Five years ago, an abortion I had with my ex-boyfriend set about to claim me. Young, scared and uncertain in my decision, I never knew then what I know now. From the day I left him to the day I left university, I had always felt a great big something to prove; that I had made the right decision, and need not feel so sorry. For all my outward feminism and gumption, somewhere between my womb and my heart, I worried I may be a terrible person.
As the years went on, and following the end of this formative relationship, the desperation seeped from my skin and rolled from me like the har coming in to cover the east coast. You could see it in my face as I searched the frown of every new person I met; do they know what I did? At some point, perspective and new love allowed me to open up about it in small, fragmented accounts. My new boyfriend spent years teaching me how to love and receive love in a better way, while searching every inch of my skin for the spaces where shame still lived. He would spend hours trying to teeth it out of me, only to come up short. I was still saturated in the stale humiliation and anger of a young woman who had never been told when it mattered that what she had done wasn’t wrong.
I decided it was best not to dwell on or discuss the past. A position I took for much of my early twenties, because I didn’t really have the words for all the ways I felt I had been let down and mistreated.
Years later, healed to a degree from a life well compartmentalised and long talks with a counsellor, the cinders of a muffled, disenfranchised trauma still crept to my throat sometimes, threatening to choke me. I graduated, spent time with friends, and longed for an explanation for it all. When I started working as a Doctor, occasionally I would catch a pregnant woman in the hallway of the hospital, and smell the sour cleaning fluid in the mop and bucket of the clinic as I sat there on my own, wondering why he hadn’t come with me. Facing abortion protestors every morning on my drive in to the hospital car-park was a more direct reminder of my pain.
It was all a bit embarrassing really, how much this decision still affected me. As someone who supports abortion in any instance, and believes fully in a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, the judgement I inflicted on myself was at odds with my moral compass. They faced in opposite directions, never meeting in the middle to grant me a period of grace from my grief and self-judgement. Outwardly, I was strong, confident and unbothered. Inside, I wept constantly.
My counsellor suggested I confront it head on, at the source. My ex boyfriend had circled my orbit for years, willing me to demand answers. In his flat one drizzly Tuesday evening, I eased in to a familiarity long-forgotten and slowly loosened my grip on the tongue I had held for years. He was a stranger to my good-will as I explained that I was grateful for him giving up his time. I was angry sitting in front of him, as I realised that most of the negative, shameful feelings I had felt about my abortion stemmed from how he had treated me after.
I was shocked to hear a deep, conscious guilt and regret over how things had played out at the time and in the years that followed. A sincere apology I hadn’t received at the time. A redundant idea that he might be better at it now, if the situation happened again, and a suggestion that none of this had been personal, in the most conflicting of ways. Perhaps I had just been collateral. Personal shrapnel to his own problems. None of these confessions fully resolved my complex feelings about what had transpired, but it provided a context I had previously been without. I could finally see where the sky met the sea. I hadn’t done anything wrong, he said, five years later. Suddenly I was sad for my younger self, who needed to hear that more than me.
That night I accidentally left my pants in his flat. Don’t look at me like that. I had taken them off to be more comfortable during a trip to the bathroom, and must have dropped them. As the dust settled on the drive home, I realised they were missing.
I thought maybe we could be friends. He had apologised, I had forgiven him. It was nice talking to him about the abortion; he was someone who seemed to understand it. It felt like being friendly with him could soothe the previous heavy handling of it all. A vision of him attending my wedding, fifth row from the back. Me buying his newborn baby clothes with rabbits on them. A promise to mail my pants back to me.
A small parcel arrived at my parents’ home that Christmas with all of my favourite things inside, and a hand-written letter re-iterating guilt and surviving love. It felt like an invasion of the life I had carefully built.
I realised we couldn’t be friends. I had enough already, and I didn’t need to be his friend to heal myself from a semi-shared grief that he seemed desperate to make about him. I returned a missed call and he pretended not to know me to save face. My boyfriend hugged me as I sighed with disappointment. It’s hard for people you know, to truly change who they are, he whispered.
A little while after, I was approached by BBC Scotland to work on a documentary about the much anticipated abortion protest buffer zone laws coming in to place soon. In sharing my story about abortion as a young girl at university, and my recent experience of abortion protests at work, now a fully-formed woman, doctor, sense of self and all, I was given an opportunity. I couldn’t change my own painful and long path to acceptance, but this was a chance to help other woman who lacked support following the same decision. I could influence how they viewed themselves. No, you’re not a bad person, are you listening?
I never got my pants back after that night. I borrowed a pair of hiking socks too for the journey home, and they sit neatly tucked away in the back of my sock drawer.
Life has many phases, moods and postures to it. At twenty-six years old, I am teetering on the edge of the part where I start to truly trust myself, and can feel the full appreciation of a good, reliable dishwasher. Where I forgive people for past hurts because, well, it doesn’t really matter anymore. Where I move towards a genuine peace in my decision to get an abortion. Perhaps laying this experience down is the only way for me to move forward, rather than transporting it with me everywhere I go; to place it out of sight in the back of a drawer like shared socks, with the knowledge that it is always there if ever I need to mull it over, to go over it one last time. I hope so.
Alexandra Hague 