For most of my life I thought I’d killed a baby rabbit. In my memory of it I chased it with a broom because I wanted to pet it. After fifty years of carrying this with me, I mentioned it to my mother. She said it never happened. Yes, I had chased a bunny, but it had gotten away from me.
As was normal in the 1970’s the parents in my neighborhood assumed that watching television was a benign thing. For me it wasn’t. Somehow, I always managed to catch the news report about clubbing baby seals in Canada or the cartoon about a lion cub kidnapped by big game hunters after they killed his mother. I remember the opening credits to Kimba the White Lion (early anime) showing a map of Africa being carved up by large corporations as the wildlife fled from massive fires (this really was a show for kids).
Once I heard about a monk who didn’t walk on grass because he didn’t want to hurt it. For years I felt just a little bad for how much I enjoyed going barefoot on summer lawns (of course evil lawns as they are depicted by some who don’t know the history of suburbia and the call of the human heart for greenery even among the poor and dirty masses).
Although the term had not yet arrived in my town, keeping a low carbon footprint (or maybe no footprint at all) was the goal. It seemed saintly. It seemed impossible. This of course led to despair.
I won’t go into the many ways this despair played itself out in my young life, but it was a very destructive force. Every decision became a choice between one evil or another. I was groomed to believe that people were beyond redemption. When I was twelve, I had a nightmare. I stood in the crowd as Jesus carried his cross (this was the 1970’s Jesus—a profile image ubiquitous in its day). He turned to me and asked why I wasn’t helping him. I told people about the nightmare, and they said it was only my imagination. That wasn’t helpful.
The decisions I made in my twenties, based on the idea that humans were parasites, never bore good fruit. Teaching third graders they’ll be dead in ten years because they get driven to school in cars will not bear good fruit either. When we are young it’s easy to get duped by misanthropes and idealogues. They deal in “reality” or so they say. They feed off the idealism, passion, and innocence of youth. Their reality is one where God is either absent or impotent. I think that’s why so many illustrations of Jesus in the 1970s were so weak looking (but I digress).
People often say you become the company you keep. I’m reading Dostoevsky’s Devils right now and it’s like living through a devastating replay and critique of my 20’s. Our parents had been indoctrinated by the free love and revolutionary dreams of the 1960’s. I cringe every time I hear someone say “you-do-you.” That’s the opposite of a blessing. Yes, as kids we were quite free to explore and break social norms. Seriously. No one cared what we did (they may have cared but didn’t feel they had the right to intercede in any way).
The gates were wide open, and our professors were egging us on. The market crashed one year when I was at NYU and our socialist professor cheered before his flock of sheep as we little lambs sat before him paying his inflated salary. I think about how pathetic it was that he’d grown a beard to look like Karl Marx. He never once mentioned the millions of deaths caused by revolution and socialism.
My father lost his mind when a Socialist newspaper turned up in our mailbox. I’d signed some list to be edgy but cared only in the shallowest way about “workers.” I did everything I could to avoid jobs. Full disclosure—I’m still awful at holding down “real jobs.” I enjoyed teaching and showed up daily and on time, but looking back I was probably a dangerous teacher in a way.
By the time I left NYU I was close to being like Nikolai Stavrogin in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Devils. Years of witnessing and participating in moral degeneracy left me benumbed to certain evils even as I thought I was a “good” person. I cringe thinking of the garbage I spewed to students that I don’t think I ever truly believed. I liked the feeling of being noble without actually being noble. I wasn’t completely lost to leftist ideology or atheism, but, at the time, I wouldn’t have noticed I was teetering on the edge of the abyss. I never killed anyone or forced sex on anyone, but so much evil in my circles was covered by a similar you-do-you gloss. let’s just say drunk driving did not carry the same stigma as it does today and it’s only by the grace of God that I didn’t kill anyone.
I’m still reeling over Nikolai Stavrogin’s confession in Devils. It’s gutted me. For him, but also for me. Thank God I’ve lived long enough to be jolted awake in the night by new revelations about past sins. The worst nights are the ones that give clarity to the ripple effects of my sins (even the ones I got away with). Despite having confessed most of these sins, I find in the dark hours of night, a lack of trust in God’s forgiveness.
“In sinning, each man sins against all, and each man is at least partly guilty for another's sin. There is no isolated sin.”
Devils, Fyodor Dostoevsky
What kills me about Stavrogin’s confession is that with each shocking admission I ache even more for his redemption. But as Tikhon (a former priest living in a monastery Stavrogin confesses to) points out the hardest type of confession is the one that has no sheen of cool on it. Some sins we glorify or at least admire in a way. It takes a certain kind of bravery to commit them (maybe?). I’m not sure why this is. But there are other sins that make the person contemptible and pathetic. I relate to Stavrogin because I don’t want to confess those sins and open myself up to ridicule.
I’m not quite done with the book. It’s a MASSIVE, wild ride and I’m floored by how unhinged it all seems. (Dostoevsky was definitely not hitting on all the tropes to gain fangirls). As a novelist it’s extremely freeing to read someone who wrote so fearlessly. I wonder how leftist professors teach this book.
Anyway, I didn’t write any books in my twenties because I believed in global cooling, and then a coming nuclear winter and finally a collapse of the economy due to a computer glitch in the year 1999 that never materialized. I was a vegan. I had no idea about the pollution and destruction of resources caused by veganism but if I had known it would have only convinced me more that maybe some people should die—or not be born.
“Instead of paradise,” cried Lyamshin, “take nine-tenths of humanity and, if there’s no place to put them, I’d blow them up and leave only a few handfuls of educated people who’d begin to live their lives in a scientific manner.”
Devils, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Yet, I loved the humans and babies in my life. Constantly being of two minds was crippling. And then something really crippling happened. To me.
A little backstory: after a series of destructive decisions, I married a man just as lost as I was. He drank for emotional and cultural reasons. I drank because that’s what people did in their twenties despite finding it incredibly boring. Having children gave me months of sober clarity, but months aren’t really long enough when you’ve entrapped yourself in the barbed wire of conflicted and half-baked thinking. Mix in some pride. Some arrogance. Some I-went-to-a-good-school elitism. I felt noble imagining how wonderful the Sioux would be if they went back to their roots and rode horses until I noticed neglected and abused reservation horses showing up in kill pens at auctions.
As I got more bored with the drinking life and more in love with being a mother my marriage began to crumble. I wanted beauty for my children’s sake even as I worked to convince them that tofu burgers would save the world. Enter Crime and Punishment. I read it at the kitchen table of our roach infested (but hip) Brooklyn apartment. The idea of redemption struck me like a ton of bricks. I was also reading the Little Bear series of books to my children. Maurice Sendak’s stunning illustrations and Elsa Holmelund Minarik’s gentle stories made me grieve my lost childhood innocence.
And then I got pregnant again. I was extremely humiliated. The world was overpopulated! I knew better! What would people say? I had ditched Aqua Net hairspray, lived with roaches because the organic insecticide didn’t work and deprived myself of real food—for the planet—and then this!
But then I started thinking of baby names and fell in love with the child growing inside of me. I still felt like a climate criminal though. Thank God there was no social media back then because I’m sure I would have been bombarded with reels celebrating abortion and haranguing “birthing” people to sacrifice the little demons taking up space in their wombs.
It still occurs to me sometimes that my initial shame and anger somehow cursed the baby. This is irrational. I know. Or maybe it’s not.
After months of morning sickness, I felt the baby kick. The next day I felt an intense ache in my leg. When I sat down my leg looked slightly purple. I mentioned it to my father. We had a family trip planned for the next week at the Jersey shore.
“You stupid ass. Go to the doctor! It’s probably thrombosis.”
I went to the doctor wondering what thrombosis was (before internet searches) and why my father always had to catastrophize everything. I told the doctor I was pregnant and what my father had said. The older gentleman smirked at me with an impatient glint in his eyes.
“Is your father a doctor?”
“No, he’s a policeman, but I guess he’s seen emergency situations …”
“You have a sprained leg. Go on vacation and have fun.”
And so, I did. Even as my leg swelled to enormous proportions, even as I braved the cold and crashing waves of the ocean and even as people on the beach came up to me with concern in their eyes. I brushed them off since the doctor had said I was fine. Two weeks later I borrowed crutches and with my two small children I showed up unannounced at the doctor’s office demanding to be seen. I should have gone to the ER, but I didn’t want this to be an emergency. The doctor was annoyed that I’d interrupted his lunch. I was wearing red shorts (I’ll always remember them). He felt my leg, threw up his hands and said I was being overdramatic. It was kind of what I wanted to hear, but I timidly asked if maybe there was some kind of specialist to see about the severe pain.
He turned away with an exasperated flourish and told the nurse to send me to a bone specialist. I took a cab there later that day with my husband and toddlers. As soon as the specialist looked at my leg he started freaking out.
“Who sent you here! My God, you need to be at the ER! Who would send you to me?”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“You have a massive blood clot in your leg! How long has this been going on?”
“Almost a month …”
I remember looking out the taxi window on the way to the ER (the doctor had wanted me to go by ambulance but that seemed too over-the-top to me at the time). The sky at sunset was that perfect shade of blue … nothing could really be wrong.
I’m telling this story because people on both sides of the abortion debate often speak in absolutes. Absolutes that aren’t going to win anyone over to their side. I’m going to say again that I’m very much a pro-life person. Babies are babies. But to see people on the pro-life side saying there are NEVER exceptions to the general idea that babies can be saved in medical emergencies is a little bit cruel and ignorant. Yes, the cases are rare and with modern technology these cases are becoming rarer, but I was that rare case. The extremist Pro-choice arguments are so repulsive to me and well-known I don’t think I have to mention them here.
If the original doctor hadn’t needed to be right and had thought a second, he would have remembered that’s it’s fairly common for pregnant women to develop deep vein thrombosis (DVT). The treatment plan is pretty simple too. It’s not fun having to inject yourself daily with blood thinners but it’s totally doable. But if you manage to live a month without a clot breaking off and killing you things get very dicey (at least this was the case 20 years ago).
The vascular surgeon fell in love with me (but that’s a different story). He was great though. The bad news was that with such an extensive clot my chances of survival were slim and even if I did survive my life would most likely be greatly shortened with the conventional treatment. I can’t explain to you why because I was in shock. I remember the doctor saying to my family, “She may look fine, but she is very, very sick.”
I was still wearing those damned shorts! I had to wear them for weeks because everyone was afraid to move me. I was ordered not to move. So many specialists hovered over my bed debating what to do. Hourly they stabbed me with needles to check my blood. The baby was a huge complication because the types of treatment that might offer me hope involved radiation at levels extremely harmful to the baby. Everyone kept saying, “be grateful that you have two other children. You need to survive for them.”
It was strange to feel fine, to feel the baby kicking and to be contemplating death all at the same time. After about a week of doctors debating and putting off treatment it became clear that the big question had to be answered. Should the pregnancy “be terminated”? The doctors thought, even with bed rest and blood thinners, the risk was high that my life would be shortened. Either death during the months of bedrest or after a few years with a compromised leg. My OBGYNs were all anti-abortion, but even they counseled me saying it was the only way they could see this going forward. Of course, that meant we needed a doctor willing to do the abortion and it needed to be done quickly since there was a cutoff date for abortions after the first trimester.
The procedure was risky itself because they had to take me off blood thinners so I wouldn’t bleed out during the abortion. Some people correct me here and say I should refer to the procedure as a D&C but after having to see my baby on the ultrasound before the procedure, I feel it’s fair to say it was an abortion. It was killing a baby to save me. No amount of rationalizing will make that go away.
The termination was a “success”. I was sent home for a few days to recover and then brought back, put on a higher amount of blood thinners, and wheeled to radiology where, under the influence of Demerol, I watched dreamily as they pushed a catheter into my leg to try to clear the extensive clot. It was to be done carefully over a few days. I was told to let the doctors know if I had any unusual bleeding. A few hours later I was bleeding to death. I was awake for it, feeling my life force leave me. The initial panic turned to extreme sleepiness. Earlier in the day, although I was a New Ager at the time and thinking I’d brought this all on by not having the proper spiritual mindset, I prayed a quick and angry prayer. “Jesus, if you exist heal this right now.” Nothing happened.
But that night as I bled out, one nurse after another came to pray over me. I never asked for it. It just happened. An intern brought me Wendy’s, telling me the hamburger would give me strength. I enjoyed it. A few doctors (strangers I never saw again) came and prayed the Our Father and Hail Mary over me too. It was so touching it nearly broke my heart. Someone at the hospital had called my sister who lived close by and at 2 AM they let her come visit me. Her jokes made me laugh.
After some blood transfusions I was sent home. The radiation therapy had been a failure. It took me years to really address the trauma of my lost baby. I wanted to put it all behind me. I had a sudden drive to prove my prognosis wrong. Every day spent with my kids made that drive stronger. I took blood thinners, but I also used my natural curiosity to research herbal medicine. I even credit Jane Fonda for my recovery (though our feelings about abortion are completely opposite). My mother had Jane Fonda workout videos and against what most people said I should do, I started working out and having fun.
I kept thinking about the many kindnesses I’d witnessed in the hospital—I didn’t want to think of the bad things. The prayers of the Christians who could have used that time to go get a cup of coffee, kept coming to mind. The hamburger from Wendy’s had been like manna from heaven.
Before this essay turns into a novel, I’ll get to some kind of a point here. I think my point is that despite being indoctrinated by the Left, my heart was broken open by people who cared about me for no reason (and possibly despite their ideologies). My life mattered to them. They mourned the loss of my baby too. I saw it on the frustrated and conflicted faces of all the doctors who’d spent hours searching through literature, calling other doctors, and debating moral issues. No one dared tell me the baby was a clump of cells. In short nobody lied to me.
Not for a second do I think I was allowed to live to write novels in exchange for my baby’s death, but I do think God can allow suffering to humble us, to question our narratives, to break our hearts and make them receptive to his call. My novels are about redemption. Not in the cheesy, whitewashed way of some books written for Christians. I write for the lost. For the people who think it’s too late. For the ashamed. Some people think my characters are too broken. That’s fine. I love them.
I’m still a broken mess. Yes, I’m called to write. I always was even when I was running from it. I thought finally accepting my calling meant I’d become self-actualized, and I’d always be happy. But I’m afraid that would make me forget where I’ve come from.
Adrienne, this is beautiful. And, heartbreaking. And...in a way, familiar.
When I was a young mother I befriended a group of women addicted to their righteousness -- to the degree that their children were so filled with anxiety they'd pull out their own hair as well as the hair of their (willing) mothers. Their families bathed in only a few inches of water, brushed their teeth with only herbal powders, and scornfully looked at me when they learned I 'accepted' chemotherapy for my breast cancer. I pulled away from them. Years later I discovered a similar group of women on IG. While I didn't befriend any of them in real life I was amazed to see their pro-abortion (not, pro-choice) statements. The same women who would not allow their child to eat a processed snack food boasted about having two abortions in college. On the other hand, the few homeschooling groups I attempted to join required me to sign a "faith statement," and their Christian rhetoric was so extreme it also made me uncomfortable. Many of them believed God should have cured my cancer...NOT doxorubicin hydrochloride and cyclophosphamide, followed by treatment with paclitaxel. They weren't boisterous like the women who thought I shouldn't have poisoned myself but it was clear they disapproved of my lack of faith.
Such experiences have made me who I am today. The you-do-you statement irks me too. And while I'm entirely mixed up, grateful and regretful, hopeful and doubtful...I am in love with this world and intrigued by all its many kinds of people. I am always delighted to find kindred spirits such as you! ♡
Oh my goodness, my heart goes out to you, Adrienne...thank you for being willing to share such a complex story. It's such a shame that the sheer complexity of our lives gets filtered through reductionist thinking in the media. As you said so beautifully in your comment here, the idolization of lifestyle choices. You were faced with nightmarish situations, and your steadfast gratitude to the professionals who didn't distort or belittle the reality of the dangers you were facing and the life of your baby - well, that's true, beautiful, redemptive gratitude.
Blessings to you, my friend.