A Babys Cry

My mother suggested I write about a difficult decision I made when I was nineteen. Why would I do that? I mean, I dont understand what the purpose would be. I wondered if I even could. Delicately, she explained: You should write about it because I think it says a lot about where you were at this point in your life and the place where you were coming from as you progressed through your young adulthood, into marriages, and motherhood. I didnt like the idea. What point is there in writing about this kind of personal and embarrassing information the kind of personal information that youre not just worried others will judge you for, but the stuff youve never stopped judging yourself for? Really though, I have to admit, thats not entirely accurate because one would have to spend time contemplating something in order to claim theyre perpetually judging themselves for it. Ive pretty much worked out a deal with my conscience to avoid this detail in my life as much as possible and when and if I cannot avoid the memory or the topic, I will justify my decision and turn away from all the details and emotions as quickly as I possibly can. Im not sure this has really worked out very well for me or my conscience. But to write about it? I dont know what the point would be. Self-therapy? Redemption? Come on. Ive tried redemption. How many goods does it take to neutralize a bad? How many rights to undo a wrong? How many good dreams does it take before you can erase the bad dreams? How many kids do you have to have and love to replace the one you didnt have? Ive never found out. I dont think there is an answer. I knew going forward, I would never be able to look back and change my mind or undo what I did. I had to settle things within me in order to keep moving forward in my life. No regrets. Dont beat yourself up; just do better next time. Be smarter next time. Make better choices next time. Do whatever it takes to never find yourself in that position, again. Right? Isnt that how it works? We learn from our mistakes and that is called growth, maturity, progress. Perhaps this is so for those who spend more time reviewing their mistakes; but, for those of us who desperately run from our painful mistakes, we never give ourselves enough time to learn from them. That character trait binds us in a gerbil wheel, cyclically repeating bad decisions and running away, bad decisionrun awaybad decisionrun away. Over and over, we wonder how we can ever consider ourselves intelligent when the decisions we make on our own behalf are stupid and self-destructive and self-defeating. And yet, we keep on making them.

I so desperately want off this gerbil wheel. Maybe thats why I finally agreed to write about this time in my life. Maybe Im hoping the writing will somehow lead to a path, a method that will finally dislodge me from the constant running, spinning, repeating. Shortly after turning nineteen years old, my boyfriend, Ben, came to the U.S. from New Zealand to stay with me for nine months. By mid-year I had gotten an abortion. At this point, I had been back from my stay in New Zealand, where I had met and fell in love with Ben, for just over a year. On July 4th, 1993, I boarded a plane in Minneapolis headed to New Zealand on an exchange program under false pretenses. Doing independent course work, I had graduated from a private high school a full year early. I deliberately did not tell this information to the program that was going to arrange my flight, housing, and student visa. At the tender age of seventeen and with very little money, this was my literal and figurative ticket out into the world. Once in New Zealand, I was lucky enough to stay with a fantastic family that supported everything I wanted to see and do. They either took me places, or helped me to figure out how to get to the places I wanted to go. They didnt report me to the program when I finally left the local school for good in order to volunteer with the Department of Conservation on the tiny island of Stewart Island, which lies just off the southern tip of New Zealands South Island. They packed me some rice crispy treats and wrote the names and phone numbers down of people along the way that I should contact for accommodation. They drove me to the train station and hugged me goodbye as I boarded and started my journey from Nwarawuahia, just south of Auckland, to the southern tip of the North Island. There, in Wellington, I walked to the fairy that took me to Queens Town on the northern tip of the South Island. I once again, boarded a train and watched out the windows as I passed some of the most exquisite landscapes Ive ever seen. Over and over again, I noted places I would come back to later. Late at night, two days since beginning my southern descent, I pulled out the folded up piece of paper and scrolled down the list looking for a contact in __________, the southern-most town on the South Island. I found a public phone and called the number. The person who answered was excited to hear from me and would be down to the station in just a few minutes to pick me up. The next day I was driven to yet another fairy that would finally deliver me at my destination. This fairy was much smaller than the first and the sea was alarmingly choppy. They announced over the speakers that we needed to stay seated once they headed out of portfor our safety. It was much safer to stay seated, though not very good for ones back. I had committed to volunteer for two months doing whatever the Department of Conservation (otherwise known as the DoC) wanted me to do. With the grueling fairy trip finally over, I walked off the pear with my overly stuffed pack, and headed to a little general store to ask for direction to the DoC office. I was given a map by a man behind the counter, who chuckled as he told me it would be next to impossible for me to get lost so long as I stayed on the paved

streets. I glanced down at what he had handed me, unfolded the map to see the whole of the island and noticed that there was only a total of one square mile that contained paved roads. The rest of the island was wild, only showing rough hiking paths and the occasional camping hut. This was truly going to be an adventure. They ended up putting me up in a house normally occupied by a fulltime conservation employee who was currently gone away on some sort of study. Not far from my house, sat a nearly identical home that was occupied by six young men, who all, for each their own reasons, had also come to volunteer. I would get to know these men quite well before my two months ended. We all worked together on various projects and learned to lean on each others strengths when the work grew hard or tedious. We chased Kiwis that stood as high as my shoulders through the marsh; stumbled in the dark, counting bat calls on a sonar register and recording our findings; and, helicoptered materials into the bush to repair huts and tracks. One of my last projects took me and four others out to a place simply referred to as the 16-mile beach for obvious and literal reasons. It was here that we stayed for over two weeks while repairing the camping hut and some low bridge work that had become buried under the mud and sludge of a bog. It was here that I became romantically interested in Ben. It was here, while covered in mud and sweat that our hearts knotted in an unyielding tangled knot. This beach is known for its undertow and its rip currents, Ben warned late one afternoon after work as we splashed in waves together. Be careful, Corey. Ah, but the water was such a relief to my tired muscles and my dried out dirty skin. The relief of the cool water was too much and I could not resist its calling. Really, I was the only one splashing and playing in the water; Ben stood close by, his body merely moving in response to the push and pull of the waves. Periodically I would look up and be amazed by how far down the beach the water had dragged us. Ben wasnt kidding. This ocean water was not like any I had swam in before. Yet, again and again, he would call out his warning to me: Youre going too far out, Corey. Come back in, always standing close by me. As reckless and carefree as I was, Ben was equally as grounded and practical. Just like that a wave hit me from behind only this time my feet did not find the ground. I instantly knew I was in trouble. I felt the power of the water treat my body like it was nothing more than a discarded shoe, easily tossed and thrown about, at the will of Poseidons furry. Surely he was about to teach me to respect his powerful waters. But then, before I even had a chance to call out for help, I felt the tight clamp of Bens hand close around my upper arm as he pulled against the rips desire. He did not try to go directly toward the beach. With all his effort, he pulled us both almost parallel to the beach with only a slight angle inward, moving in the waters desired direction but resisting being pulled out to sea little by little. It took him nearly thirty minutes before I could point my toes and once again feel the sand on the occasional lull between waves. Within another fifteen minutes, I was on my feet helping him to drag me up the rest of the way, out of the greedy waters, and onto the safety of the dry sand dunes, his hand never ceasing its grip on my arm.

We both stumbled into the soft sand, collapsing from exhaustion. I felt so stupid and foolish. I had exposed my idiot-side to Ben and now I would become one of those stories that New Zealanders tell while laughing uproariously at a foreigners stupidity. Bens deep set eyes finally looked up at me. They held no mockery in them. In fact, there didnt seem to be any judgment in his face at all. Perplexed, I sat there as he simply said, I was never going to let go of you. I was never going to let you go. Are you even kidding me? There was probably nothing that he could have said that could have done a better job of hitting me in my heart just where I needed it the most. I shot off a barrage of shocked questions: When did you know I was in trouble? What if you hadnt been able to pull me in? What if you had started to lose your footing? He calmly replied, in his deep man-sized heroic New Zealand accent, that he would have held onto my arm and been taken out to sea with me; then, he would have stayed with me as long as it took to figure out a way back in. And what if we couldnt get back in? I anxiously pushed. I would have stayed with you and made sure I found a way to get you back in. Knotted. Tangled, we would become. Who would have foreseen us one and a half years later driving down the I90 toward a facility in Minneapolis where I was to get an abortion? We were fighting. I didnt want to get an abortion or at least I wasnt sure it was what I wanted; and, he was pissed that I would even threaten to go back on my promise. Before we ever slept together we both agreed that, God forbid, should I ever find myself pregnant, I would get an abortion. Now I was pregnant and this decision no longer seemed so easy to make. What I had seen so clearly before when discussing a theoretical pregnancy was now a twisted and warped world where there were no cut-and-dry solutions, no black and white right and wrongs. I honestly didnt want to choose from any of my options. I sure the hell didnt want to try to raise a babyI was pretty sure I was incapable of doing thisbut, I also no longer wanted to go through with having an abortion. Theory is not reality. Theory is theory. Reality is way more complicated and sometimes very ugly. I bent. I got the abortion. As early as dinner that night, while twisting my fettuccini noodles around my fork at the Spaghetti Factory, I was already working really hard to run as far away from it as fast as I could. But as fast as I ran, I wasnt really going anywhere. Faster and faster I spun a world of denial.

We returned from Minneapolis to our rented space in an old home. The west sun baked the apartment. The Elms had been cut down due to Dutch Elms Disease. The whole street had been cleared, on a street of rental property, nobody had bothered to replant. Our apartment sat on the first floor in the back of an old house. The landlord had not renovated any other part of the house and so Ben and I were the only ones occupying the home. It reeked of mold and the floors sagged awkwardly in every room. There was no air conditioning and we could only open the windows a couple of inches to try to allow for any kind of air movement. Because I was told that I needed to rest and move my body as little as possible for a while, I spent countless hours sitting in the stagnant air of our living room in a rocker that once belonged to my great grandmother. My initial attempts to close my eyes and walk away from my decision proved futile. So many times as I was sitting there rocking, I would be startled by the sounds of babies crying. I had never heard any baby sounds before getting the abortion. I began to think I was losing my mind. I told Ben that I would have named the baby Andrew and called him Drew. I told him the crying baby was him wondering why I had gotten rid of himI was supposed to be his creator and his care provider.