The whole thing started like this, six years ago: my then-boyfriend went away to Las Vegas with a friend for a week. He came back the Friday after my 21st birthday, we did some predictable catching-up, and the condom broke. I called Student Health Services (I was a senior in college at the time), and they said hey, no worries-- we're closed till Monday, but the morning-after pill works for 72 hours, so just come in then!

I did what they told me; I got pregnant.

I didn't think I did initially; when I came in after four weeks for a pregnancy test, it came out negative. But I was sleepy all the time and my breasts were sore. I told my mom about it; she asked me, "Are you pregnant?" I swore up and down that I wasn't.

Two weeks later, I was at my internship on the other side of town, at a fairly prestigious magazine, and I felt sick. Really, really ill. I figured the best thing to do, if I felt that nauseous, would be to make myself throw up, and then presumably it would go away, but that didn't help; I just felt worse. I threw up one more time in the ladies' room before I told my supervisor I was going home. This was followed by another vomiting session in the McDonald's bathroom near the subway; another on the subway; another at a subway stop, and two more in my dormitory, followed by me calling my boyfriend and saying, "There's something really wrong with me, I can't stop puking-- will you bring me to the hospital?" (I was associating the whole thing with a recent event wherein a good friend of mine had gotten dehydrated from drinking/puking too much and had wound up in the hospital; I hadn't done any drinking for a few weeks at this point, seeing as I couldn't really stay awake past 9 PM, but that was all I could think of. Silly, I know.)

At the ER, they hooked me up to an IV of fluids, asked me some questions, took some pee and some blood, and a little bit later, a cheery nurse came in and told me, "You're pregnant." It really hadn't even occurred to me. I asked her, between sobs, to tell my boyfriend, who was standing outside the room; I was too shocked myself to be able to handle seeing his reaction to it. A few minutes later he came in and held my hand, and I told him, "There's no choice here-- I absolutely cannot have a baby. I'm going to have to have an abortion." He didn't really tell me what he thought, which I think was nice of him. (I still don't know what he really thought; we broke up a few years later, and we don't really talk anymore. One day I'll get around to asking him how he feels about it in retrospect.)

I didn't even really think about it that much-- it seemed like too obvious a decision. I'd been going out with my boyfriend for less than a year; we certainly weren't ready for parenthood. My boyfriend was moving back into his parents' house in a few weeks, and really didn't make much money at all. I'd lost my father only six months previous, and wasn't in the best emotional shape I'd ever been in; I was never all that stable anyway, and that just made it worse. I'd just turned 21, and was developing a taste for alcohol that wasn't very consistent with responsible motherhood (and as you may imagine, the very weekend I got pregnant, there was quite a bit of debauchery). I was a senior in college, and my due date would have roughly coincided with my graduation; even if I was able to stay in my dormitory throughout my pregnancy (and the nurse at Student Health Services later told me that if my RA found out I was pregnant, he'd be obligated to report it to a higher-up and I would be booted out of student housing), I was barely able to make it to classes already because I was always exhausted. So the probability of me finishing school was slim. I already owed a fortune in student loans, and if I couldn't finish school, I'd still owe all that money and have no degree! And my father, who I didn't much like and who didn't much like me, was obsessed with me getting a good education, and would absolutely spin in his grave if I didn't graduate. And all this sickness was really, really scary, and it only got worse over the next two weeks prior to the abortion. There was just no way.

I went home and called my mother, who, having lost her husband only six months previously, was pretty businesslike about crisis at the time; her reaction was, "I knew it!" Seeing as I was on her insurance, she agreed to set up an appointment near where she lived, a state away, so it would be in-network and save us money. I'll never stop being grateful to my mother for being so clear-headed and calm about the whole thing; I sure wasn't, and it takes an amazing mother to be so circumspect about helping her daughter get an abortion.

A week later, I was woken up at 3 AM, in my childhood bedroom, by the sound of my mother crying. She'd just received a phone call from the hospice where my grandmother, who was 91 years old and gravely ill, had been for the last week; Grandma, a tough old Holocaust survivor, had died.

So I'm sure you can see the macabre humor in the fact that all the next morning, on the way to the clinic, at the clinic, all the way home, my mom was on her cell phone, making funeral arrangements.

More macabre humor was introduced when we couldn't find the clinic, since it was set back pretty far from the street in an unmarked building... until we saw the pro-life guy with a bullhorn and loads of huge pictures of mutilated fetuses standing in front of the fence out front. We seriously might not have even found it if it weren't for him. One day, I hope he hears about this and gets really annoyed.

In the waiting room, my boyfriend drew vampires in his sketchbook, and my mother told me something that I'd never known before: I knew that my newly deceased grandmother had been to Paris twice when she was young (her family had been quite wealthy), and that before she met my grandfather, she'd carried on a ten-year affair with a man she wasn't allowed to marry, but no one had ever told me that the reason she went to Paris was in order to have two abortions! (This is, by the way, the reason why I think this story is almost too literary to be true.)

Anyway, so from there on it was pretty uneventful-- all the pre-abortion counseling was nerve-wracking and I got really freaked out and cried a bit, but once they got me on the table and stuck the needle for the IV sedation into my arm, I was fine. I don't remember pretty much anything about the procedure, aside from a nasty pinch from the novocaine needle in my cervix, and that I hallucinated that the ceiling light was slowly changing shape. When they told me they were done, I was surprised that it was that quick. They plopped me into a wheelchair and as they wheeled me into the recovery room, the only thing occupying my skull was a shower of exclamation points and a vast sense of relief.

Afterwards, my mother, my boyfriend, and I went to a diner and had a feast, and then I went home and slept for many hours. The next day was my grandmother's funeral, which felt strangely apt. And the next few weeks brought some mighty mood swings and some fights with the boyfriend, but I can't say I've ever had a moment of regret.

The one positive thing to come out of this is: I know now, in a way that I never did before, that I do in fact want to have children, when I'm ready. I never thought about it before then, but now I'm quite sure. I know in my heart that waiting to become a mother was the right thing to do; my life is so much more stable, and I'm so much happier than I was then. I have my degree, I have a career, I have my friends and my family (and my impossibly brave mom!), and most importantly, I have my sanity, and my life is slowly turning into a well-feathered nest, a safer place for me to nurture someone else. When I have a baby, someday, I'll be ready. And I'm not sorry. Not at all.