Addicted to Hiding, Addicted to Being Seen

What's Around My Neck and Who's Allowed to See It

I wear two necklaces every day. I almost never take them off. One is a tiny opal on a delicate gold chain. The second is a golden snowdrop pendant on a slightly longer gold chain. They aren’t necessarily meant to be worn together and are constantly getting tangled in one another. When they’re not tying themselves and each other into knots, their clasps are migrating to the front of my body, to the dip of my throat or the spot on my collarbone stickiest with sunscreen or sweat. I find myself constantly adjusting them. I get nervous when people ask about them, but I hate when they’re not visible, or—God forbid—when they’re not touching my body, tangly and irritating as they can be. The few times I’ve taken them off and forgotten to put them back on, after swimming or showering or getting a massage, I have felt naked and unfamiliar to myself.

The little gold pendant is for my son; snowdrops are January’s flower and he is January’s baby, the little winter child who bloomed in the freezing darkness, the vibrant pink and orange sunrise spreading its generous fire over the icy grey city on the morning he was born. He loves to hear about this morning, about the moment he crossed that threshold from inside to outside, his little lungs entering stage right and his little eyes opening for the first time, though it’s all secondhand. He can’t remember this happening and we can’t ever know what it was like for him. All we can do is tell him what we saw that morning through our own long-open and tired eyes, the ones made for us by our parents and the ones our parents won’t ever know what it’s like to see through, either.

The opal is a birthstone; October’s. My husband was born in October, and even though he’s not from here, he’s deep New England autumn in a human form. Late afternoon, woodsmoke, hot black coffee, migrating birds and trees across the mountains stunning you with their beauty just by doing their job, following the reliable patterns and schedules that never become less jaw-droppingly beautiful. Probably hating these sentences as they read them, those tall gorgeous trees and golden-winged birds.

Autumn is a season with a firm plan, and a warm light that makes you and everything else it touches glow as it shifts across the earth according to that plan.

If I hadn’t had an abortion, I would have had a baby last October, too. That baby’s birthstone would have been an opal. Maybe they would have even been born on my husband’s birthday, a sapling planted on the mountain or a bird hatching before the frost.

Ugh, the repetition of these husband-metaphors, for someone who has never existed in human form. I don’t know that I should use the same (overwritten, ask any editor I’ve worked with) prose for the idea of them. An acorn, a seed. An egg we consume rather than incubate and protect.

Likewise, I don’t know that this little stone I wear around my neck should be for both of them—my very real solid tangible living beloved and a memory I can only see through my own flawed eyes, because no other eyes grew to see it from the other side. Not even the memory of a life, or a death. The memory of an idea. Can a necklace be both a symbol of a person and a symbol of a lack of personhood? An empty space in the garden where we watered the snowdrops but not the marigolds, and thus they never grew? More metaphors, because I have no other way to describe this lack. I’ll never know what I’m lacking, here. How can I know that there’s no baby—no birth, no sunrise from the hospital window and piece of cake for my husband to share with someone who looks like him—and also that the baby’s birthstone is an opal?

I know that I’ve made this idea into a baby in the minds of many other people by writing about my abortion. Recently, looking for an interview I’d done in the lead-up to the book’s publication, I stumbled across a pro-life site’s take-down of this excerpt that ran on Jezebel.

“…the elective abortion of her second child,” the description under the link—which I didn’t click on—said.

I don’t know how to tell anti-abortion people that they don’t have the right to refer to my “second child,”

a person who may exist in the future but has not ever existed and does not exist now. I don’t know how to tell them to keep any and all children of mine—real or conceptual, imagined or existent—out of their mouths, their hands, their bodies that my abortion-providing colleagues and I work hard every day to protect and care for, too.

We often cite the statistics which tell us that most people having abortion are parents, but I think parents ourselves may be afraid that publicly grieving or remembering is ceding ground to the five-week-embryos-are-the-same-as-real-babies crowd. They are a small but violent and aggressive minority, and a minority with a lot of power. They feel entitled to name and claim knowledge of not only our sacred and private lives and bodies but of children we never even had. They will tell you that I have two children and I murdered one, loudly and confidently, even as I say, look, let me tell you, here’s my family, here’s my only child, here’s my husband, here’s this moment that lives in my body forever and here’s how it all felt and feels to me.

They didn’t see the sunset on the morning my son was born just like they didn’t see any of my pregnancy tests just like they won’t ever see what it looks like when the leaves change from where I’m standing. They think they see through all of our eyes—or worse, they think they can tell us what we see and what we don’t. Elective abortion of her second child.

They won’t be happy if I show them my necklace or if I hide it, and they’ll never want to hear about how I feel in January and how I feel in October—and how those seasons and pregnancies are both different and the same for me, one holding echoes of the other, the leaf under the snow, the empty nest of frozen twigs that only sheltered an egg once and briefly.

They will continue to pretend to know these things, though, and their shrieking insistence that they can see out of my eyes, that they can (and should! must!) take up residence in my body and my hospital bed will only become louder. They will continue to turn away from the mountains and the birds and the trees and the sunrises, to ask no questions, to exhibit no curiosity about how things look through the eyes of my son or my husband or the eyes my own mother watched as they opened one August morning of her (and my) own.

Their entire platform is predicated upon a pretense that they know what it is to be my mother watching my eyes open for the first time, that they know what my eyes saw and see—when I’m mothering or when I’m having sex or when I’m making choices based on infinitely complex and private and ever-shifting mazes of sensation and memory, or when I’m moving through a world they’ve made so ugly and frightening with their desperation to control the seasons and the bodies which can’t be controlled.

Elective abortion of her second child. Pro-life activists wouldn’t even know that I had children at all, or that my mother had children, or her mother, if I hadn’t crossed their own very narrow little field of vision with my words—not written to them, or for them, or about them. I wonder if, when they describe other people’s family structures, they stumble over their own weird violent silly ugliness: “She’s telling me she has three kids. Wait, I have to find out if she’s ever had any miscarriages or abortions so I can tell her she’s wrong! She has six kids!!” “It looks like the family next door has two children, but I don’t know how many times they’ve been pregnant, so I get to decide if I believe that or not.”

Anyway. I wear two necklaces. One is for my son. The other one is for my husband, and for a birthday that may or may not have fallen near his.

I’ll never let them tell me, or anyone else, what we see and what we may wear around our necks. I’ll never let them tell us or anyone else our stories.

I’ll never let them tell me how many children I have.