by Laura June
It wouldn’t be accurate to say I then felt regret for the way my relationship with my mother had unfolded, but it was true then that I did see other ways it could have. Other ways I could have been, and wanted to be, moving forward. And that afternoon the seeds were planted that I could probably, after years of telling myself the same story of my own life, and the story of my mother, tell another one. I saw that there might be another version, another way of thinking about it, a way that was truer than what I had previously told myself. After decades of believing that “making peace” with something consisted largely of saying, “Fuck it, we did our best,” I saw the possibility of something more nuanced.
I had always thought that when people die, our relationships with them stop evolving. But I realized then that this wasn’t true.
From the moment my daughter was born and my relationship with her began, I have felt an overwhelming awareness of my own place in time to my mother that exists both in the past and in the now. I am able to think differently about my relationship with her, as she’s become not just my mother but also Zelda’s grandmother. My grandmother is Margaret June, my mother is Kathleen June, and I am Laura June. When we named Zelda, Zelda, we also named her June. Zelda June. Another girl joining a long line of women with the middle name June. As part of me, as part of my mother and my grandmother, and going back in time further, to women I’ve never known or heard anything about.
The story of Zelda’s birth is the most important one I have to tell. But first, before I tell you about how I decided to have a baby, I want to tell you about when I decided not to.
* * *
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My mother took me to have an abortion on Mother’s Day in May of 1995. I was a senior in high school, and although I was not promiscuous by my own definition of the word, I wasn’t 100 percent certain who the father of the baby was. I didn’t have a boyfriend, really, and the boys I hung around with all fit a general profile: mostly a couple of years older than me, mostly dealing with their own shit. My life was about as confusing as it had ever been, and that confusion had only increased in the roughly two weeks since I’d found out I was pregnant, in the bathroom of my best friend Emily’s mom’s house, in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, where I had lived for most of my life.
It was almost certainly a Wednesday afternoon when I found out that I was pregnant, because Emily’s mom worked late on Wednesdays, and we—Emily and I—were often responsible for watching over her two younger sisters after school. Well, Emily was responsible for them, and we had been a package deal since second grade. I was sort of along for the ride. We responded to Emily’s mom’s show of trust by instituting something we called “Wacky Wednesdays,” which lasted for about the last two years of our high school careers. The activities of Wacky Wednesdays usually included our other two best friends, Vanessa and Ellen, and ranged from dyeing our hair, taking bubble baths with one another, to inviting lots of people over to drink whatever alcohol we could get our hands on.
We also occasionally took pregnancy tests (always stolen, since they’re incredibly expensive, and only Emily really had a job), whether we really needed to or not. What kind of teenager takes a pregnancy test when they don’t need to? Everything, even impending, possible but not likely pregnancy, was a potential laugh to us. Pissing on a stick over a toilet was inherently funny. Until it was me doing it for real, because I had a feeling, in my breasts, in my “loins,” that something was up. I’ve only ever had loins when I’m pregnant.
I know that I took the test when there were lots of other people around in the house, but I think I was alone, in Emily’s mother’s bathroom. I know that afterward I joked about the fact that it was positive to a few people, but I didn’t feel like laughing when it actually was. I was buzzed but not drunk.
I felt a deep pit in my stomach, a sickness, a loneliness—no, an aloneness, that’s it. I didn’t feel lonely; I felt alone in a way that I never had before but still do to this day. The pregnancy test was simply a confirmation of what I’d suspected for a little while, a week or two: my body had felt . . . different and foreign, and I’d allowed my inner voice to whisper, “You’re pregnant,” in the dead of night once or twice, but I hadn’t gone any further than that.
I was taking birth control pills when this happened. I’d been on them consistently for probably a year and a half. I couldn’t have said then, and I certainly can’t say now, that I had taken every single one of them on time, but even then, at the age of seventeen—I’d been through sex ed; my mother was blunt and open—I knew what all the possible consequences were.
I went outside and sat on the bench in front of Emily’s house and started smoking a cigarette. I was still new enough to smoking that every single time I did it, I got an intense head rush. I don’t know how many cigarettes I smoked. I remember that Emily came out once. She had a beer in her hand and offered me some. I took it, though I knew I shouldn’t. “I guess it doesn’t matter, but I feel like I shouldn’t drink at all anyway,” I told her. I hadn’t said, “Hey, I’m thinking about getting an abortion.” She assumed that I would, I’m sure. She didn’t say, “What are you going to do?” She was probably thinking, “Thank God it’s not me,” and counting her blessings. That’s what I would have been doing, if it were her in my place. I stubbed out the cigarette and went back inside the house. I knew that I had to get it over with, before Emily’s mother came home. The pregnancy test, which I kept for at least another two years, was in a Ziploc bag in the back pocket of my jean shorts.
I called my mother, who was staying with my grandmother. She answered the phone because both of my grandparents were slightly hard of hearing, so she’d probably gotten there first. It was 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon. I asked her to go upstairs into one of the bedrooms and to call me back.
“I have to talk to you, call me back.”
She called back right away. “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”
“Are you kidding?” I answered. I don’t know how she knew or why she said it. “Are you psychic?”
Let me say here that I have an excellent memory, particularly for conversations, so much so that people are routinely annoyed with me, my recall of times and places and scenarios, and yes, even exact wording sometimes. And this conversation is even more important than most of the other ones I remember in life. I recall it minutely. I remember breathing into the phone as I listened to her talk.
“Sometimes you just know things,” she said, sounding sort of crazy but, of course, she was right, which was the larger point. I guess I didn’t really care how she knew. “What do you want to do?” she asked immediately.
What a question. I’ve thought back on this conversation maybe a thousand times since then. It is the most remarkable framing of a conversation I have ever experienced. In asking this question, my mother conveyed so many things to me: she respected me, wanted to hear what I had to say, and considered me capable of making my own choice. I didn’t really process or think about any of this at the time: I was literally hearing “Papa Don’t Preach” as a soundtrack in my head and thinking about how limited of a time I had to make a decision. I wasn’t sure how much time I had, actually. I didn’t know how pregnant I was. I didn’t know anyone who had ever had an abortion.
Why did I call her? Plenty of friends in my situation would not have called their own mothers. In fact, they probably would have called mine. My mother was the cool mom. She was the one we went to and asked what a blow job was. She was the one you asked for advice. She didn’t buy me cigarettes, but she turned her head the other way when I smoked hers. It wasn’t just that she was young; she was different. And though she often gave good advice, the reasons for her cool-mom status, I know now, were really complicated. I know that much of it was due to her having married so young and being immature in many ways. I know that much of her coolness and willingness to allow regular, parental boundaries be trespassed upon was due to her alcoholism, h
er lack of fight at important junctures. But it was also, I like to think, somehow part of who she might have been regardless.
It also occurs to me now that this conversation is in some ways very representative of my relationship with my mother overall: we were close and connected, and often, the mother-daughter dynamic was off. Sometimes when I’ve looked back and thought about my mom, I’ve judged her harshly (especially as I became a mother myself) for her failure to simply be a parent, to be the one to call the shots consistently and firmly. But this time, this situation, could not really have been handled by a woman who had firmer boundaries. In order to do what she did, and to say what she said, she had to also be a friend to me.
The gist of what I said to her next was something like: I’m too young; I’m scared; I’ve been drunk a bunch of times; I’ve been smoking; I’m still in high school. How would I get an abortion? Can I get an abortion? Is it a baby yet? (She said yes; I veered toward no.) It was really early, but I didn’t know how early. I couldn’t remember when my last period was, and they weren’t ever that consistent anyway. What if I do want to have a baby? What do I do then?
My mother offered to help me raise the baby.
“You could still go to college; I could help; we could all live together,” she said. This woman who was so extremely close to finally finishing the decades-long job of raising her own four, without blinking an eye, offered to take on a new one.
All my friends loved my mother, but I suspected they talked about me (and her) behind my back; no one wants a mother who is a “best friend” type exclusively; she might make a good grandmother, but did I really want her to help raise my kid? I couldn’t raise a kid; she’d fuck up the kid the way she fucked me up. Wait, was I fucked up? I felt pretty solid most days, actually. I was healthy. I was graduating on time. Then again, I was seventeen, pregnant at my best friend’s house on a Wednesday, drinking a beer on the phone and smoking out her dining room window. Fuck this.
This couldn’t be my future. I could barely accept its reality in my present.
“I’m going to call Planned Parenthood; I’ll get back to you,” I said.
Two days later, I had an appointment for an abortion for which my mother would have to give her permission. I remember that the cost of it was about $800, an enormous amount of money for a teenage girl who had only ever held a job for three weeks in her life (at a Little Caesars inside of a Kmart). I didn’t even consider if my health insurance would pay for it, because that was under my father’s name, and I was terrified that he would somehow see it on a bill. I didn’t even get my birth control through my insurance; I paid cash for it every month, watching the pharmacist side-eye me.
Even though my parents were still married, even though my father was still very active in my life, my mother agreed not to tell him when I begged her not to. She agreed to take me to have an abortion and not to tell my father. This made a lot of sense to me in 1995. In 2017, it is sort of incomprehensible to me, but I am still, I have to be honest, thankful for my mother’s inability to keep her roles straight. Because she was more of a “friend” to me than she was a wife to my father or a partner in parenting with him, I do not today have a twenty-two-year-old child.
I think in her own terrifically misguided way, my mother was protecting me the only way she knew how. Although we didn’t discuss it, she knew the cost of having a family very young. She’d become a mother at the age of twenty, not even out of college yet, to my brother David. Four years later, there was me; sixteen months later, my brother Daniel; and finally, two years after that, my brother John. Boom, boom, boom, boom: a beautiful and not-so-little family.
Though in later years I sometimes felt like she held this—the fact of the abortion, and that she helped me to get it—over me (simply because she often brought it up pointlessly in conversations when she’d been drinking in order to, I felt, hurt me), it was the most selfless act ever performed on my behalf.
It’s sort of hard to comprehend how one thing in a person’s life can monumentally inform how the rest of their life works out, but in looking back on my own life thus far, there’s no doubt that this act, enabled by my mother, is the single most important thing to have happened to me. If I had never had the abortion when I was seventeen, my life would have been indescribably different; who knows if for worse or for better. But different. I think about this all the time. I thought about it the day that I graduated from high school; on my last day of college; on my first day of graduate school, sitting in orientation. I thought about it the morning my mother died and the afternoon Zelda was born. I think about it sometimes, early in the morning, when I crawl into Zelda’s room, the sun barely up, and lay beside her crib as she jostles herself awake, drinking coconut water and touching her belly, making intermittent eye contact with me. She’s just a baby: what would my adult child be like? What would that life look like? There’d be no Zelda, for one.
Maybe especially because it was Mother’s Day, there were protesters outside the abortion clinic in downtown Pittsburgh the sunny morning of my appointment. It was one of those days when there is too much sun, not just for your eyes but for everything, where your whole body feels as though it’s squinting and just wants to retreat inside. I’d gotten up very early, having not slept well the night before out of nervousness and fear. I felt that feeling I feel in my stomach when I am tired, a shakiness that is a combination of nerves and a need for food. But I couldn’t eat.
The drive from the suburbs to the clinic was maybe forty minutes; my mother was in the front passenger seat, her friend driving. Her friend had been recruited presumably because she too had had an abortion, hers when they’d been roommates together in college. She told us how she’d had to go all the way to New York from Pennsylvania to get hers, because abortion wasn’t legal in Pennsylvania at the time. I sat in the back seat solemn and unsure of what I was supposed to feel about any of this.
Being unsure of how you’re supposed to feel was the source of much of my turmoil as a teenager. I felt slight elation at getting the thing over with after a few weeks of nerves and aching sadness; I felt anxiousness at the unknown—I didn’t want to run from the fire but rather I wanted to walk into it simply to know what it would feel like, even though it inevitably felt like just that: fire.
What I remember of the rest of that day is tainted by the fact of the abortion. The abortion was the most important thing to happen to me, that day, and maybe any other day. Though I have tried to imagine that child into existence many times, the stumbling block of reality—that no child of mine actually existed—stood in the way of really exploring what it could have been like. All I can remember is overwhelmed by what has been, the collective sigh of relief I have felt every day since then, on repeat, skipping like my CD of “Vogue” used to skip in 1990 from too many plays. I can never quite get over how good I felt after that procedure.
I make excuses for myself now, because I was basically a kid, but I have to say that I still do feel that sense of relief at not being pregnant any longer. My body was once again all my own, the invasion was over, and I felt, to the extent that a seventeen-year-old can, a new lease on life. Anything, it seemed, was suddenly possible, all because I had undergone, without anesthesia (“Fuck that, I’ll stay awake, I’m fine”), a short—it couldn’t have lasted longer than ten minutes—abortion, ending my pregnancy at seven weeks. It wasn’t just a possible baby that I aborted that day but a whole series of possibilities that died and were reborn there in those few minutes while I lay on my back, looking up at a slowly rotating mobile that had silver stars and sheep on it. The lighting was pulled way down low, and there might have been soft music piped in. Though the clinic was a bustling, busy place (clearly the weekends were booming), the room where the procedure itself was performed was quiet and calm and empty: nothing betrayed what went down in there, until I craned my neck around and spied the equipment that did the job.
Only much later
in life, when the internet had become part of my daily life, did I investigate what this procedure actually entailed. I remember it as mildly uncomfortable, mentally challenging, and emotionally . . . well. The thing about this, for me, was that the relief washed away almost any other emotion. As I sat in the little recovery room, back in my own clothes in a huge recliner, sipping orange juice from a straw stuffed into a little cardboard carton, I felt almost as though I could cry. But no one else—none of the other girls, all of them young like me, with the exception of one woman who seemed impossibly old who I wondered about just then, and who seemed to me the saddest of us all—seemed upset. “I’ll be sad later,” I thought, just wanting to get through the door and back to my mother.
But I’m still waiting for that wash of feeling. I feel a lot of emotion now for my mother and for what it must have taken for her, a forty-two-year-old Catholic woman who had been married since she was twenty, to take her only daughter into the city and get her an abortion. I feel proud of her for having done it for me, for what are obviously selfish reasons. I feel confusion that she did do it, not knowing if I could do the same. I feel some anger for her allowing me to keep it from my father, thus engendering what was a serious but ultimately positive thing for me with a shroud of dark secrecy that I see now it didn’t have to have had. I could have told him, and she was the only person who could have made me feel it was okay to do so. Instead, she chose the easier path, the one that I desired so much in the moment and worried over so much later on. What I don’t feel, in any part of me, is regret about the abortion.
And I like to think, though I can’t and won’t ever know, that my mother knew then what is so obvious to me now: that the best decision I ever made was made possible only by that one act of quiet, secret selflessness on her part. She wouldn’t win any Mother of the Year awards for doing it; she wouldn’t be admired by her other friends who were mothers or by her family—that’s why she didn’t tell anyone she was doing it—but she did it just the same, I assume because she knew what it would be worth to me, then and always.
