Disclaimer to start. There is a lot of shit to unpack and disseminate in this post. In many ways, this is the launch pad post for the book I may or may not ever write. I’m gonna try to keep it short but there is a lot in here and I by no means want to make light of any of it. That is not what the brevity is about. If nothing else it is just me keeping it short enough to make sure I actually cough it up into the light of day, and this broader field of awareness, to begin with.
Here’s the warning: I’m going to talk about God in this post, and abortion and pregnancy loss, infidelity and deceit and magical thinking, forgiveness and radical honesty, suicide and grief, yoga and sweat and tears. It is a lot in a little. If you need to skip it, I understand. If you do manage to read it, please, be gentle. Not just with me but with yourself and everyone who has made a mistake or been faced with a difficult choice or who has been in any way irreversibly altered by a life event. All of us. Be gentle. Be kind. I will keep trying to as well.
Today marks the 8th anniversary of my abortion. I received care at the Planned Parenthood in the Third Ward of Milwaukee, a clinic that is currently unable to offer abortion services due to current state laws. Mind-boggling. Abortion at that time for me was both the only clear choice and also one which induced immense trauma and years of regret. More so even than the miscarriage that followed less than a year later. The decision for me involved choosing a third baby, which I had always longed for and wanted, or choosing my existing family and the work I needed to do in my marriage and on myself. I knew that being pregnant then was in nobody’s best interest, including a potential baby’s. And holy shit is there absolutely nothing worse in the world than suffering being pregnant when you don’t want to be.
In the winter months prior to this surprise pregnancy and subsequent termination, I had an affair with a friend of my husband. It is, I think, the darkest and most hurtful thing I have ever done in my life. And of course, my actions hurt (which is altogether too soft a word) the person whom I care for most in this whole wide world. I didn’t do it because I didn’t want to be with Chris, I did it because I was lost from myself, my relationship, and my life. It continue to feel so ashamed to admit that at 36 years old I still thought the external circumstances were responsible for my internal experiences. I was miserable and like a wild animal trapped in a domesticity it had never been designed for. I didn’t know how to read the signs or ask for help. I hadn’t yet learned to identify all of the parts of myself; their needs, their desires, their contradictions. There were reasons and a lot of shit living under the surface inside of me that led up to it. And yet none of them were enough, in a million years, to justify my actions or the pain I caused. It was bleak. I was naive and in my naivety, cruel. There was nothing more liberating and also excruciating than the eventual revelation of my infidelity and the deconstruction of my tower of lies. I was restored and reclaimed unto myself and, in the ultimate grace of my life, to Chris. And I, by no means ever want to make light or small the very real pain that he has had to tend to and do his own healing work with from the trauma that I induced. He is a brave and bold man to choose to rebuild a marriage and a life with a woman who decimated his sense of safety and trust when most of the culture tells you to cut bait or that an affair is a deal-breaker. It was not the easier path for him and he walks it anyway. I think we have done a remarkable job of rebuilding, but nothing in life is truly linear and we are awake to the reality of that.
So when we became pregnant right in the very early days of our recovery, it was simply too tender to consider. Yet even with that clarity, choosing to end that pregnancy was simultaneously the path forward for our family and one that I regretted for many years. Abortion laid me low. It wasn’t until the arrival of Wilfred over 5 years later that much of the grief and trauma that I carried from that choice abated. And honestly, I could, even when in the thick of my regret, see that it was in part a product of my own magical thinking in tandem with not understanding what the aftercare of abortion would entail. In the weeks and months following my D&C I spiraled into a hopeless pit of despair that I simply could not drag myself out of. I know now that much of that depression was a product of the quick and intense flush of hormones following an abortion. And yet my resulting lived experience was a feeling sense that I had betrayed almost every part of myself.
I remember a few weeks following, when I was truly in the thick of it and my tears were as vast as the salt sea, we shared a meal with some of Chris’ cousins by love. At that dinner when Courtney, in an honest and sincere effort to offer me comfort, told me that God has a plan for me- something that I find generally insensitive and trite and like a true bypass of very real feeling and experience- it landed as perhaps the kindest and most compassionate thing that anyone had done for me in my pain. I felt in that moment, and in the days and months and years following, the light of his faith like a gift and balm to my heart and soul. Not enough to convert me out of or into anything but instead a comforting and benevolent transmission of Grace or God’s Love or Consciousness or any other name that holds the truth of this mystical mood. Years later, when he ended his own life, I came again to reflect on his words from forever ago and saw the peace in them still, even within the chaos of unimaginable loss. It was in this way that it seemed to make striking sense when we found ourselves expecting Wilfred only 2 months after his death. The baby that he seemed to know we would welcome one day.
I was also comforted in the months following by regular therapy, time in the hot room practicing the OG 26+2, and in shifting our family lifestyle to a home and family-centered one. We began our home education journey the following fall and it turned us toward a path that was truly our own, authentic to us and to me in particular. It set me forward on the ultimate trajectory of reclamation, me as meg and me as mom, and how I truly wanted to embody all of the identities that build me into the woman I most truly am.
I did really sweat it out on my mat in earnest for many years. Funny enough, I just got an email in my inbox yesterday congratulating me on my 10-year anniversary of my very first hot yoga class. So funny to think that it has already been ten years when I often still feel so new to it, like such a beginner. I had been practicing for a good long while before ever stepping into the hot room and I suppose that explains it. It still feels new in a way to me. I suppose when you take the longview with practice and with life, that is a natural outcome: things stay new for a while. And really, what a helpmate that practice has been to me over the years. There is nothing like staring at myself in the mirror for the first 55 minutes of that sequence, boring a hole into my own eyes reflection while letting all of the noise in my head get all the way loud until the heat and the struggle become too much for anything extra. What follows is perfect silence, space, and peace. Sometimes clarity. Sometimes insight. Always peace. I owe a lot to my time in the hot room. Of all of the posture practices I feel well served by over the years, that one is at the top of the list.
Yesterday on the drive to Islesford I listened to most of Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anna Lemnke. One of the strategies that she discusses for folks in recovery is what she calls Radical Honesty. For me, that has been a central and pivotal component piece to my own healing and is now built into the essential framework of my daily living. This refers to all of the big, and most of the time infinitesimal, mistruths we tell others, but to an even greater degree, that we tell ourselves. You see, I did not see myself falling into the darkness that led up to having an affair. It was incremental, one modification or acquiescence at a time. Hardly noticeable. So in the aftermath and my recovery and healing and reclamation, I realized I had to tell the truth about every single thing. Even the omissions that I tell myself are only intended to spare unnecessary discomfort for the recipient. And yes, I continue to be imperfect at this and I am forever a work in progress, but I track this shit for myself and do my best to attend to everything that needles me in a way so as to alert my attention to the calibration of my truth.
All of this (way too many words) to say: July 11th forever. Thank you for marking time and serving as the teacher/turning point in my own edification and becoming. I love that often when I am remembering this day, I am here in our Maine home, soaking in the salt air and feeling all of the ways that we heal here, time and time again. Coming home to our hearts and the time and space to reflect on all of it. And begin again.
* I have been sitting on sending this to publish, for obvious reasons. I needed Chris to read it first and I also needed to sit with how comfortable I am in exposing the parts of his story that are too intertwined with my own to parse out and protect. And how comfortable he is. It is tender and will be forever. We also had to ask and really get to the ground of why this sort of telling is of such importance to me, and the word that keeps on turning up for me is: Integration. My own unending efforting toward wholeness, connection, compassion, and… the integrity that informs and builds out an integrated life. So, it is with his blessing and his love that I share this but also with the understanding that I still feel strongly about protecting my husband’s peace, now and forever, and I would love for anyone reading this to try to hold that dear as well. xxx