I’m still amazed at how I went from this all-American family girl to a near empty existence. I so badly wanted to turn back time - back to when the safest place in the world was in my daddy‘s arms. Back to when I would dress up in my mom’s clothes and shoes, dreaming of the day I would be a mother just like her. But time wasn’t turning back and I continued to pull away from the only people who might have been able to help. My parents knew what I had done and I knew they wanted to help but the bridge between us just seemed insurmountable.
I went to see a counselor at Planned Parenthood a month or so after the abortion because I was so depressed and she told me it was normal to be experiencing sadness due to hormonal changes. Sadness? This was more like an atomic bomb had been detonated and I was waiting for the radiation to kill me off. But what else was I to believe? She was supposed to know what she was talking about, right? I figured I must be making too much of it so I packed up and headed off to college hoping to forget about this nightmare.
I had never planned on going far away for college mostly because of the complicated relationship with my boyfriend so I had been going to a local community college, making average grades, up until the pregnancy. After the abortion, however, I knew I needed to get away and was hoping for a fresh start. Yeah, not so much...college became a blur of late night partying. Most nights you could find me either at a local frat house completely drunk or rolling on ecstasy at a club. I slept the days away, very rarely attending any classes. And somewhere in the mix of it all I found myself becoming less concerned with hiding my abortion. I really became almost proud of telling the story, if only to be able to say, “screw anyone who wants to judge me!”
I was a complete mess losing myself in alcohol or drugs so the pain and anger would diminish, even if only a little. Christmas break came and I decided there was no point in going back to school. My parents were really concerned and had me visit a psychiatrist. I was diagnosed with bi-polar and put on medication. The anti-depressants definitely helped take away some of my anger but life still seemed pointless. I began looking for some source of happiness, anything that would help me feel alive again. That led me back to my old boyfriend. And then it happened, in May of 2002 I found myself once again face to face with a positive pregnancy test.
