Chapter 13: A Spell
She was invited by salt, ushered in by tunnelling rainbows.
Missed a chapter? Read them all here.
Read Chapter 12.
Read Chapter 11.
Read Chapter 10.
It’s not like I’ve kept it a secret. I’ve spoken the words out loud a bunch of times before—in rooms and during workshops and from stages, watching the relief break across the faces of the women listening as they allow themselves to feel the relief of not being the only one.
I didn’t want to become a mother.
I got pregnant by accident, almost exactly one year after Martin and I were married.
For some reason, the last time I spoke this truth in the presence of two dear friends, some old unprocessed piece of shame around it bubbled up and I immediately vomited.
In the church I grew up in, we were taught to want children. Well. We were not taught to want them so much as a woman wanting children was presented as a natural law of that religious universe. What does a woman do? A woman grows, marries, gives birth. This was not questioned by anyone.
I didn’t question it either.
I simply ignored it because it was boring to me.
Only later have I realized how comfortable I’ve always been holding paradoxes. Of quietly housing the piece of my heart that assumed I would have children one day. I was a woman, wasn’t I? I was alive, wasn’t I? In a sense I knew ‘my place’. Yet I made no plans to stand in it. I had no aspirations of pregnancy. I wasn’t like other girls I knew who chose names for their future babies. I wasn’t like my sister who—though I didn’t know it at the time—wanted to be a mother more than anything in the world. Not as the product of a religion, but as the sincere and ultimate wish in her heart.
Perhaps it was simply that I wanted so much else. And I wanted that else far before the want for babies was even an urge I could recognize. Yet, that else was also unclear. Maybe that’s where I went wrong. Never defining for myself exactly what I was aiming for. Always thinking I would simply know it when I got there. As if it would be placed before me for recognition.
So when I found out I was pregnant one year into an unwanted marriage, I heard the final key turning in the lock of what had been my freedom. Click. Up until that point, I still could have gotten out of the mess I got myself into. But with a baby involved, there was no going back.
And yet.
That baby…