RvW

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I had a boyfriend. Actually, no, according to him, he was not my boyfriend, I was not his girlfriend, and he would never love me with a capital L, but he'd be willing to keep me around if I helped him with home improvement projects.

Why did I sign up for this and let him reel me in, hook, line, and sinker? I was eighteen and in love. Eighteen-year-old females in love are, in a few words, and I'm trying to be kind here...stupid as fuck.

He was nine years older than me, and I had a crush on him. He had no business entertaining that crush, but he was emotionally stunted, and so to my elation (at the time), he did entertain said crush. And there was a LOT of entertainment going on, if you know what I mean. Completely consensual entertainment, make no mistake. It was a good relationship that way. I mean, REALLY good. 

Unfortunately, the good didn't really go much beyond the bedroom (or wherever...back deck, front yard, kitchen counter, outdoor gazebo, suspended from ceiling beams in the den in a fairly impressive feat of engineering but I digress). 

I had some kinds of maturity when I was eighteen. I was smart, well-read, starting at a fancy schmancy college, high achieving...but when it came to my emotional stuff, and mental health, and self-esteem, that was all in the crapper. I didn't see a lot of value in myself, and didn't expect anyone else to see any either. In fact, when "not-your-boyfriend" (we'll just call him NYB from here on in) liked to remind me of my worth, NYB would quote from my very favorite Shakespeare play, and tell me, 

"Sell while you can, you are not for all markets." (As You Like It, Act III, Scene v)

NYB thought that was very funny. 

Speaking of funny, here's another one of his "jokes." NYB used to tell me, often, about how it would go if I were to accidentally become pregnant. "You'll pay for an abortion for yourself, because I can just wipe it off my thighs and get on with my life, or I'll throw you down a flight of stairs and get it done that way." Isn't that hilarious? I think I would actually giggle...I'd be going for coy but achieving, at best, nervous. Because guess what. I believed him. 

So I was very careful. And very lucky. I was always the one of the two of us who had to hit the pause button to make sure we were safe. I always made sure. Of course, no matter how sure you are, there can be an oopsie-daisy, but like I said, I lucked out. I would have had a hard time coming up with the funds for the procedure as a student, would not have been able to tell my parents EVER, and didn't have a lot of good faith in the throw-me-down-the-stairs method.

What's the point of this, quite frankly, bummer of a story? I'm not sure how to say it right, but I'll try.

I was in this tenuous position when the overturning of Roe v. Wade wasn't yet a gleam in the eye of SCOTUS. Oh, many would have liked it to happen, but it wasn't an immediate threat then. The court had yet to be stocked with just the right number of fundamentalist psychopaths who care about babies' lives just about the same way most of us care about the lives of flesh eating bacteria. The "throw me down the stairs and see what happens" method would have been the one most likely used on me in the event of an accidental pregnancy, had there been no other options. 

It makes me wonder how many eighteen-year-old girls who don't yet know their infinite worth as human beings will get fucked by their abusers, then thrown down the stairs.

Sorry to be so ineloquent. 

Actually, I am not fucking sorry. I'm grateful to be alive, and to now have children of my own, planned and wanted and nourished and cherished from the depths of my soul, because I wasn't ever thrown down the stairs by a cheap megalomaniac who didn't like complications in his high-and-mighty life. 

I ended up dumping NYB after seven full years of being in his thrall. What happened? I grew up. It was that simple. I started seeing a therapist, got a first-time look at what I'd allowed to happen to me, the blinders fell off, and that was that. That growing up I did--that was a problem for him. I realized after tons and tons of healing and self-examination that I'd been sleeping with a man who didn't know how to have a relationship with an adult. When I became one, in my head as well as my chronological age, I said "buh-bye, don't ever darken my doorstep again." He could NOT believe it. The unmitigated gall! Oh the songs and dances, the sturm und drang that followed...suffice it to say, I'd taken away one of his favorite playthings, and he did not go gently...and all of THAT can be a story (tome) for another day.

For today, I'll just say this: Because I was lucky, I didn't have to choose between an abortion and being thrown down the stairs. But if I'd been unlucky, at least I'd have had the choice. I'd have scraped up the money, lied and said I needed it for textbooks, taken a page from Baby's scam in Dirty Dancing, somehow I'd have gotten the cash. But more to the point, lots of girls still fall in with their own NYBs, become playthings to narcissistic man-children before they've grown into their understanding of how precious they are. And now, a lot of them won't make it to the other side of that creaky, rocking, splintering bridge.

So in closing, congratulations SCOTUS. If it had been up to you in the late 80s, I might have been dead by now. I made it, barely. Now, many won't.