearly loved her son, just like my dad loved me. It had to do with something that can be broken inside people, making it hard for true feelings to see the light of day.
WHEN I LOOK back at my teenage self, I feel so heartbroken for that lost young girl. I am saddened by everything she went through, and I wish deeply she had made better decisions along the way. But I know how much anger and bitterness she held in her heart, and I know how much she hated herself and considered herself worthless. I know how badly she wanted to believe in God and how hard it was for her to accept that He was listening. I wish I could hold her and tell her how special she is.
But of course I can’t do those things. I can only tell you the truth of my life, no matter how painful it is.
Two years after JP was born, I had a summer fling with someone in town. It didn’t mean anything, and it didn’t last long. But then, one morning, I woke up feeling nauseous. I drove myself to see our family doctor. I described my symptoms, and the first thing she asked was, “Could you be pregnant?” I said no, absolutely not; I was using birth control. She gave me a few tests and came back thirty minutes later with the results.
“The tests were all negative,” she said, “except for the pregnancy test. You are definitely pregnant.”
I threw my head in my hands and wept. I can still recall the deep, deep shame I felt in front of that doctor. She tried to console me, but I just kept saying, “I can’t do this again. I can’t.” I felt a sickening panic, a sense of utter doom. What was wrong with me? This time, I knew for sure I hadn’t missed a single pill—not one! The doctor explained that pregnancies can sometimes still happen even when on the pill, and I thought, Of course it would happen to me. The doctor was so sweet to me, and she did her best to comfort me and make me feel like I had options.
“It’s not the end of the world, Crystal, I swear,” she said.
But I couldn’t help feeling that it was.
There are many things I could have done at that point. I could have told my mother, who had been so kind and giving after my first pregnancy. I could have called Aunt Connie, who had been so ready to adopt my first child. I could have talked to a pastor or to a friend. I could have reached out for help, for guidance, for advice. I could have done any of those things.
But in the end I didn’t call my mother. I didn’t call Aunt Connie, either. I didn’t talk to a pastor or to a friend.
All I did was pray to God for forgiveness.
Just three days after learning I was pregnant, I walked into a nondescript brick office building, went to the front desk, and handed over $300. They told me to have a seat in the waiting room, so I did.
Then I just sat in my chair and waited, too numb to feel anything at all.
I HAD FOUND THE CLINIC IN THE YELLOW PAGES, AND I took the earliest appointment they had. Up until then, I’d never really given any serious thought to the issue of abortion. I knew that as a Christian I was supposed to be against it. I’d see bumper stickers that said, “It’s a Child, Not a Choice,” and deep down I knew it was wrong. Other times I’d try to convince myself that I should have the right to decide what to do with my own body. But suddenly this wasn’t just a theological debate.
Suddenly it was real.
The clinic was in Oklahoma City, and I convinced a friend to come with me. We took the two-hour drive up Interstate 44 in my beat-up old Mustang GT, talking about everything except the most important thing. I felt myself shutting down a little more with each passing mile.
At the clinic I handed over my cash and filled out some forms. Then I sat in the waiting room, listening for my name. I can’t remember a lot about the clinic, except that it was drab and ordinary and might as well have been a dentist’s office. And it was quiet, really quiet—no conversations, no laughter, just silence. I sat in my chair feeling like I was watching someone else go through this. There were a few other girls there, but I kept staring at the ground, afraid to make eye contact. I wondered what path had brought them to this place on the same day as me. I wondered if they had cried themselves to sleep the night before like I had, or if they’d begged God to forgive them and take care of their babies like I had. I wondered if their hearts were breaking as they sat there waiting to hear their names, like mine was.
Finally a nurse called for me and took me to another room. She handed me a few more papers and asked me to sign a waiver. I thought about how similar it all felt to a normal doctor’s appointment, except there was nothing normal about it. The waiver, she explained, described how this was a serious medical procedure that could, like many other procedures, result in my death. I was shocked to hear the word “death,” because I’d never thought for a moment that could happen. How ironic is that? I thought. You come in here for an abortion, and you’re the one who dies. And then I had a second overriding thought:
If you die, it’ll be what you deserve.
Once I signed the papers, everything happened so quickly. I was taken to a procedure room where a nurse helped me change into a hospital gown. My legs were shaking, and I felt like I might throw up. “Do you want to be asleep or awake?” the nurse asked, and I didn’t answer because I didn’t know what I wanted. The numbness that had gotten me through the long drive was wearing off. Suddenly I was starting to panic.
“Do you want to see the fetus on the ultrasound?” another nurse asked as she laid me down on the table and put my feet in the stirrups.
“No, I don’t want to see my baby,” I said quickly. I surprised myself by using the word “baby.” It was the first time I or anyone else had used it since I walked into the clinic. All at once, it struck me that what I was doing was unforgiveable. Around me, the nurses and technicians were casually going about their business, trying to keep the mood light. I couldn’t understand how they could act so normally, as if I was about to get a molar removed, while to me it felt like something horrifying was happening. A doctor came in, and the pace of activity picked up even more.
Get up, Crystal, I thought. Just get up, and tell them you changed your mind.
But my body seemed frozen. And then the crippling panic began to subside as the anesthetic dragged me under. The next thing I knew, two nurses were helping me get dressed and hustling me into another room with several big recliners and fans blowing warm air around. A nurse handed me a cup of cold water.
“You’ll feel light-headed for a while,” she said.
For some reason, I didn’t cry. I cried a lot in those days over every little thing, but there, in the clinic, not a single tear. I guess the only thing I felt at that moment was shock. I can’t believe you did this, Crystal, I kept saying to myself. I sat in stunned silence, listening to the loud hum of the fans and the insistent voice in my head: What have you done, Crystal? What have you done?
The door swung open, and a nurse walked in with another girl. She was tall and skinny and quite beautiful, with long sandy brown hair and big, sad eyes. I guessed she was about seventeen or so. She could have sat in any one of the recliners spread around the room, but she picked the one next to me. She was crying uncontrollably, her chest heaving with every gasp for breath.
Then the girl looked over at me, and our eyes locked. We didn’t say a word, because we didn’t have to. We knew exactly what the other was feeling. It was this terrible mixture of shame and horror and disbelief, as if our souls had been torn from our bodies and then replaced, but all mangled and broken. But it was also this incredibly strong feeling of compassion for each other. In that moment, sitting in those cheap recliners with those big fans buzzing, we were giving each other some small measure of comfort at a time when we desperately needed it. We each served as a witness to what the other had endured. There was no judgment, just a shared pain that neither of us had the words to express. This wasn’t just some routine medical procedure. We’d both lost something we could never get back. We’d made a choice we could never undo, as much as I would later pray that I could. When we walked out of tha
t clinic, we’d be very different from the scared and anxious girls who had walked in. We’d both been changed profoundly and forever, and we knew it.
I don’t know if that lovely girl ever thinks of me, but all these years later I still think of her, and I hope and pray she has found forgiveness and happiness, wherever she is.
That night I begged God to forgive me for what I’d done. I asked Him over and over—Please, God, forgive me for this, please. I said these words night after night, week after week. Please, please, please, God, forgive me.
But even as I was saying them, I felt all but certain they would do no good. I couldn’t see any possible way God could ever forgive me for what I’d done. Even if He was real, even if He was listening, there was no chance I would ever receive His forgiveness. I believed I was doomed, and I never felt more worthless as a human being. I was a sinner, a failure, unforgiveable, beyond salvation and hope. All those times I’d been baptized seemed almost silly to me now. I hadn’t been saved or cleansed at all. The dirtiness of my world was something that could not be scrubbed away. I’d gone to church every Sunday as a child and a teenager, but in my twenties I stopped. Spiritually, I was finished.
I hated myself so much that whenever I passed a mirror I looked away, because I couldn’t bear to see my own reflection.
I wasn’t sure of much in my crazy life, but I was sure of one thing: God could never, ever love me now.
I’VE BEEN ASKED many times since I started sharing this part of my story where my heart lies in regard to abortion. This is what I say.
I say that my heart lies with the girl who just found out she is pregnant and is lying in bed and crying and scared and thinking about an abortion. I want to sit with her and tell her the truth about what she is contemplating. I want to tell her it is not the easy way out she may think it is; that in truth it will forever be her nightmare. That no matter how far or how fast she runs, she will never be able to outrun the consequences of that decision. That no matter how much time passes, she will always wonder about the child she never got the chance to meet.
My heart lies with the girl walking out of an abortion clinic. I want to take her and hold her and wipe away her tears. I want to tell her she can never fall so far that God won’t catch her and love her and above all else forgive her. I want to tell her that God never stopped loving her and that His arms are still open to her if only she will choose Him. I want to tell her that with God there is always hope and always love and always forgiveness. But I also know that forgiving herself will be her biggest battle.
My heart lies with the women who have been covered by a curtain of shame, women who keep their abortions a secret and can’t grieve for the child they lost because of the crippling guilt that holds them captive. I want to sit them down and tell them about the God I met. The God who is the key that will unlock their chains, if only they will raise their chains to Him.
And finally, my heart lies with the millions of babies who have not been granted a chance at life. I cry for these little lives that have no voice. I see the statistics that say more than 50 million babies have been aborted since it became legal in the United States, and I can’t help but cry and grieve for the one baby that was mine. The lie of the enemy is a powerful thing, and I know all too well the destruction that it causes.
AFTER THE ABORTION, I acted as normally as I could around people, so no one would think anything was wrong. At nights I put myself through the ringer, praying and crying. But during the days, everything, at least outwardly, looked fine. And then after a few months I slipped back into my normal routines and went on with my life. My wounds turned into scars.
It wasn’t too long before I fell in love again. Will was someone I knew from way back in the sixth grade, when I was a tomboy trying to hold my own with the tough boys in my class. The boys wouldn’t let you play with them during recess if they thought you were a sissy girl, so no matter how much they pulled my hair or knocked me down, I always got up and jumped right back in with them. After a while, they let me be part of their little playground gang.
Will was one of those tough little boys. I saw him again years later when he was all grown, and I thought, Gosh, he’s really cute. He had long black hair like a rock star, and he always wore the most amazing leather jacket. I learned he had a reputation as someone you didn’t want to mess with. He wasn’t all that big or muscled, just quick on his feet and street-smart. He was also a talented artist who did these incredible airbrushed drawings. He could be very sweet to me, and he was wonderful with JP. I began to see a real future for us.
But, like all my other loves, Will was volatile and unreliable. He liked to drink and have a good time with his pals. We broke up constantly, only to get back together again. That should have been all the warning I needed, but I was too young and too in love to see all the giant red flags unfurling before my eyes.
Roughly at the same time, Will and I decided to get married and I got pregnant again. This time, though, it was no accident or surprise. You see, in my talks with God I’d been begging Him to send the baby I’d lost in my abortion back to me. I longed for that child—I grieved for that child—and I begged God for another chance. I wanted the emptiness inside me to be filled. And in my brokenness I guess I believed I could make everything right by replacing the child I had aborted. And so when I learned I was pregnant again, I was ecstatic. I believed I’d been given a second chance.
My mom wanted to plan a big, splashy wedding, but when I told her I was pregnant, we agreed on a smaller ceremony. She wasn’t thrilled to hear I was having another baby, but by then I didn’t much care what anyone thought of me. I asked my father to walk me down the aisle, and I was delighted when he said yes. The service was at a tiny little Methodist church in town, and we invited something like thirty friends and relatives. Right before the ceremony, as I was standing in the back of the church with my father, he noticed I was crying.
“You don’t have to go through with this,” he told me. “We can get in my car right now and drive away.”
“I’m not crying about that,” I said. “I’m crying because my pantyhose are too tight and it took me thirty minutes to get them on and I have to go to the bathroom!”
The ceremony was short and sweet. I wore a simple white dress with red roses in my hair. Will looked so handsome in his dark suit and tie, and my beautiful son, JP, who was two, was just adorable in his little white button-down shirt. After the wedding we had a small reception in the church with cake and drinks and dancing. That was the day I truly realized I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was a wife, with a son and a husband and a family of my own. It was one of the happiest days of my life.
I wish I could say the rest of the marriage was as warm and wonderful as the wedding, but I can’t. Even before I married Will, there were clear signs we shouldn’t be together. But once again, I ignored them. Maybe I was so used to seeing anger and discord in relationships that I figured that’s how all relationships are. Or maybe I was so desperate to finally find some happiness, I simply pretended the warning signs weren’t there.
The problem was that Will liked to drink . . . a lot. Early on, he spent more time drinking with his friends than he spent with me, but I figured that since we loved each other, we’d have plenty of time later to grow and mature as a couple. I truly believed we would spend the rest of our lives together. I didn’t realize we were already tearing apart.
We lived together in a small house we rented in town, about seven miles from where I grew up. Some nights Will would come home late from drinking and pass out. Other nights I’d wake up in the darkness and look for him, only to find him gone. I’d get ready to go searching for him, but inevitably my car would be gone, too. Or he’d tell me he was going to the store and would see me in five minutes, then disappear for hours. When he was around, we fought constantly—loud, nasty fights like the ones I’d known all my life.
A couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, the electricity in our house went out. I thought, That’s
weird. I just gave Will money to pay the bill. Two days later, the gas went out, too. Then I discovered we were two months behind on the rent. I had no choice but to move back in with my mom. I was eight months pregnant at the time.
My mother was the first to notice what I was too willfully blind to see. She could see that Will’s behavior was getting worse: more disappearances, more fights, more unexplained events. Finally one day she sat me down and told me the score.
“Your husband is doing drugs.”
I didn’t want to believe her. I told her no, that’s impossible, but my mother knew the signs all too well. Before long, I realized she was right: Will was hopelessly hooked on drugs. And not the measly stuff I dabbled in—hard-core drugs.
That realization ripped my heart apart. I was devastated, but not only for myself—though it was agonizing to see my dream of wedded bliss get so quickly and cruelly squashed. My heart also broke for Will, because I knew that, like me, he never really got a fair chance at having a normal life.
Will’s childhood was even darker than mine. He was one of eight kids who grew up in extreme poverty, in a rat-and-roach–infested house that was unfit to live in. His family barely had money for food, let alone clothes. I later learned the reason William wore his leather jacket all the time was because he didn’t want anyone to know he had only two shirts.
Will’s brothers and sisters had many different fathers, and the man listed on Will’s birth certificate wasn’t even his real dad. Maybe because he didn’t belong to the man who was called his father, Will didn’t feel like he belonged to anyone at all. Will told me that he met his real dad only a handful of times, and that when he was eight years old, he watched his father stab someone nearly to death. Years later he would learn his father had been killed.
A year before our wedding his older sister was murdered. Her body washed ashore on a riverbank. It fell to Will to go to the morgue and identify her body. He was in that morgue for only a few seconds, but I’m sure those few seconds damaged him down to his soul. And I am sure that when he closes his eyes, he can still see his sister’s body.
Waking Up in Heaven: A True Story of Brokenness, Heaven, and Life Again Page 8
