Aborted Dreams

It never quite leaves you.

Many years ago, a friend confided that she had had an abortion. She was a close friend and, yet – somehow – her confession colored my view of her. It separated us, since I knew her choice was not the one I would have made. When she told me that, in fact, she had made that same choice on yet another occasion, I consoled her even as I quietly judged her inadequacy.

She wasn’t the person I felt I was – a person who would preserve the life of a child at all costs. Sure, she was my friend – that only took sharing the occasional bottle of wine and complaining about the shortcomings of our husbands. But I knew that, somehow, I now resided on a plane of living just a tier above hers. Two, even.

Life has a tangled way of confronting us with our own delusions of supremacy.

That friend left her marriage and moved on from my neighborhood and my circle of friends. I’m pretty sure I judged her then, too – not in a JUDGMENTAL way, you understand. No, I’m quite certain I was too good of a person, in my mind, to consciously judge someone. Instead, I simply internalized that she was a kind of girl I’d never be. Then I drank more wine and talked some more, to someone new, about my husband’s gambling or his loudness or his lack of appeal.

Eventually, I stumbled across one “someone new” too many to whom I could complain and, this time, he convinced me I wasn’t being loved nearly as well as I should be.

So I left my marriage and had two “someone news” to judge: him and me.

It’s true, I guess, that many of those traits we find abhorrent in others mirror those we pretend don’t exist beneath our own skins. I didn’t like people who were judgmental. So I married a talk radio host. Could I have found a more cantankerous person to judge? That marriage, too, soon ended. I also faulted those who weren’t great parents – even as I created a two-home family for my own children. I frowned on the many ways I felt my own mom had blown it – and made choices that blew away her worst.

My train had left the station and all that was ahead was the screeching and wailing as the good girl I’d meant to be collided with the bad girl I was certain I was. In the carnage strewn behind were the dreams of what might have been, three failed marriages, my daughter and son who would now wrestle with how to manage relationships despite weathering childhood in divorce - and two innocent heartbeats that were snuffed out at my own request. Yes I, the one who would never do such a thing, ended two pregnancies because I felt shame and fear and lost in the mire of bad choices.

Derailed. Despicable. Deserving.

It seems irrelevant now the times I begged, once I learned I was alone and carrying life within, to create family instead of avoid it. Those tears were long ago. My inner and outer arguments – ones that convinced a woman in no shape to make life decisions – fall short when they surface to console me now. Those I trusted reminded me that I had made my choice for good reasons and now I needed to “stick with it. Do it. End the life. Resume your own.”

The counsel I should have sought – WANTED to seek – seemed so elusive then and I can only wonder now why I didn’t try harder.

Yes, I got my life back. It was my first thought when I left the clinic. Now I could move forward and give my young children the benefit of less drama and a more stable future. And no one would even ever have to know.

But what I lost can never be fully or adequately defined.

It is so primal that it takes something so fleeting - a reference in a movie, the smile of a passing child, the swollen belly of an expectant mom, a startling recollection out of the blue - to resume the desperate ache.

It’s pointless to discuss the shame I feel. That is the searing nature of consequence.

It never quite leaves you.

Recently, I saw a movie that brought memories crashing in. As I watched a woman trudge around with a child she’d had the courage to bear alone, I could barely breathe. It didn’t matter that it was Hollywood. She should’ve been me. I should’ve been her. The roles crowded around me and, yet one more time, I mourned loss. I blamed me. I withered as the flames of regret torched my insides. My pain was a glaring reminder of a life – and two deaths - I wanted to forget.

Times are very different for me these days. A handful of years and wise counsel have passed and through them have emerged tendrils of growth. Remarkably, I have married a man who is gentle and loving and wise. I respect him and he loves me. I love him and he respects me. He has taught our family that God cares in a way that is transforming.

Still, not even my husband’s love can save me from my past.

No. For me, there is only grace.

Only grace from above moves me past one-foot-in-front-of-the-other plodding and grants me permission to breathe when others do not. Only grace reaches beyond my choices and inspires buoyancy in my step. Only grace brought me the man who unconditionally loves – and leads. Only grace introduced me to a wholly loving Father.

Still, there are the choices that I made. They can never be altered. It is what it is. I don’t forget. As I watched that movie, I so wanted to reach across to my husband and ask, “Do you really think God truly forgives us for the worst of what we’ve done?” I just couldn’t ask him and unnecessarily stir a topic so painful.

Last week, as I stood in church between my husband and my children, I felt tears crowd my eyes with the familiar question. Though I’ve long been a Christian and embrace God’s unending love for me, I felt heavy with old grief.

The song they sang next was to me.

“Oh praise the One who paid the debt, who raised this life up from the dead.”

I won’t tell you everything that flooded my heart. I’m not sure I fully understand. I do know my babies live and so do I. It is not all for naught.

Still, I’ll never make much of a preacher. The world is full of people – like me – who aren’t “capable” of being judgmental and yet sure do keep a handful of stones handy, just in case. I don’t want to face that kind of scrutiny and transparency. What matters is the unforgivable has genuinely been forgiven and my debt has been settled by One who cares.

I just want to say, just this one thing, to the girl or guy who is facing a choice that sure seems to have a simple backroom solution:

It never quite leaves you.

And He never, ever does.