E, my feelings are not simple either. At the risk of being assaulted from all sides, I have to say, been there, done that.
Once, at 19 and petrified because the father insisted that if I went ahead with my determination to bear the child, he would try to use my family to pressure me to marry him. He is, and was, a lovely man and is one of my closest friends to this day. A marriage would have been a disaster, however; we'd have been throwing crockery inside of six months.
I allowed terror to overpower my own sense of reason: No one can force a marriage in the United States; I am not now and was not then human Jello; I underestimated myself and everyone around me.
I allowed other people to form my picture of: "It is you or me, kid." It was not that at all. I suspect too many women allow other people to give them this message.
One of the moments when I respected my mother most was when she responded to my telling her about a friend who was pregnant and sickened by the thought of abortion but horrified by what bearing a child and keeping the child would do to her life, yet unable to bear the thought of adoption (she, herself, had been adopted): My mother said, "Let her know, I should be more than happy to raise her child and she can her child all the time, yet not tie her own life in knots."
When I reminded her that she was in her sixties and surely didn't need to start the child rearing blues all over again, she replied, "If you believe something, you put your life where your mouth is." |
