Until I turned up pregnant.
“All right, Kelsie, I will take care of this,” my mother said, and all of a sudden I thought I was going to have to give this baby up for adoption. I put my arms around my stomach when I thought about it. I’m not going to sit here and lie and tell you I felt instant love for that baby. Mostly, I just felt sick all the time and so tired I could barely stay up past seven o’clock. I thought about handing the baby over to some nice couple from Louisiana or whatever, and it didn’t seem so bad. Maybe they’d send me Christmas pictures and let me come to his first birthday party. Maybe they’d let him have a dog, unlike my mother who thinks that animals in the house just make a gigantic mess.
I promised myself that if I got to choose the adoptive parents, I’d make sure they’d let him have a dog.
About a week after I took the tests, my mother woke me up at five in the morning on a Saturday. I didn’t know what was going on.
“Get dressed, Kelsie,” she said to me, whispering. She was dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, which was weird because my mom always wears makeup. And she almost always wears skirts and dresses and khaki slacks, not jeans.
“What’s going on?” I said. As soon as I sat up, a wave of nausea ran through me. I pressed my hands down on either side of my body, trying to steady myself, and I took a deep breath.
“Get dressed,” she said again, standing there next to my bed.
My dad and sister must have still been asleep. I pulled on some clothes and followed her out to the car. I kept asking her what was going on, but she just told me to hurry up. Usually, I don’t mind getting a little fresh with my mom no matter how many Bible verses she says I’m disobeying, but this morning my mom was being so weird, I was scared to say anything.
We pulled out onto the highway and headed for the city.
“Kelsie, we’re going to take care of things,” she said, staring out the windshield, not looking at me. I glanced at her face once in a while and then I looked out at the billboards and the rundown houses that popped up on the sides of the highway. It was still dark, but the sun was just starting to come up. I think that was the moment I knew what my mom was planning, but I couldn’t believe it could possibly be true.
There in the car that morning when I glanced at my mom’s neutral expression, I kept thinking back to that picture I’d found in the attic back in Flint. The funny-colored hair. The nose ring. The look on her face that told me—even if she’d never admit it—that back then, she’d been having fun. Lots of it. I knew I could stare at my mother’s face for the rest of her life, and I’d never see that same expression on it ever again. She’d left it back in Chicago in 1993.
She kept on driving.
All the times I’d seen the Women’s Care Clinic, it had been from the outside. It’s big and gray and the windows are small, skinny strips of glass that are so tiny they might as well not even exist. It looked like a prison. I’d felt really bad every single time we protested there, if you want to know the truth. Even though deep down inside I was pretty sure that abortion must be murder (after all, what else could it be if it isn’t that?), when I looked at the faces of the girls and the women walking in for an appointment and how sad and confused they looked, I didn’t see the point of all the protesting. What is it ever really going to change? Sometimes I’d seen girls that looked my age walking inside, and they’d be holding onto women who had to be their moms, and the girls would sort of lean their heads in and cry against their moms’ shoulders as they walked past us. The couple of times I’d seen a mother–daughter pair like that, I’d been a little jealous. Me. Jealous of a girl getting an abortion because she gets to cry on her mom’s shoulder.
So that should tell you something.
When we went into the clinic, it was so early there weren’t any protestors outside yelling at us yet, and I knew my mom had planned it this way. I didn’t get to cry on my mom’s shoulder. Not that she’d let me if I’d tried. She just walked me into the lobby and we got frisked by a security guard who looked like he weighed about five hundred pounds. Then we got buzzed into another room, and from that moment on it’s just this weird blur in my mind.
My mom never actually said, “Kelsie, you’re going to have an abortion.” Later on, I figured out my mom probably believed not saying it makes it like it never happened. Because after that day, she never talked about it again. Like that day just never even happened.
I knew the clinic people must have recognized us, but they acted like they didn’t, and for this I was really thankful. I sat in the waiting room and I stared at my sneakers, and I tried to figure out how I felt. Relieved? Scared? Sad? Really, I don’t know what I felt. I didn’t have time to feel.
My mom filled out some forms and she didn’t talk to me once. I overheard her confirming with the nurse that we lived at least one hundred miles away from the clinic, so we could have the procedure completed in just one trip. Soon I was in a room with just a nurse and a doctor, and I was holding the nurse’s hand, and the nurse was so nice. She was, like, ridiculously nice. She kept explaining everything that was going to happen step by step by step, and the entire time she never let go of my hand. Her hand was so warm and soft, it was like wrapping my hand up in cotton T-shirt straight from the dryer.
“You’re so nice,” I said to her. “Thank you for being so nice.” Hot tears were sneaking out, and I tried to blink them back, but I couldn’t, so they just ran out of my eyes and down my cheeks.
“Of course, sweetheart,” the nurse said, and she leaned into me, crinkling my blue paper gown as she did so. She pressed up against my shoulder and I smelled her skin, which smelled like talcum powder. She was wearing a thin chain with a tiny cross around her neck just like my mother’s. Her purple scrubs were covered in butterflies.
“Thank you for being so nice,” I said again, and I said this over and over during the whole entire thing. If I could keep on saying it, it would make everything okay. I was convinced of that.
“Of course, sweetheart,” the nurse said every single time, and her voice was so gentle, so soft. She kept answering me even as she stopped to tell me what was happening, step by step by step.
Thank you for being so nice.
Thank you for being so nice.
The drive home I didn’t feel well. I guess she knew I might get sick, because my mother had come prepared with a plastic bag from Seller Brothers in the front seat, and she gave it to me when I told her I felt like throwing up.