Tissue, page 3
Six weeks after my abortion, I booked myself in to see an abortion counsellor. A therapist whose job is to aid abortion-havers with the multitude of feelings that come afterwards, be it guilt or otherwise. Given my termination took place in the heart of one of Victoria’s most strenuous lockdowns, we met over Zoom: me, pale and hollowed, staring blankly at her through my screen as she reiterated things I knew in theory, that this was my right, a decision informed and unerring, nothing deserving of remorse, of shame. She chose not to tiptoe around my guilt, instead encouraging me to lay it bare, to underscore the reasons I made the decision: I wasn’t ready to be the kind of mother I hoped to be one day. I did not have the structures in place to ensure that this child would thrive. She then proclaimed, with a resolve that warmed me, that my decision was ultimately loving. Kind, she insisted. A considered and generous act. In another story, perhaps one where Abyzou was not subjected to the plight of infertility, but chose this instead, knew in her ferocity the cost of parenthood: the tenderness required to ensure it is done well, done gently. Perhaps she didn’t, but I am not Abyzou, not a frightful creature intent on hauling my baby from my womb, but instead a woman firm in her convictions to love passionately when love is there, and when it isn’t, to instil that love inwards. To love myself instead.
It feels inappropriate to compare myself to Abyzou, but in her I see, at the very least, a woman who is childless. It may seem naive, even plainly wrong, to need Abyzou. To rely on a fabled character to represent childlessness, which is perhaps to suggest that such women don’t exist in real life, that they can only be found in an otherworldly realm where they presumably gorge themselves on the blood of the unborn. But when my grandmother called me a week after my abortion to tell me about the time she fell pregnant unexpectedly, careful not to let her misgivings surrounding my decision be heard, I discovered that comparison was rampant when it came to my pregnancy, comparison of the most condemning kind. ‘I was seventeen years old when I found out,’ she told me, seized in the firm grip of young love as she hid the purple thumbprints that emerged from the equally firm grip of the teenage boy she shared her pregnancy with; my grandfather, who used his fists to speak. Her pregnancy progressed, and—low and behold—my uncle was born. A miracle! A man I knew and loved. I am, compared to her, to mothers everywhere, only so far as my pregnancy allows me to be, not my abortion. I want to ask her about the other women she could have likened me to, those who are deliberately childless and content. I want to ask her to compare me to people who have had abortions, who have continued to live full and ample lives after the fact, whose deliberateness was felt in the most unforgiving sense. Who, through no fault of their own, had to reckon with their childlessness. Had to bleed for it.
Not long after my abortion, my boyfriend and I visited his parents. When we arrived, his mother wrapped me in a soft embrace before handing me a neatly packaged bundle of essential oils, soaps, and—cheekily—a sheet of condoms. As the two of us shared a cigarette that evening, the hum of my abortion suspended quietly between us, she admitted to knowing the inside of the same Marie Stopes clinic I had sat in some months before. She had had a termination during university.
She tucked a loose strand of long hair behind her ear and I locked eyes with her, a glance gentle but desperate. For the first time since my termination I was afforded the kind of comparison I longed for. In her I saw a woman granted the fullness of a life on her own terms, a woman whose eventual motherhood was wanted, timely. Nights that throbbed in a humble European village where she worked and, in due time, fell in love. Slip-ups. Brisk walks. And then a lasting pregnancy, her boy the same one who would eventually hold the hands of a woman not too dissimilar to her, as she heaved and winced in familiar, tired breaths.
The antonym of guilt is innocence. Innocence: the state, quality, or fact of being innocent of a crime or offence. Innocence, too: lack of guile or corruption; purity. Printed on picket signs and waved forcefully outside abortion clinics are depictions of frayed body parts thought to belong to the unborn, a group rendered completely virtuous by their God-fearing advocates, untouchable only then to be touched. Killed by their sinful mothers. Foetuses nestled in their wombs. Creatures feeble and pure. Anti-abortion protestors, as Zimmerman describes, use the innocent as their vehicle. Opportunely, they promise to safeguard the unborn by terrorising the two-legged carriers they live in. By bestowing guilt and shame upon pregnant people. But it is this that they conveniently forget: the termination of an unwanted pregnancy offers women the opportunity to bypass another vein of guilt, one—in many ways—more demanding, more onerous. A guilt reserved only for mothers. The fear of being a bad one.
I considered asking my own mother about guilt. I’d preface it as such: This question is purely research-based. For my book. Which is to say: You weren’t a bad mother. You aren’t a bad mother. That is not what I am saying. My mother, a devout perfectionist, who grappled with her own mental demons during my childhood. A nagging eating disorder. Bouts of wearying depression. Hardly doting in the traditional sense, in the Hallmark way. When you are the daughter of a woman who once starved herself in a bid to be better, to be perfect, you are—more often than not—an extension of this pursuit. An extension of her. Something in need of refinement, of bettering. For a long time the tensions that lived between us could be found in the simple fact that my mother and I didn’t know where she ended and where I began. Enmeshment, my psychologist called it: where personal boundaries are permeable and unclear.
This was no doubt exacerbated by my mother’s infertility. At twenty-eight years old, while cradling a weeping newborn, my mother was struck with early onset menopause. Partly genetic, partly the result of her illness—of how hunger turns on the body, feasting on itself instead when it isn’t being listened to, isn’t being fed. The stakes were high: I was to be her only child. The singular vessel of her hopes and dreams. This paired itself with its own strange guilt, a guilt I felt: I wasn’t going to pass this on, wasn’t going to have my own children who would then, like me, home the demands, regrets and aspirations of their parent. I developed a deep-seated aversion to child-bearing, to femininity, the sorest point between my mother and myself. I razored my hair short, fell in love with other women, cared not to shave or wax, each gesture seen and felt as a provocation, an attack. Motherhood was the pinnacle of all things feminine, all things womanly. I felt it as dangerous, smothering. The sort of thing that hauls itself through the body, her body, causing ripples and fissures and guilt with each tired push.
My mother is a good person, a kind person. Like Abyzou after being robbed of her ability to conceive, she loved too much, too devotedly. I think she subscribed to the belief that if motherhood is the project, it must be done right, done beyond compare, even if the child resists being changed, being bettered. Especially if the child resists, and especially—furthermore—if the child is a girl. My agency, my want to dress myself, to look and feel and live the way I felt was right, made her wince.
The pressure bestowed on mothers to raise their children flawlessly means, inevitably, that they ought to disappear in the process. Ought to offer themselves up, almost ritualistically. Self-sacrifice.
The world we live in has us believe that motherhood is innately sacrificial, for the mother is a vessel, remember? And, as Zimmerman eloquently puts, for her to crack or be discarded after carrying: this is not outside the natural order. Think: mastitis, postpartum depression, episiotomy. Emotional disarray if the birth isn’t natural, isn’t organic. ‘Every time you cried,’ my mother told me, ‘I had milk leaking out of me, but I couldn’t feed you. I just couldn’t.’ Nursing the scars of a caesarean delivery, a huge, hefty red incision that travelled down the middle of her stomach, my mother felt guilt of the cruellest sense: that those wounds didn’t count, but were proof instead that no unique bond would develop between her baby and her, a woman who wasn’t afforded the right to push for her child, to push out her child. To weep, to weep some more, and to push again.
But, as Zimmerman continues, for a woman instead to empty herself, to leak, to be bottomless, to never be filled: This is unthinkable. We have the social language to make sense of the injuries that take place when a woman becomes a mother, emotional or physical: common depressions, the splitting in two (if you’re unlucky, as my mother was), and the splitting apart (if you are lucky), the growing pains of transitioning from person to host, from childfree to parent. A termination, on the other hand, is a wound with no honourable recovery. After my abortion, I arrived at a place no conservative accepts as salient in its own right: a place of selfhood, of individuality.
I read once, in an essay by Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker, about a stratum of guilt known as survivor’s guilt. Paumgarten dissects survivor’s guilt through a series of interviews with alpinists, whose friends and partners are often swallowed by the peaks in their pursuits, their bodies rarely recovered. In his research, he discovered a question being handballed among them: why do some of us survive and others don’t? This was particularly pertinent in the case of Conrad Anker, a mountaineer whose best friend Alex Lowe died during their shared ascent of Shishapangma, the fourteenth-highest mountain in the world. Anker went on to marry Lowe’s wife and adopt their children, but within his newfound joy was what he came to know as survivor’s guilt: the nagging feeling that he was living someone else’s life.
Survival—the state or fact of continuing to live or exist—is crucial in how we make sense of what it means to seek a termination. Our own survival takes precedence. An abortion is a gesture undertaken at the expense of some illusive person’s future existence, my maybe-child whose eventual aliveness was thwarted for the sake of my own. I imagined—in the heart of my abortion’s hangover, the empty days that followed—I’d find myself stuck, solemn and heavy, in the throes of survivor’s guilt. But if survivor’s guilt is some kind of niggling angst that you are living somebody else’s life, I managed to avoid it, to bury it, in my decision. My pregnancy was a small obstruction in the life I had slowly carved out for myself. A childless and gratifying one. I’d be living somebody else’s life if I had remained pregnant, the life of a person I didn’t care to be, at least not yet, subbing spontaneous plans and sleep-ins with formula and shrill cries, which would be made worse if I had continued my pregnancy because of guilt, of shame. And so, I emptied myself. Unthinkably free.
After the abortionist placed the ultrasound gel on my stomach the morning of my abortion, I requested she print off the grainy image for me to keep. She muttered something—uncomfortably, from memory—along the lines of, I’m sorry, I would’ve offered, but not many people want to see it. Guilt, again: was I some kind of monster for wanting to witness what was there, what endeavoured to survive, before its effacement? According to all of the murder mysteries I’ve indulged in over the years, the killer often scrambles when forced to look at his handiwork, uneasily fingering through crime scene photographs at the request of the police. But, in a dusty box beneath his bed, is often a trophy: a lock of hair, a wedding band, a fingernail. I did not scramble. I am not a killer, but I keep the ultrasound in a carton somewhere. Proof. Of what, I’m not sure.
In her essay ‘The Capacity to Be Alone’, Anna Moschovakis writes for The Paris Review, that her favourite novels tell the stories of women who refuse—usually under duress—to feel essentially bad, unworthy, or wrong. I agree with her, nodding softly at the mention of duress. The women I like to read are often unapologetic, but not unbothered, in the face of pressure. If this is a story, and I am a character, I’d like to be remembered as such: a woman who carries disdain not for what she ought to feel, or does feel, but for the structures, people and phenomena that tried to ingrain in her a sense of guilt, of badness. Moschovakis goes on to describe the child she chose not to have: nineteen, French. Half French, rather. These are the moments I share with her, imagining my own could-be child: his hair shaggy, brown and unkept, his voice soft but brazen. He is cheeky, joyous, and the only times he isn’t is when guilt is smothering my imagination, pricking holes into his miserable image as if he is some kind of voodoo doll, an effigy based on nobody.
If this is what guilt does, if it aggressively manufactures a chokehold on my ability to imagine the child I chose not to have, what does it serve? I am deliberately childless and content, but I’d be happier again if my abortion did not feel even the slightest bit shameful. And then, of course, I am forced to consider what my abortion would’ve looked like in a world with no condemnation, no Abyzous. Perhaps it would be a non-event: a routine procedure, an ordinary Sunday. A blip … only bloodied. Perhaps I never would’ve found myself imagining him, cheery and youthful, because nobody tried to instil in him a sense of personhood, to moralise the tissue that briefly grew, until it didn’t, inside of me.
Moschovakis writes: If I can define my shame, will it lose its hold on me? A definition can be anything: a name, an explanation, both. While hunched in the throes of my termination, my womb heaving and aching as I winced, I called my mother. A surprising gesture. I often try to keep my turmoil from her, to not let it muddy our dynamic, one where I bolster her up. Me, something solid and reliable. Proof that she didn’t fail. She called me again once it was over. ‘I want you to know,’ she started, gently, ‘that I may have been a lousy mother, but I think I’d be a great grandmother.’ When I told my friends this, they smirked collectively: reiterating to me that it wasn’t the best time to say something like that, going so far as to say that perhaps it was inappropriate, cruel. Instead, I heard a proclamation. Something generous. Something difficult for her to do. She’d named her guilt: acknowledged, moments after my own pregnancy dissipated, that she hadn’t been perfect. In her own remorse, she’d perhaps thought that I had done what I had done out of fear that she wouldn’t be there for me, wouldn’t be faultless. It had long lived between us, a guilt that had previously gone unnamed, her guilt and mine, and only then did it acquire a title.
‘I know,’ I cried, and I did know. As I cradled my empty stomach, my elusive motherhood an echo of what once was, a lonely cramp, I knew then what I hadn’t known before. That guilt lives everywhere, and only if we define it, name it, will it lose its hold.
Consider this that: a naming.
IN DEFENCE OF THE GREAT UNWOMANING
TAYLOR HAS A CLOSE friend with a child. She doesn’t mind how they are to hold. Children, I mean. It is 2019, and we are lying on a soft patch of grass in the parklands near her home, discussing whether or not we ever imagine having children, having being a word that carries many meanings: bearing, adopting and cradling the soft, pregnant body of our imagined female partner as she nervously anticipates her eventual delivery. Taylor and I have been together for nearly two months, and will only ever date for three: our resulting break-up fated for a number of reasons, all to do with me, and none worth elaborating on. Throughout the writing of this book I think of her often, imagining her confusion—scorn, even—if she were to look through these pages. The Madison she knew was averse to pregnancy. Disturbed by it. The Madison she knew referred to it, on more than one occasion, as parasitic, a kind of disturbance that causes your teeth to loosen, your skin to sag; the embryo a greedy leech that sips on all of your hard-earned nutrients.
Together we toppled into a brief but heated relationship. We spent weekends gulping vodka straight from the bottle, giggling loudly, our heads—and cigarettes—dangling from the window of her second-storey bedroom. Her housemate would have to bang furiously on the adjoining wall to shut us up. A thud. A firm reminder that reverberated through brick and timber. A similar command echoed through my car a week later, a grievous phone call leaking hazily from the stereo. Firmer again, this time from my mother. ‘What are you?’ she asked, her plea filling the vehicle with contempt as Taylor, sitting politely in the passenger seat, listened. We were on our way home from my grandmother’s birthday. Taylor had taken photos of my family and I that evening, meaning she wasn’t in any of them, meaning I wasn’t a lesbian. But I wasn’t a lesbian. I was—I am—a person who dates, loves, fucks people of all genders, and it is this that made my mother’s question a difficult one to answer.
In an article published in The Atlantic titled ‘The Abortion Debate Is Suddenly About “People”, Not “Women”’, Helen Lewis argues that the LGBTQI+ community surely aren’t disproportionately harmed by abortion bans, as stated by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), because one of the many things to recommend lesbian sex is that it doesn’t risk getting you pregnant. Her claim is littered with brevity, with rashness, forgetting that not all abortions are the result of consensual, devoted sex. That lesbians are women too, hardly divorced from the droves of sexual threats and assaults that affect women everywhere. Then, of course, there are lesbian women who undergo medical conception practices, such as using donor sperm, which may result in complications or an ectopic pregnancy. While Lewis doesn’t tiptoe around the fact that queer women and trans men who have procreative sex are inevitably impacted by abortion bans, she employs a dangerous and tired rhetoric: that a queer person’s prescribed sex life is the be-all and end-all of their lived experiences. That lesbians only fuck women, and women can’t get other women pregnant, conveniently overlooking the existence of trans-women—or furthermore, trans-lesbians. Lewis is hardly an anomaly. The bare bones of her claim make up a proposition that exists in the consciousness of a society obsessed with clear-cut identities, with rules. With membership, and all of its unforgiving clauses.
