Love Letter No.6: To My Wife (Love, Will)
No. 6 : I am collaborating with the inimitable Camila Ochoa Mendoza of the Abortion, with love podcast to publish and air a series of love letters, written and read aloud by people whose lives have been touched by abortion, and who have love to express—to their provider, to their support systems, to the pregnancies they terminated, to themselves.
Abortion is love.
We will be publishing a new love letter every Monday, with enormous love and gratitude to artist Idalina Lehtonen for our gorgeous graphics and composer Anton Olsson for the transcendent music you’ll hear on each episode. You can listen to Will read this letter here, or by subscribing to Abortion, with love on your favorite podcast platform. And you can send us a letter of your own, or a response for us to pass onto any of the letter-writers.
(Please remember that these are letters written by individual people, in their own cultural and personal contexts. We believe that everyone’s abortion experiences are valid and should be honored. You may not relate to or resonate with some of the things written in these letters, and that is okay. But we hope that you can recognize the magic and the truth in people honoring their own unique experiences, in their own words.)
Ed. Note: This letter was written by my husband, Will. It is about my abortion experiences, and about his feelings as he supported me through them. Please feel free to send it to any spouses or partners you think may benefit from hearing or seeing their own abortion support roles reflected back to them in someone else’s story.
To my wife:
The first time we found out you were pregnant, our lives transformed. It's hard for me to remember how we filled our afternoons after work, our middle-of-the-nights, before our son was born. The life we've built since then gives me so much joy. Your growth into motherhood has shown me even more of the ocean of your strength, grace, and love.
The second time we found out you were pregnant, I saw how deep your ocean truly is. We decided together to have an abortion, but it was your abortion. You took the medication, and felt the physical pain of your body releasing a pregnancy. And when we found out that the medication abortion hadn't worked, you endured the aspiration. I hurt so much to see you in pain, but I know that your pain was greater. Through all of these decisions, and this pain, you were so brave, and so full of love. You have so much love for our son, and so much love for our family, and so much love for the child we decided not to bring into the world, and your heart is big enough to hold all of those loves and not collapse. And you are wise enough to know, and to teach me, that these are not separate loves, but connected to each other, like all waters and oceans are connected.
The grief you carry is love, and like the ocean, you do not force it away, but you let it ebb and flow and swirl around the happiness of our days. You are brave enough to allow the grief for the child we did not have to flow alongside the love for our son, and I hope that we can teach him to be as brave and compassionate as you.
Love,
Will