No 5: ON CHOICE

PHOTO BY LUCIA AUERBACH

REBECCA KOPELMAN

There is a world in which I was aborted, and I am infinitely grateful that it could easily have been this one. Because it means that my mother had the choice, and still chose me. If there hadn’t been a choice, and if she hadn’t been allowed to openly feel her ambivalence, my life might have been one of resentment and discomfort. Because my mother had a choice, I am loved, and I know for a fact that I was wanted, which puts a kind cast over my home, my parents, and my very existence. 

A lovely sheen over my conversation with my mother, at thirteen, about whether I was wanted. A lovely sheen over her telling me that I was a surprise, but not an accident.

A lovely sheen over my knowing that she really meant it. That if she really wanted to she might have gotten rid of it (because there was a point at which I was not me at all, but rather a parasitic and potentially insidious it). Because both I and she know that after my accidental conception, she could have chosen to terminate the pregnancy, my accidenthood is something I’ve absorbed into my identity with some amount of pride. I was not expected, but I was wanted. If I weren’t wanted, I wouldn’t be here.

When my mother tells me about how the doctors had to induce labor early because I was dancing on her bladder, there is a lovely sheen to that, too. If I had been a burden to bear, it might have been excruciating, but because she was sincerely excited, at least enough to keep me and to rub balm on her stomach each day and to walk on the treadmill in her office to maintain her glow, I was a sweet thing doing a jig inside of her. 

To be unloved is a horrible fate, and to be unloving is even worse: I think of those mothers who fight (or fail to fight) the urge to leave their babies in hot cars or bash them in the heads with rocks. The children, who, through no fault of their own, are unwanted and know it, in the way that children know things. The mothers, who, through no fault of their own, cannot love these unchosen strangers in their homes, and know it. Nobody should have to live without love, without receiving it or giving.