I have been debating whether or not to write about this topic for my first blog, but a big part of Ava relates to both motherhood and abortion, so here goes nothing.
Disclaimer: My mom isn’t here to give her side of the story as she passed away in 2019. She had a traumatic childhood and undiagnosed mental illness. Maybe if she had gotten help, life for both of us would have been different. But she was raised in a generation where talking to a therapist was only for “crazy people”.
When I was a teenager, I decided I never wanted children. Not because I didn’t want to deal with the responsibility or struggles of raising a child, but because I felt I was the reason for my mother’s dissatisfaction with life. I believed that because of my birth, I ruined whatever happiness she could have had. Therefore, any chance for my happiness would also be ruined by having kids.
The first time I heard the word abortion was when I was nine or ten years old, and I had done something to upset my mom. I cannot remember what it was, but I remember her rage very, very well. She was yelling at me as I stood in front of her, frightened with a knot in my stomach (a knot that appeared many years before and stayed with me for most of my life). She hissed at me that she should have listened to her mother and gotten an abortion.
In my mind I wondered what an “abortion” was and how it related to me at that moment. Was it a wooden spoon to use to beat me? We had wooden spoons. Why didn’t she just go in the kitchen and get one? I would have at least gotten a brief reprieve from the yelling, and maybe she would calm down as she searched the kitchen drawers.
But she continued yelling instead. “I thought I had the flu when I found out I was pregnant with you. I was sick the whole time you were inside me and you still make me sick. My mother told me three children was too much and to abort you. I should have listened to her.”
So, she wanted me dead. And, apparently, so did my Oma who I hadn’t even met yet. That did quite a number on my self-esteem and why the knot stayed put.
My mom was born in 1939 in Stuttgart, Germany one month after Kristallnacht when Nazi soldiers broke the glass windows of Jewish businesses and synagogues and the streets sparkled with destruction. It is considered the beginning of the Holocaust.
As I grew up, I knew my Opa had spent much of World War II in prison after he was caught as his first jump as a paratrooper. He made my mom dollhouse furniture while he was there, and it is still in the attic of her home. I had assumed at the time that there was a “good” German army and a “bad” German army, and he was on the good side. It took me a long time to realize there was only one army and my Opa was a Nazi.
Mom didn’t really talk about it, but my dad told me that my Opa was nineteen when he tried to escape on his motorcycle to Italy to avoid serving in Hitler’s army. He was captured after his mother reported him – she was upset he was being a traitor to his country (did she know what her country was doing?). I don’t know what my grandfather’s ideology was, but I hoped most young men would rather not be a part of the genocide, so that’s how I reconciled his past in my head.
The timeline before he was imprisoned is hazy, but my understanding is he and my grandmother had a quick wedding and my mom was later born “prematurely” (I suspect the birth was on time and the wedding was late). My mom didn’t meet her father until World War II ended and she spent the first years of her life hiding in bomb shelters and food was scarce. She told me one time she swiped a stick of butter from the war rations they were given and ate the whole thing.
I understood my mother endured a lot of childhood trauma from her experiences during World War II, the physical and verbal abuse she suffered from her mother, and a near death experience with bacterial meningitis when she was eighteen. She then left her home country after marrying my dad at age nineteen and moved to Kansas knowing very little English.
I still didn’t understand how her experiences translated to her treatment of me. I did notice a pattern as I got older that my best friends tended to have a parent who was an alcoholic and their sudden mood swings and empty bottles made sense to me, but my mom didn’t drink much so it remained a mystery until I went to medical school.
When I was learning about the various personality disorders in medical school and first learned about Borderline Personality Disorder, it clicked. That was my mom. She was never officially diagnosed, of course. It is only my opinion as she checked so many of the DSM-IV boxes. It helped me to better understand her and gave me some hope that maybe I wasn’t destined to be miserable if I had children.
Still, I was afraid. Afraid that after I gave birth, I would be a mother like her. That I would resent my daughter. That I would blame her for my unhappiness. That I would make her feel worthless. That I would hit her, push her, slap her. That I would be enraged when she started her first period on a Sunday when stores were closed to buy her pads. That I would call her a lesbian if she wrote a letter saying “I love you” to her best friend who moved away in seventh grade. That I would pull her hair and slap her head when she got a perm when she was on her period when I specifically told her not to.
My pregnancy was truly wonderful and a welcome surprise. I was thirty-six when I got pregnant after seeing a fertility specialist and trying and failing several rounds of IUI. The next step was IVF, but I couldn’t afford it with the medical school debt I had incurred, and I decided a childless life was probably for the best. And, then, I got pregnant the old-fashioned way. I didn’t tell many people initially because I was afraid I would miscarry.
It was a great experience. I loved everything about being pregnant. I loved growing a baby inside me and taking care of her. I ate better than I ever had before. I took care of myself physically and mentally. In hindsight, I could say I didn’t have any issues at all, but then I remember the initial fatigue, the cramping in my calves at night and the horrible reflux after eating pizza in my eighth month. But, that’s it. It was great.
And my delivery was fantastic. I was induced the day after my due date. The only family there was my now ex-husband (to whom I am forever grateful for our child) and my best friend who is an OB/GYN and was such a calm presence. I know how lucky I was.
I still remember the moment of her birth. I felt an immediate rush of warmth and endorphins. When she was placed on my chest I remember my first thought was how much I loved her and how I would kill anyone who tried to hurt her. Truly, that is how I felt. And I also felt relieved.
And I hope I have been the mother to my daughter that I wish I would have had. I have tried my best to make her feel valued and wanted and important.
When my mother was alive, one of the hardest things for me to do was to buy her a Mother’s Day card. It filled me with dread and angst. I spent a long time at Hallmark stores trying to find the right balance. It couldn’t be overly sentimental (disingenuous to me) or too lighthearted (sparking anger in her).
My daughter makes me handmade cards for Mother’s Day and my birthday. Although I tell her how much I love them, I don’t think she has any idea how much I mean that and what her drawings and words mean to me.
I haaaaaaate it when I tell stories of my childhood, and I am regarded with pity. Of course, I wish things could have been different. But it wasn’t, and I am a different mother than her because of her. Hopefully a better mother because of her.
I almost wasn’t a mother because of her. That would have been the real tragedy in my life.
While Ava is much about reproductive choices, at its core it’s about motherhood—the hopes, fears, and complicated love that shapes how we raise the next generation. Writing Ava allowed me to explore these themes through fiction, and to reflect on how our past shapes the way we mother, and the way we are mothered.
