Warning: Contains graphic content & adult themes.
I got stood up. I didn’t like him that much anyway, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. I called my best friend and we went to the skating rink. Supposedly, JL had been watching me all evening until we finally met. He was charming and funny. We bumped into each other the next day, totally by chance. Later, we started hanging out. He first lied about his age, which later came out was 12 1/2 years my senior. Really, that should have been a big flapping red flag. Not the age so much as the ease of the lie. It seemed like such a little thing.
The first few months were fun and exciting. I met his five year old son whom he hid from me for several months. By the way, he’d been married, hence the son. (Side note here, he didn’t tell me about the second wife either. His mom told me and not until several years into our relationship.) If the bouquet of red flags didn’t tip you off here…
Granted, I had my own issues going in. My dating career had not been full of banner moments and it was a sheer miracle that I didn’t get into trouble during high school. Still, I had somehow managed to come out with my dignity and virginity intact. I started in a vocational program and had a part-time job. Not too bad for a start. I started having some health problems but hung in there. I won’t go into detail here, but I could trace it all back to the first time.
Really, it didn’t strike me as being anything spectacular. He wasn’t really that concerned with my participation as long as he was having a good time. At least part of it was that from the first moment, it was all laced with guilt, jealousy, and manipulation. They were mostly subtle, but it never felt right. I wanted to break it off, but had a sneaking (and growing) suspicion that there was more to my health problems than I was ready to admit.
We had been dating for about nine months and things were going badly. In his words, I was getting fat and he couldn’t stand fat, so he was going to go be with his true love, which by the way, happened to be my so-called best friend. If we weren’t already neck-deep in drama, try out the words “I am almost certain I’m pregnant” and have a man, bigger and stronger than me and fueled with disgust and anger, scream the F-word in my face. Oooookay… I guess I’m dealing with this by myself. Fine.
It was another two and a half months before I saw a doctor. Tricky part was, I had a period for the first three months and had been on the pill. I figured I wasn’t that far along. Wrong. Way wrong. I was seven and a half months along when I saw the doctor. He passed me off to another doctor, I think because I was a liability to be that far along with no prenatal care. One of the doctors suggested abortion and I nearly vomited in his office from shock and disgust. After that it was a whirlwind of despair that sucked me deeper into itself with each day that passed. I didn’t want to live through it. JL had left me but kept coming back. I saw judgement in the eyes of everyone who looked in my direction. I had lost my best friend. Abortion didn’t even come close to existing as an option. I couldn’t just send the baby away in adoption and never know what happened. Even so, I had absolutely no idea what to do. There were no good options.
My mother saved me. She hugged me. Against all odds, she wanted to help at a time when everything hurt. I confessed that I had tried to put myself in harms way on purpose. I was terrified. I wanted it all to end. I believed my life was over. How could it not be? There was no way out of the fear and doubt and pain.
“You know, there’s something called an open adoption. It’s where you know where the baby is and it’s not a secret. Your aunt and uncle can’t have any more children and they have been getting ready to adopt. Maybe they could adopt this baby.” When she said it, it was as if God had whispered it into my heart. It seemed like the only way possible for this to not end in tears. Now to ask the two people whose lives would be changed forever in a way they never imagined… My aunt and uncle. They were both on the phone when I explained the situation and asked them if they wanted to adopt this baby. I don’t remember the words I used, but their simultaneous and resounding YES echoed through my entire being.
There was not much time. We had only about a month after that to get everything ready. I told JL what I was going to do. He was irritated at first. Then I showed him the sonogram and he realized the baby was a girl. If I thought he was mad before, it was a joke. He became incensed, and I was afraid. If I hadn’t been in a safe place with something between us, I think he might have hurt me. You see, he wanted a girl. It was not the end of the world for the baby to go away if it was a boy. In fact, problem solved. Since it was a girl, though, he went through a sudden and remarkable change. He grew warm and loving and wanted to get back together and call off this stupid adoption thing.
By now, the red flags flapping in my face and a light at the end of the tunnel were enough to let me remember why things were the way they were. He still refused to go away. Several weeks later, I went to the hospital with contractions. We called my aunt and uncle and they headed down. Bear in mind, here, that it was a 650 mile drive with a seven year old in the car. It was not like they were an hour away. By the time the doctor checked me out and sent me home, they were already well on their way. A very generous friend with a ministry house let them stay for the next week until the baby was born.
As much as I enjoyed connecting with my aunt and uncle and becoming increasingly comfortable with the idea of sending this wiggling, kicking, punching, squirming, trying-her-best-to-get-out-by-any-means-possible baby with them, it was a terrible week. JL had redoubled his efforts to prove that we should stay together and keep the baby. He said such romantic things, like “After all, no one’s gonna want you after you’ve popped out a kid. I’m the best you’ll ever hope to get.” and “We should stay together. We don’t need to get married. We could just go back to how things were and keep the baby.” and “If you are so stupid that you still want to get rid of her, then give her to my sister so at least she’ll stay in this family.” (Side note here, he hated his sister and wasn’t currently speaking to her. I guess he was willing to “get over it”.)
After my aunt and uncle had been there for a few days, he asked me to marry him. I said no. He grew angry again and told me that he would take the baby when she was born and I’d never see her again. He said if I tried to take the baby and go live with my aunt and uncle, he would track me down and take the baby from me and there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it. He told me I was a stupid whore and he would get even with me for what I was putting him through. There are few times in my life that I have sobbed so hard.
I cried so hard, in fact, that I went into labor. It was a complicated labor that lasted through the night. The baby was sunny side up and for the first time in a while, she didn’t seem to want to come out. My epidural took hold in only half my body, so half of me was numb and the other half felt every excruciating moment. JL was there, alternating between pacing and hovering. They used the vacuum but it didn’t work. The baby had a BM in the water, so it became more urgent to get her out. The doctor told me jokingly that if I had her by noon, I could have lunch. She was born at 12:01.
My family went to eat, laughing and talking and celebrating. The hospital staff brought me the promised lunch. It was a cheeseburger and french fries. I never got to eat it. By the time my family came back from eating, I was being prepped for emergency surgery. I had torn and hemorrhaged. The doctor was removing clots the size of the baby’s head. I was whiter than the sheets I laid on and was slipping out of consciousness. My aunt ran in a desperate search for chaplain. She found one and they all gathered around me in a circle while the doctor was busy getting the operating room ready. I would go into surgery as soon as it was ready. She told my family that I would most likely not be able to have more children.
What happened next differs depending on who tells it. According to my aunt, they were led in prayer by the chaplain as they stood in a circle around my near lifeless body. It was a prayer for healing and peace. Then the doctor came back to do a final check before surgery. That’s not exactly how I remember it…
I don’t remember the chaplain coming in, but I knew he was there. I know where everyone was standing. I was laying on the hospital bed and then I wasn’t. I was standing on the pillows stacked behind my body. I was looking down on my body and watching the circle around me as they prayed. They were crying. I was not. I had a choice. It would have been easy to choose to fly the bonds of earth. It was not a conscious decision, though I knew it was there. I didn’t weigh the pros and cons and calculate the best option. I simply didn’t go. There was peace there. Somehow I knew what I needed to know and did what I needed to do.
They were all still praying. I laid back down. That was when the doctor came bustling back in. She had my mother sign the next of kin paperwork and turned back to me. She made her last check and froze… She checked again. The hemorrhaging had stopped. This doesn’t just stop, she kept saying. She couldn’t believe it. She brought in her partner (who also happened to be her husband) and had him check. I had, in fact, stopped bleeding.
I had come back. No one else really understands what happened that day. The problem was that I may have come back, but I came back to an even worse mess than I had left. I woke up to JL sitting across the room, cooing to the newborn baby that he was going to take her away where none of these evil people could find her. He refused to hand her to anyone but me. The whole time I was in the hospital, he rode me with guilt and hurled insults disguised as thinly veiled threats.
We left the hospital on a Saturday, so we couldn’t go to the lawyer’s office until Monday. My aunt and uncle couldn’t take the baby until we signed the paperwork. Honestly, I didn’t think JL was going to show up. He had been getting more and more possessive and aggressive as we neared the appointment. He came, though. He came in, signed, and left.
I stayed to see them off. I held the baby and said my goodbyes. As they pulled away from the driveway with her, a wave of numbness crashed from one side and a wave of noxious pain cascaded from the other. They met in the middle where I stood and overtook me together. I was held on my feet only by the paralysis that had set in. I began to cry. I cried all the way down to the bottom of my heart, which had now been cleaved in two. Half of it was in that car with her new family getting farther away by the minute and the other half was doomed to stay with me and never be completely whole again.
The next weeks were torment. I was attempting to pull the pieces of my life back together and JL was trying harder than ever to pull them apart. This is the part where you ask why I didn’t leave him. Go ahead… Everyone does. So I will tell you. I was drowning. The peace of near-death was gone. The pain of real life was back in full force and now I had no baby. Everything had been ripped away from me. In a way, JL was in that water with me. The grief was overwhelming and he was constantly pushing his way back in, refusing to let go of me.
That may sound romantic, until he explained his reasoning. He told me that if I led the way, we could say that I changed my mind and we wanted to keep the baby. He told me so many times that we had to stick together to get her back. He pushed for intimacy and tried to keep everyone away from me. If I stayed isolated and connected to him, he might just be able to get me to cave in to what he wanted. If I left, I feared he might try to kidnap the baby. I couldn’t diffuse it if I wasn’t there.
Meanwhile, he hounded me to quit school. He didn’t want me to continue in Tae Kwan Do. He hated when I got together with one of the few friends I had left and he discouraged it heavily. He showed up at my work and ultimately cost me my job. All this was in the name of ‘love’. I felt trapped and he made sure I stayed that way. Incomprehensible emotions with fear pushing behind every single one is the only way to explain why I stayed.
He didn’t hit me. The potential was always there and many times violence was boiling just beneath the surface. No, his form of abuse was more subtle. It would have been easy to leave if he had hit me. Tiny acts of evil manipulation each day wore me down until I started to believe what he said about me. I was afraid that he was right. I was ruined and worthless. My body was spoiled and no one would ever want me.
What he didn’t count on was one simple fact: I am stronger than he ever imagined. I saved that baby’s life. I saved her from the life of abuse that took me nearly ten years to escape. I saved her from being the waif to wipe up her birth father’s needs. Nearly the whole family was rife with adultery, molestation, and their own unique brand of guilt-torture. To this day, she has no idea what squalid circumstances she so narrowly escaped, both physically and emotionally.
He never forgave me for giving her up and made sure I knew it. I don’t really care. He wasn’t the one I was trying to save. I stayed with him to keep him from going after her. It was the only way to protect her. Every day was a tiny victory. I sacrificed everything to give her a life that was not my own.
More than twenty years later, it still burns in my very core, but by the grace of all things holy, I gave her a life.