#9.5: A message from the birthday girl

My Saturn has officially returned & more Big Life Stuff

Hello! I know it’s been a long time. I hope to return with a book essay sometime in the near future, but I don’t have one today, and I might not have one for a while. This is a different kind of essay, and a very personal one. But I’ve been wanting to write about what’s been going on in my life, so I’m sharing it with you (even if it’s probably mostly for me).

I turned 30 years old last Thursday, and not a moment too soon. You may have heard about Saturn Returns, an astrological concept that occurs when Saturn migrates back to the same position it was in when you were born. Supposedly this planetary alignment—which is marked by major change, huge milestones, and sometimes big challenges—affects you between 27 and 30, and I certainly felt that influence over the course of these transformative and sometimes tumultuous few years. I changed cities and made a new home and moved jobs from one company to another and fell in love! But Saturn is specifically said to complete an orbit around the sun approximately every 29.5 years, and that timing felt eerily accurate for me, too: six months ago, on my half birthday, I took the first of two medications to have a medical abortion after discovering I was about five weeks pregnant.

A lot of the last six months of my life has been marked by these kinds of strange quirks of timing. I found out I was pregnant because I’d gone to the gynecologist to get an IUD. While prone on the exam table with my feet in the stirrups, doctor underneath me preparing to insert the device, a nurse rushed in and said in a hushed tone, “The pregnancy test is positive.” They looked at each other. They looked up at me. I pointed at myself with two thumbs and said, incredulously, “ME?!” (A lot of the last six months has also unfortunately played out like a Judd Apatow script.)

Whether or not I would carry the pregnancy to term was never a question in my mind. I could give you a list of reasons, but the only one that matters is that I didn’t want to do it. Because the decision was so easy to make, I naively believed that the experience would be easy as well. To be fair, in some ways it was. It was blessedly simple to obtain the necessary medications from my doctor and to take them in the safety and privacy of my own home, totally hassle-free. But there’s so much I didn’t know and couldn’t understand until it happened. I didn’t know how pregnancy—even one that short—would affect my body. I didn’t know that the physical pain of the abortion would be the worst I ever felt in my life, that I would be sending panicked texts to friends worrying I’d messed up the medication by violently vomiting within the first 45 minutes. I didn’t know that my blood type would necessitate a RhoGAM shot the next day, that because of an apparent national shortage I’d be sent from my OBGYN to the ER, that I’d spend hours and hours there waiting for the injection while bleeding from the abortion that was technically still happening to me. I didn’t know I’d have all this bad timing, that my boyfriend would get called away to a funeral on the west coast before the actual abortion and that I’d end up doing all of those things alone.

I didn’t fully think through doing those hard parts by myself when my boyfriend had to leave. When I was little, I once I got caught in an ocean riptide that pulled me further and further from the shore. I was never a strong swimmer, and I couldn’t manage to paddle myself out of it. As I drifted deeper, I passed an adult couple who smiled and waved at me, and even though I was scared and struggling I smiled a strained smile back. I hoped they would notice that I needed help, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask for it. I wanted to be able to save myself, and even more than that, I really wanted to not be in a situation where I needed saving.

I felt that way during the pregnancy and abortion and for a very long time afterwards—that I was doing everything I could to keep my head above water, barely able to catch my breath. Everything happened so fast I barely had time to process it; the time between finding out I was pregnant and having a medical abortion was around a week. There were a few times in that week when I wanted to call my mom, but doing so felt like breaking the glass in case of emergency, and I really didn’t want to be in an emergency. I wanted it to be easy and to be okay. It wasn’t exactly okay, but I got through it regardless.

When my boyfriend got back to New York, it was hard to talk about how difficult and isolating the experience had been. I cried and told him that my life felt suddenly and completely upended, that I was feeling really insecure. He held me and told me he wanted me to feel safe. A week later, he dumped me. I called my mom.

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Life goes on, as it is wont to do. At first I found this immutable truth hostile. The day after the breakup, I had an ultrasound and was told there were retained products of conception (RPOC) in my uterus; either it would pass on its own or I would have to do another round of medication. I thought it would probably pass (it did), but for those two weeks between appointments every time I thought about getting the all-clear I wept because then it would be over, and there would be nothing left to tether me to the relationship or to this big, consequential thing that had happened. Time keeps moving whether you want it to or not, and eventually that started to feel like a good thing. It gave me perspective. Truthfully, I didn’t even realize the incredible hormonal toll that being briefly pregnant and then abruptly not pregnant was taking on my mind and body until it wore off many weeks later and it felt like a physical weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

Still, for much of the summer that followed I felt lost at sea. I went to Pennsylvania for a while and let my family take care of me, then I came back to New York and tried to remember how to take care of myself. Sometimes it was genuinely fun, an adventure on uncharted waters. Other times it felt like someone hit me in the chest with a pickaxe. (Occasionally, I thought I should check myself into a psych ward.) I talked shit with my roommates and got drinks with my worksties and visited my long-distance friends and cried with my mother. I cried a lot: in therapy and on the subway, at the park and on the street, at parties and weddings, in different states and on different coasts. I lost my appetite for a lot of things—food, yes, but also habits and hobbies (like writing about childhood books, for instance). It hasn’t all come back yet, and I’m trying to be patient and wait to see what fills in the empty spaces. Some days I feel like a different woman every hour and I am learning to enjoy riding the waves.

Over the last six months I’ve been confused and hurt and angry and exhausted and grateful and lonely and sad, but I was never, ever regretful. In fact, the only thing that remained crystal clear through the fog and the fury is how glad I was not to be pregnant. I am happy to not have a baby. I am happy to not have a baby with a partner who doesn’t want to be with me. I am so happy that having an abortion was so easy, even when it was incredibly hard. It’s still very fresh for me, and I find myself wanting to talk about my abortion all the time. I’ve been contemplating how to incorporate this experience into my writing, meditating on what I want to say and how I want to say it and in what context. Then we had an election right before my birthday, six months after my abortion, and the country picked a guy who is likely to enact a national abortion ban. So it seemed like as good a time as any to share some of my own story in my own small sphere, about my ordinary, quiet, safe, and relatively simple abortion.

I’ll have more to say (and write and preach and cry and ponder) about it in the future, but for now, there’s this: I am 30 years old and so blessed and lucky to be able to choose exactly the kind of life I want. I know a lot of people came before me and a lot of people will come after who decide to have an abortion, and I wish for them the same level of care and love and support I have received. I love being alive, I love my neighborhood, I love my work, I love my friends and my family, I love not being in my 20s anymore, and I love my abortion. I love that everything is changing all the time and I love that we have the power to change it. I think we should make it better, if we can.    

Thank you for reading!

Mary Kate