Memory Exercise 12/04/2016 - Peace with my Past [Part 1 of 3]

In some Indian cultures, the feeling of a sinking heart is a recognised illness. It’s that feeling where you’re walking upstairs in the dark and you think that there is one more step than there is and so you fall into the black obscurity, your hair standing on end and your heart racing. It’s the feeling where the person who you changed yourself for tells you that the exterior you crafted is not enough to cling onto their love, no matter how much you plead.

I still remember the first time. A pain I‘d never felt before, first physical, then emotional. Then, at back of my mind, a question - is this really what it means to be a woman? Because I was terrifyingly happy. I felt the butterflies pirouette in my stomach as I realised that I was no longer my own, knowing that the crimson stains on my bedsheet were a weakening of not only my body, but all my beliefs. The beliefs became white noise, and words from the literature, squiggles that were to be lost alongside the person who I used to call myself. For this I hated him. He tore away what fundamentally made me, me.

No matter how happy my hormones had told me I felt, I hadn't been sure if I could really have loved him, been committed to him, a cannibal of the soul, someone I knew could kill me one day if he woke up and saw fit. I'd always known this, deep down where I kept my doubts, yet the day he woke up and did so, I'd been no more prepared for it. I changed into a person I never thought I’d become, someone incapable of making their own decisions, someone who had no respect for them self, someone who allowed the illusion of love to consume them, and bind themselves to the harbinger of their torment. 

We all question what love is. Regardless of how educated we believe we are, no one ever truly knows the answer to a query so subjective. Some say that love makes them weak at the knees. Well, love weakened me in every way a person can be weakened – if this is true for love then obviously, I’ve been in drowned in it. Kicking and unable to breathe, this suffocating feeling is colossal compared to a physical pain, although I can still remember the pain she felt when he broke her nose and cracked her ribs. This dominance I once thought I could’ve fought, can in fact drown me.

I clenched my teeth as I walked past the leering builders.

“Alright love, where’re you off to, a modelling shoot?” Being 5ft 4”, and a size 12 on a good day – I was clearly not on my way to a modelling shoot.

I held my tongue, I couldn’t be arsed with the confrontation, not on a day where I was running late for work.

“Get that face off o’yer!” And with this remark he slapped me on the backside. I jumped and without even thinking I returned the slap, right across his face.

“Fucking hell lads! The fat ones are always feisty aren’t they?” scoffed the slapped builder. The ‘lads’ descended into fits of laughter as if what the tosser said was remotely funny. They continued to discuss how ‘feisty’ I would be in the bedroom. I walked away wishing I’d hit the bastard harder.

I once was confident in my beliefs that women should not be subordinate to men and shouldn’t live to please them. Yet despite this, when he leaves the room and there’s a sharp sting between my legs, I smile, knowing that I have done everything I needed to, to please a man. There’s no denying that I loved the feeling of being useful to him.

Jump to my twentieth birthday. Two blue lines on the stick before me blurred as I looked up to the mirror. I examined the mousey brown roots in my bleached blonde hair, my fat spilling out of the top of my jeans, my mouth and its opinions silent for once. There was a baby inside of me.

Are women put on this Earth to birth children? Whether you’re religious or scientific – that is what people are made to believe. As a woman, I was going to fulfil my ‘purpose’.

Those two blue lines disgusted me. Have I not gone through enough?

“I’m pregnant.” Silence.

“What you going to do with it?”

I paused. This isn’t what I’d expected, though what was I expecting? Anger? Love? “I can’t… I can’t have the baby. I’m not ready.”

“Well what the fuck do you want me to do here, Katie? We’re not together anymore. Your body isn’t any concern of mine.”

“But Joe – I didn’t make this baby alone. We’re in this together.”

“No. We’re not anymore.”

I fought back tears as I asked the question. “What do I do?”

“It’s not my problem Katie.”

He’d reduced our baby to an inconvenient ‘problem’. A problem so immediate and complex that I couldn’t put it to one side, to resume it when my mind was in the right state. It was one that I needed to solve now. But he didn’t help. I remained silent and the result was evident. That I was on my own.

I didn’t know what I wanted. For someone who in the past had felt so empowered when alone, I had never felt so powerless. I hadn’t the courage to make my own decision. I just wanted him to tell me exactly what he thought, then, when the decision was made, I would know that the fault didn’t lie in my hands.

I'd pictured him letting me fall into his arms, then kissing my sore eyes. I wished that he’d cried tears of joy, told me that he wanted our baby more than anything in the world. I would want it too and wouldn’t feel the need to end my pregnancy. With his divine consent, I would be happy. My stability rested entirely on his permission, a cage I promised myself I’d never be trapped in.

I was willing to take his share of the ‘problem,’ his exact half of the baby, a whole life, into my own hands, but I was too young to have a baby, too unstable. The maternal instinct that seemingly comes as part of the package of being a woman had never arrived for me. Almost everything in me was telling me to make the appointment, and yet somewhere inside, a small part was drowning out the rest, branding me a killer and haunting me.

No, it’s not fair, but how can we blame individuals? When Mr. Punch kills Judy and her baby, the children laugh. The puppeteer laughs too, an innocent, stifled giggle as he presents the show to us children, and we’re taught that the death of this lady and her baby is ok at the will of Mr. Punch. Not only ok, but comical. So later in life when a man kills a woman in whichever way he chooses, the spectators smile and the woman remains silent. Which is exactly what I did.

The words continued to pierce through every fibre in my body, resonating to a terrifyingly familiar level of sadness, piercing deeper each time they repeated in my head.

“It’s not my problem, Katie.” It wasn’t his problem of course, not if he didn’t want it. And so, at my own will, I made the agonising decision to terminate my pregnancy.