1985

At age 8, I already knew I wanted to be a mother. I’d walk around with a doll pushed up under my shirt, ready to give birth at any moment. These painless deliveries gave me a distorted idea of what motherhood might be, with infants that neither cried, ate, nor soiled their diapers. I told anyone who might listen that I’d have three children, two boys and a girl when I grew up.

I do not know what gender my first child was, because I got pregnant when I was too young to take care of myself, never mind another human being. The doctor who prescribed the abortion told me that since I was in my second trimester, I’d have to get a laminaria tent inserted.

On the specified day, I walked to the doctor’s office from my basement studio apartment, climbing over a snowbank to get to the back door. The procedure took minutes. The snowbank looked insurmountable on my way out. Biting my cheek against the pain, I crawled up the icy boulders and slid down the other side onto the street that led to my cul de sac. The instructions the doctor had given me, complete with where I was to go in the clinic and how long the abortion would take, crumpled in my hand, wet with barely warmed snow.

The next day, I took the bus to the hospital and winced as a bracelet with my name on it was clasped around my wrist. I undressed in a large, communal change room and folded my clothes into a locker, removing them, then donning the supplied gown, paper slippers and fishnet underwear. I read the instructions from the sheet taped to the inside door of the locker. I checked the pockets of my jacket and folded pants, but I hadn’t brought any coins.

“I don’t have money for the locker,” I told the nurse behind the window in the hall. She raised a brow.

“I’m worried about my wallet? My bus card?” I clarified, twisting the back of the gown in a vain effort to keep it shut.

The nurse shrugged, returning to her glossy magazine, and twirled a pencil in her hair.

I trudged down to the waiting room. I shared the space with a dozen other women. I glanced around at my companions, but only one would meet my gaze.

“This is my third,” she growled. “I can’t afford a third.”

I squeezed my lips together, nodding jerkily. From then on, I kept my eyes downcast, playing with the fraying edge of my thin blue gown.

The pressure in my lower regions grew intense, but when I stood up and attempted to shuffle to the washroom, a nurse interrupted my journey. “You do not have to defecate,” she said. “Go sit until your name is called.”

My bottom lip trembled and a tear threatened to roll down my face. Defeated, I reclaimed my plastic bucket seat. When a disembodied voice crackled my name over the intercom, I wavered, but unrelenting pressure in my abdomen reminded me that my remorse had arrived too late.

I climbed onto the bed the nurse indicated, in the middle of a large room. It was not an operating room, just a large room with several beds lined up as though in an assembly line. My heart ran circles around itself as the nurse, doctors and anesthesiologist did their work. When I came to, my face crusted onto the pillow, I was alone in the room with a pain in my belly that burned red and the woman who could not afford a third.

“I changed my mind,” she begged. “I changed my mind.”

I kept my own protests quiet against the rawness of my insides, and I worried about the doctor telling me that I’d never be able to keep a child in my uterus, now that I’d had an abortion.

Staring at the white ceiling, I gave myself a heartbeat to grieve.

I blinked, willing myself to move. I gingerly climbed off the bed and ambled out of the room.

I had to work the next morning.