- Loneliness
(Of the sort that’s painful to live through but, in retrospect, carries a hint of pleasure.)
Evenings, I made a cup of tea and poured milk into a shallow bowl for the cat, then carried both outside to the picnic table. The cat and I sat together, drinking and watching as orange and lavender streaks swallowed the sky. Bats circled above us; in the pond, bullfrogs honked from deep inside their bellies. It was our favorite time of day but also, for me, the loneliest. My boyfriend worked forty minutes away and played softball and league darts, often grabbing dinner with his former housemates before a game, and although he invited me to join them, we were nearly seven years into a relationship in which I’d grown tired of meeting him farther than halfway.
Not long before, we’d lived in a converted barn an hour east, close to my job and family, with a view of a much larger pond outside the front windows, but he wanted a woodworking space. I found the listing for this tiny Victorian creamery with a second, twin building that could be part of the package, and he fell in love with the cedar shake siding and the unfinished, unheated interior of the shop where he intended to install a wood-burning stove. The creamery landlords were New York City bankers who came up to Millbrook on weekends and who, when they learned we were artists, lowered the rent without our asking. I appreciated the break but hated that $75 a month had no impact on their lives but made a real difference in ours.
The land was beautiful. Peaceful. All summer I gathered mulberries off a tree by the pond, baking them into pies. Before that I picked raspberries and blackberries along the long driveway, the cat making me
laugh by jumping out of the bushes as if to attack my legs. Before that, in early spring when the temperature was still cold and the trails soft with mud, I spent hours in a rocking chair by the window, reading The Color Purple, moved to my core by the human capacity not for harm, which I already understood, but for forgiveness. And before that, in winter, there was a day when we both called in sick to work and skated on the pond, a little bit drunk in the middle of the day, him bent over and holding the cat, who loved to go fast across the ice. Mostly, though, when I think of that period of life, I think of myself alone, adjusting to the possibility of not being part of a couple.
Through all the seasons there were walks on the trails, up the hill at the east edge of the property, where the view stretched across Dutchess County, across the Hudson River, across Ulster County to the Mohonk Mountain Ridge. I wanted very badly to be content with this life, with this relationship, the first serious one I’d had. When I moved out, I cried the whole time I packed and the whole time I drove west, across the county and the river, to a new life bordered up close by the Mohonk Mountain Ridge. Once there, I felt as if I’d stood on that hill in Millbrook and willed myself out of loneliness and into the distance, as far as my eye could see.
2. Envy
(Feminized and gets a bad rap, but can actually be inspiring, motivating. Less a deadly sin than a wake-up call for confidence.)
Getting what you want in life is not that difficult, but knowing what you want? Sometimes there’s nothing harder.
What I wanted as a young woman, a first-generation college graduate with no idea how to land a job in my field, was to stop waiting tables. I’d been doing that since I was sixteen, making decent money in exchange for putting up with customers and bosses who told jokes with sexist or racist punchlines or gifted me pornographic photos torn from magazines or tried to kiss me as if I had no choice in the matter.
So I got a job as the back-up receptionist for a busy optometrist, and not long after I started, the primary receptionist disclosed how much she made, which was ten percent less than I made, and I told her so. She asked for a raise, the doctor refused, and when she quit he blamed me. But he couldn’t fire me because he was already down one employee, and with so
many billing procedures that only the primary receptionist understood, he was forced to lure her back with a raise. I didn’t know what I wanted in that period of my life, but working for a doctor with multiple homes who paid a mature, married woman less than a young, single woman was not it.
So I got a different receptionist job with a non-profit family planning organization whose values aligned perfectly with my own. I answered phones, dispensed advice and birth control pills and referrals for abortion and prenatal care and IVF treatments. I loved everything about that job except the salary, which was so low I couldn’t make my student loan payments. It broke my heart to leave all those smart, compassionate, underpaid coworkers, all women except the well-compensated male director we hardly ever saw, and back to the restaurant business I went.
But not for long. The final restaurant I worked at was owned by a jovial young Italian guy with a habit of slapping female employees on the backside. The first time he did it to me, I told him not to do it again. The second time I grabbed his wrist, looked him in the eye, and told him not to do it again. The third time, I followed him into the kitchen and, in front of the cooks and another server, shouted that the next time he slapped my ass, I was going to punch him in the stomach, capiche?
This would be a better story if the ass-slapping were the last straw in that part of my life, but I had no other prospects. Then one day Liz Prine came in for lunch. Liz was one of the cadre from our high school class who didn’t go to college, so I was surprised to see her wearing a business suit and meeting two older men for what was clearly a working lunch. I mentioned this to the cook, who it turned out bought his weed from Liz’s brother, and he said she’d gotten her commercial real estate license and was making a killing. “She’s worth, like, a million dollars or some shit,” he said, wide-eyed. Liz certainly looked that way, with a designer purse and poufy hair that made her seem much older than twenty-three.
Good for her, I thought, until the next time she came in and sat in my section. Neither of us acknowledged we knew the other, and she was polite and tipped fine, paying with a gold American Express card, her name embossed in shiny letters. It was the credit card that finally prompted me to change my life. I could not get over the words Elizabeth Prine in shiny letters. There was no way, I thought, absolutely no way the girl who used to cheat off my vocabulary tests in English was more
capable than I was. But she’d gone after a career, while I flitted from job to job, wasting my potential.
I got serious about myself then, and before long landed a part-time tutoring job at a community college that paid more than I’d ever earned per week, plus benefits. Soon I was accepted into a master’s program at a nearby state university, and not long after that, I left my boyfriend of nearly seven years. Because of Liz Prine’s gold card, the kind of future I wanted to inhabit began taking shape.
Decades later, I still sometimes sweat through the sheets dreaming that we’re in the weeds with the kitchen backed up and a line out the door, and if it’s a good night, I’m able to stop in the middle of the rush and remember that this is not my life. Then I turn and head toward the door. The option to walk away, redirect, turn over a new leaf. All my life,
that’s what I’ve wanted most.
3. Anger
(Sometimes intense, often misplaced.)
During high school health class, a woman from my neighborhood came in to teach us about safe sex. I knew her as Scott’s mother, a very serious woman who’d been on the elementary school PTA and now worked for a family planning organization. She didn’t recognize me, and I hardly recognized her once she got going. Scott’s mom was funny, approachable, irreverent. Before passing around a packet of birth control pills she warned us that when the last group got done passing a packet, there was only one pill left. “They’re not Tic-Tacs!” she guffawed. “A girl has to take one every day or they won’t work. If you see anyone from last period, tell them to use condoms!”
This was before the internet, and my friends and I—sarcastic fifteen- year-olds who fancied ourselves much older than we were— knew little of what Scott’s mom told us. The main lesson was that anyone could call the office downtown for advice and to make appointments for medical exams and STD testing, birth control, pregnancy tests, all on a sliding fee scale. No questions asked. No parents necessary. We were responsible for ourselves. We had options.
Years later, when I worked for that same family planning organization, I spent two days culling paper files. I didn’t need to read them, just check
the date of the patient’s most recent visit and shred anything before a certain year, but of course I stopped on each familiar name. There were my classmates, the dates when they became patients, the dates when they (we—I was there, too) began menstruating, the ages at which we became sexually active. There were the birth control methods, the abortions, the abnormal pap smears, and within five years, two cases of cancer, one cervical and one ovarian. In general I’m not a good keeper of secrets, but not once was I ever tempted to share what I learned from those files. I felt tender toward every woman, including myself, as well as the organization that cared for us.
At that job, I often crossed a line of protestors on my way into work, some of whom snapped pictures of staff, some of whom held signs with giant, bloody fetuses that bore no resemblance to the lab reports I opened. In the vast majority of procedures, what came out of a woman’s uterus needed to be viewed under a microscope to be sure the procedure had worked. “Fetal tissue present” was the line that allowed me to file the report in a patient’s chart.
I felt that line in my stomach every time. We all did. Just as we felt the sorrow, the fear, the relief, the gratitude. And sometimes the frustration. After a young woman came in for her fifth procedure in three years, some of us spoke to the doctor. “This is ridiculous!” we said. “Why does this keep happening?”
The doctor shook her head in response. “What do you want me to do, make it hurt?”
“Maybe a little?” I replied, and everyone laughed. But the doctor had been working in nonprofits for most of her career. “We don’t know her situation,” she said gently. “I doubt this is how she wants to live.”
Later a coworker said, “Hey, what’s worse than having five abortions in three years?”
“What?” I replied, ready for the gallows humor. But there wasn’t a punchline. The punchline was what we worked against every day: a pregnant woman with no choice in what happens next.
4. Betrayal
(Which is to say: a mismatch between expectations and reality.)
We grow up, so many of us, under the myths of romance. Soul mates.
One-and-onlys. The love of a life, “meant” for us. We learn to measure our worth by the attraction and commitment of a partner.
My first friend to get married did so within months of high school graduation, for no good reason any of us could see. But his religion insisted he make a decent woman of her, so he used a full-court press and she accepted the proposal. Not long after the wedding, my mother was at the bowling alley one evening, watching a friend’s league team, when this girl came in, crying. Her mother was on the next lane over, and my mother could see the red outline of fingers on the girl’s neck. “I hope she leaves his ass,” my mother said to me. “Thank god they don’t have kids.” At that time, my mother worked with a woman just a few years older than me, whose husband was overbearing at best and, my mother suspected, hit her in places where the bruises wouldn’t show. When the woman got pregnant, my mother offered her the spare bedroom, any time, for however long she needed it, but that turned out not to be necessary because one afternoon, coked up on his way to pick his wife up from work and with a police car hot on his tail, the guy drove into a tree at seventy miles an hour. Of course the wife was devastated, but there was absolutely no way, my mother insisted, that being a widowed single mother was worse that living with that guy. A couple years later the widow married a terrific man and had a couple more kids, and I think that my mother, until her dying day, believed that her own prayers were
partly responsible for how her friend’s story turned out.
When I was twenty-five years old, I told my mother I was planning to move, alone. We sat in her tiny living room, on the second floor of a two-flat, me in the recliner and her on the end of a sofa, feet resting on the coffee table, one ankle crossed over the other. My mother was in her early fifties then, and after dating only women for a decade, had a boyfriend who drank himself to sleep every night but was otherwise kind and loved cooking elaborate meals for her. He lived across the river, in the house he’d grown up in, his mother in an apartment off the first floor. He cooked for her, too, and my mother liked that, too. A man who was good to his mother always boded well.
I’m not sure what I expected before delivering the news that I was leaving my first serious boyfriend after nearly seven years, but it wasn’t the response I got. My mother looked surprised, then injured, as though I’d slapped her. “Why?” she demanded, in a more aggrieved tone than
my boyfriend had used in response to the news. I felt too raw to call her on that, so I explained that I wasn’t happy. That I didn’t see a future with him. That I wanted to be alone for a while.
I had assumed that my mother would want for me what I wanted for myself and what she had long wanted for herself, too: options. Choices. The freedom to craft different futures from the ones we had learned to expect. But, in fact, what she wanted for me was stability. A man (or maybe even a woman) who earned a decent income and didn’t hit me and was good to his mother, all of which described my father, the husband she had left after thirteen years.
“But he’s such a nice guy!” my mother huffed, as if I’d said otherwise. “I really like him.”
5. Gratitude
(Including compulsory gratitude, toward people who believe you owe them.)
Permission to live life on our own terms is a gift.
Over the last couple decades, studies have shown that single, aging women without children are the happiest demographic in the U.S. Why is that? Maybe it’s because they pay attention when their friends complain, understanding how hard it is to deal with babies, toddlers, adolescents. Mothers, on the other hand, remember their pre-parenting freedoms and extrapolate them out to the rest of an alternative life, imagining what else they might have done, accomplished, enjoyed.
Regardless of the reason, it was life-changing for me to encounter, at thirty years old, a study concluding that older women who had never had children rated their lives as happy with greater frequency than did mothers of the same age. I remember the desk where I sat reading the newspaper, how my mouth hung open as expectations fell away. All my fretting about time was unnecessary. Maybe I would find a partner, maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I would one day become a woman who craved children, or maybe not. Life could be happy either way.
I carried that freedom for the next ten years, into a new, permanent relationship, into a career and a move to Chicago, into tenure and the publication of my first book. Then at forty years old, I found myself casting about for a new adventure. Kevin had always wanted children,
vaguely, not in a way he had pressed to make reality, so one day I brought it up. Oh sure, he said, that sounds like fun. We stopped using birth control. Time passed. It seemed likely that our reproductive window had closed, which is what my grandmother must have thought at forty- five, when she became pregnant with my mother a decade after leaving her abusive husband. Her experience gave me hope, although I was still surprised when, three weeks shy of my forty-third birthday, a pregnancy test turned positive.
Six months later, while in Spain for work, I was strolling near Madrid’s central plaza, Puerta del Sol, when I heard the chanting of a crowd. It was January, just after sunset and not too cold, which was good because my wool coat no longer buttoned over my midsection. Following the chants, I discovered an abortion rights protest with women of all ages and some men, too, holding signs that demanded bodily autonomy. I hadn’t planned to join a protest when I left my hotel room for a walk, but I couldn’t stand on the sidelines and observe with my pregnant belly signaling who knows what. And anyway, protesting is a way of life in Spain. During my time living in and visiting that country, I’d lent my physical presence to many just causes.
How beautiful it felt to be part of that crowd, clapping my hands to the beat of demands for bodily autonomy. At no time before I turned forty, not one year, not one moment, was I ready to have a baby, and until maybe five years ago, I almost certainly would have had an abortion if birth control had failed me. That it hadn’t was a matter of diligence and luck and Plan B.
But if luck had failed me, if I’d made the brave decision to end a pregnancy, would I later have regretted it? Maybe. Maybe I’d have felt about that the way I later felt about being an older mom, raising an only child, which is to say a little regretful, a little like I’d missed out on a bigger family, but not that much, really, because look at the patience I had now, the confidence. And if I’d had an abortion and not ever gotten pregnant again, would I have regretted the abortion more? I suspect so. Or maybe the relief at having a choice would have carried me through the regret to a life of contentment, like the women in the research studies. And finally, if pre-natal testing had shown evidence of devastating abnormalities in our future son, or if my life were in danger from the pregnancy, Kevin and I would have decided to terminate. We were clear
on that from the start. We very much wanted a child and there were many situations we felt equipped to deal with, but we understood our limits. That would have been a shattering turn of events, made no easier by its vilification, but we would not have wavered.
I feel deeply for women who regret abortions, and I understand that those who become determined to keep other women from making that same mistake believe they’re doing the right thing. For many, the wound of regret offers proof that having an abortion equals being a bad person, but this is a dangerous, toxic way of thinking. Despite being raised Catholic, a religion with the built-in guilt of original sin, I have always, from the moment I became aware of what abortion is while watching the TV show Maude when I was eight years old, believed the opposite: it is not wrong to abort a fetus. It is simply, sometimes, necessary because the life and the future of a pregnant woman matter.
“La mujer decida/Si madre sea!” I shouted with the crowd in Puerta del Sol. “A woman should decide if a mother she’ll become.”
6. Devastation
(Also known as betrayal on the national level.)
On Election Day in 2008, during an autumn term when we were living and teaching in Madrid, Kevin woke me at two a.m. to say CNN had just called the race for Barack Obama. When I got up at five a.m., Kevin was just heading to bed, amped on adrenaline. I carried our six- month-old baby to the sofa and fed him in front of my laptop, weeping as I watched Obama’s acceptance speech live from Grant Park, not far from our condo in Chicago. I had never felt so wildly hopeful in my life. What a world my son would grow up in. The citizens of the United States had finally gotten it right, and when I left for work a few hours later, I hoped someone, anyone might ask where I was from so I could say with pride: “Soy americana.”
Eight years later, my body understood the horror before my mind could parse it, muscles trembling and voice shaky. Andrew kept asking what was wrong, and Kevin kept answering with words I couldn’t take in. I thought: any hope of slowing climate change is going out the window, and a woman’s right to choose is seriously in danger. Or, more specifically (because if this had ever been about the sanctity of life we’d have strict
gun control laws and paid family leave, etc.), what was at risk was a woman’s right to have sex, freely and for pleasure, without consigning herself to motherhood.
That’s what the anti-abortion movement has always been about. “You make your bed, you lie in it.” Unless you’re a man. Or impregnated by a powerful man, in which case options exist, though they may be his.
Soon the march began, toward all the odious overturnings. Title IX protections for transgender students and victims of sexual assault; the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programs; the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act; protections against payday lenders; protections against discriminatory practices in the financing of automobiles and in Housing and Urban Development programs; the ability of transgender people to serve in the military; Title X funding for family-planning organizations; the right of patients to receive medical care regardless of a provider’s religious beliefs; the moratorium on the federal death penalty; significant aspects of the Clean Air Act. I could go on. And on. And on.
Devastating as each new laceration felt, none surprised me after the shock of election night. When the overturning of Roe v. Wade happened, I hardly blinked because the dismantling of a woman’s right to make healthcare decisions in conjunction with medical personnel, without the interference of the government, has long been a cornerstone of right- wing rhetoric and policies aimed at protecting white male power. We are a nation of individual rights, until those rights offer full choice to women. Or to people who don’t fit within the prescribed gender binary. Or look back toward historical realities underlying deep inequity. Or in any way impede the continued supremacy of Eurocentricity. Even before being elected, a criminally unqualified president gave bigots and xenophobes and misogynists of all stripes cover to say aloud, proudly, what they really thought, and as much as he was able to, codified that prejudice into law.
7. Resolve
(See also “Fear, Lack of.”)
At fifteen years old, Andrew talks openly with his friends of all genders, using language I envy. They says things like, “My social battery
is too low for a party,” and discuss without embarrassment topics my generation kept quiet: puberty, periods, what it means to become sexually active, what it means to be gay, trans, asexual, bisexual, pansexual, to experiment however you want with whomever you want, what consent does and does not look like, what respect means and how to show it. They have more opportunities, more options for being themselves than I could have imagined at their age, and I’m glad.
But of course they fuck up. When one of Andrew’s friends has a complaint of sexual assault lodged against him at school, Andrew tells Kevin and me about it, rehearsing all the reasons why it can’t be true. “Buddy,” we say, gently at first and thenwithincreasing force: “You weren’t there. You can’t know. Being a ‘nice kid’ doesn’t matter in the least.”
We are trying, as hard as we can, to raise a boy who will not assert himself in ugly ways. Who understands that in his relationships with girls and women, he is responsible for obtaining real consent, repeatedly, as well as for preventing an unwanted pregnancy, and if birth control fails, as it sometimes does, the decision of what happens next belongs to his partner. And if she decides to have a baby? Then he becomes a father, whether he’s sixteen years old or sixty. And later, if he desperately wants a baby and his pregnant partner does not? Same thing, my love. She owns the choice of what her body must bear. Is this fair? Please. Show me one day in all the days of all the world that’s fair. And also: it’s fair.
And also, this: if anyone my son knows, ever, whether it’s his girlfriend or a friend or someone he only just met, finds herself pregnant and unable to tell her family, for whatever reason, I can help. Whether she needs a sympathetic ear, information, advice, prenatal care or an abortion, I know what to do. And if it’s the latter, regardless of laws or attitudes or the efforts of people who believe in personal freedom except, I will help.
I’m not unique. Women my age who made use of nonprofit family planning services and had abortions and would have had abortions and struggled to craft a life they wanted to lead (including becoming mothers) are not sitting back and shrugging our shoulders. We remain committed not only to choice but to options, to self-determination. And if, as the anti-choice, state-control-of-women’s-bodies crowd would like, a federal ban on abortions should eventually follow the fall of Roe v. Wade, we will continue to make sure pregnant people can receive safe abortions.
Like many mothers, my own didn’t always like the choices I made in life, nor was she able to guide me well in making them. But when I was eight years old, curled up on the couch as Maude struggled with an unwanted, late-life pregnancy, I turned to my mother. She was sitting beside me with her feet on the coffee table, crossed at the ankles, and when I asked what the word abortion meant, she defined it without bias. It was 1972, less than two years after the Roe v. Wade decision and thirty- five years after her own mother might well have chosen abortion if the procedure had been safe and legal. My mother wasn’t pro-abortion in any sense of that phrase, but her attitude shaped mine from the start: If you don’t believe that abortion is a fundamental, personal, protected form of health care, well then, don’t you have one.
Michele Morano is the author of the essay collections Like Love and Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain. Her short fiction and nonfiction has appeared in many anthologies and literary journals, including Best American Essays, The Sun, Ninth Letter, Fourth Genre, The Normal School, Brevity, and more. A professor of English, she teaches creative writing in the graduate and undergraduate programs at DePaul University in Chicago, where she is a founding co-editor of the social justice book imprint Big Shoulders Books.