My Private Summer of Love

In July and August of 1980, a few months shy of 16, I decided to get rid of my virginity with my first real boyfriend, a handsome bad boy with an adult voice and a juvenile record. Just to make sure it was really and truly gone, we had sex whenever and wherever we could: In the car, in the swimming pool, in my room, at his house. Those steamy Louisiana days and sauna evenings before curfew weren’t enough. Once the central air loudly cranked on and my parents couldn’t hear, I’d creak open my window and crawl out into dense night. Mosquitoes swarmed, pine trees oozed sap, and I had sex.

I was then attending a typical Louisiana public school, which though racially integrated, still had strict segregation between the words “sex” and “education.” The assumption was, if they don’t teach it, kids won’t do it. They didn’t, but we still did, so that while I may have lost my virginity, I was completely lost when it came to the concept of contraception. In my naive mind, it was like an analogy question in my SAT study guides: “Bad Girl: Condom, therefore Good Girl: No Condom.” And I was a good girl—just one who started her junior year of high school with a boyfriend and a zygote.

Having the emotional maturity of an average 16-year-old—basically ten parts “emotional” for one part “mature”—I was determined to do what I thought was the right thing. I would have a baby and take care of it. It would be cute. I’d feed it and dress it up and carry it around. It would be my very own. But after a while, reality set in. I realized that not only was I was calling it “it,” but that I knew I wanted much more from life than being a teenage single mom would offer. Plus, I hated babysitting and never remembered to feed the cat, so deep down I knew I wasn’t ready for motherhood.

I also still hadn’t told my parents that they were going to be grandparents: My parents, who went, religiously, to Mass every Sunday morning; my parents, who were politically to the right of Goldwater. When I finally swallowed my fear and went to tell them their first-born daughter was eating for two, it turned out they knew before I could get the words out of my stammering mouth. They said they loved me and would help me, but their faces were a billboard of love and disappointment. We all agreed there was only one option and they made the appointment for me. I never knew shame, guilt and relief could be so interwoven, like the X and Y chromosomes dividing and multiplying inside me.

A few days later, my parents drove me silently to the clinic, a nondescript office in a medical strip mall. Thanks to Roe v. Wade, finding an abortion clinic was easy. After my parents parked the Corolla, I slowly walked into the office with them, head hanging in shame and trying to will all this to be over before it started, wishing I could’ve hit life’s rewind button (or at least had used protection). I soundlessly cursed my boyfriend who had already disappeared like our embryo soon would. My parents sat in the waiting room, nervously angry (who could blame them?), flipping through old magazines. Part of me wondered if they’d ever forgive me, if life would ever go back to how it was before. Being a teenager, I never told them this worry—I just hid it with false bravado, layered it on top of all the other unsaid doubts and fears. Then I went into a room, changed into a green cotton gown and put my feet in stirrups. After some discomfort, it was over. I left the clinic with my silent parents, a maxi pad full of blood and an empty uterus.

The discomfort in the car on the way home was acute. My uterus wasn’t the only thing that felt empty—part of my life seemed aborted, too. Not from the “procedure” (I have never regretted my choice), but it felt like some of my parents’ love had been scraped away. And since I didn’t feel that I could tell my silent parents, I reinforced my protective shell with titanium—nothing they could say or do would hurt me. For another two years, we lived in our own self-imposed segregation: Equally separate together. We didn’t talk about my abortion. We didn’t really talk about anything more intimate than the weather. It was like we were strangers sharing a house.

But when I left home for college, things slowly began to change. With distance from my parents, it finally seemed possible to become closer. When I went home, I saw little things that I hadn’t noticed before—fine wrinkles around my mother’s eyes; a little less hair on my father’s head. We also began to talk about more than the weather—it felt like I was discovering the people that they were, not just the parents that they had been. Corny humor that used to make me cringe with embarrassment now occasionally made me laugh or groan. And I slowly came to understand that their disappointment in me was also one in themselves. I began to see them through clearer eyes—that in their love for me and hope for my future, they were willing to bend their fundamental beliefs. I noticed changes in me, too— cracks in my old defensive shell, and I felt it slowly start to slough off. It kept dissolving in fi ts and starts over the years until, with the birth of my daughter, almost none of it was left.

We’ve never talked about my abortion. My parents and I haven’t discussed it since that day in 1980. We’re close, I think—we chat weekly, on a phone line that makes 2,500 miles away seem like it’s across town. I sometimes wonder why we don’t talk about it, though. Did no one want to be the first to bring it up and then at some point too much time had elapsed? Is it just easier for everyone to pretend that it never happened, for my parents to “forget” that they did something that they didn’t believe in? Or, are we not as close as I like to think we are—is my abortion a skeleton in the family closet, a vivisection of a more honest relationship? Does the undiscussed really need to be talked about for true closeness? Has it been possible to build intimacy without talking about my abortion, scaffolding our relationship with talk and other togetherness? I like to think so, but sometimes I wonder if I’m deluding myself that true closeness with them is just out of my grasp, that what passes for it is another defensive shell of sorts. But even if it’s a new shell, it’s different from my old teenage one—it’s more flexible and porous in spots—and, when I watch my daughter and parents together, it disappears, temporarily, completely.

Sue Sanders is a freelance writer. She lives in New Paltz, New York with her husband and daughter. Reach her at sandersue@gmail.com.

~Sue Sanders