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SusanofO -> RE: Confessions (8/6/2006 9:44:15 AM)
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Guess I have another confession. Before I married, from the time I was about 27 until I was about 30 years old, I had a boyfriend who was 16 years older than I was. He was a counselor I was seeing to try to stop drinking, because I knew I couldn't keep drinking like I was doing while taking the anti-depressant meds I was going to be needing for the rest of my life (I'd been "self-medicating" for years). We both knew this relationship was kind of "taboo" (because he was my counsellor), but, he actually didn't ask me out until our final counselling session.
Anyway, I fell in love with him, and we ended up living together for almost 3 years. He told me when we had our second date that he had already been married once, and that he would never marry again, no matter how much he might end up loving me. But did I listen? Noooo. Of course not (at the time, I really wanted to get marreid. I have since learned it's not the big mystical deal it can be made out to be).
I loved this man - he was kind, very intelligent, well-educated, and good-looking. Well, I ended up (truly by accident, as I was very careful about birth control) becoming pregnant.
Suddenly I, who had sworn never to have children, found myself actually wanting the baby. But he would not hear of it, and said he did not want to be, nor was he prepared to be, a father, and that he would pay for an abortion, but if I planned to have the baby, he wanted me to leave right then and there. I cried and pleaded and begged him to re-consider, but his mind was made up. He kept saying: "Don't make this any harder than it needs to be."
After he said that, I could tell he really meant it, and I locked myself in his bathroom and said I was going to slash my wrists (and I meant it. I'd wrecked my car the day before, plus I was working two jobs, and was really feeling terrible in general). He broke the door down, and made me take some Valium he kept in his kitchen so I'd go to sleep, and the next day he took me to an abortion clinic and I had the abortion. I cried and didn't eat almost anything for 2 weeks after that. A month later, I moved out, and said good-bye to him forever.
About a year went by, and my mother calls me. She told me she'd read his obituary in the newspaper. He'd killed himself by shooting himself through the head in his living room, I found out (I called a friend of his, and she told me what had happened). He'd become very depressed recently, she said. It was too late by the time my mom called me to let me know, for me to attend the funeral, but I did send a card to his father. I cried about that, too. I wish I'd known, maybe there is something I could have done to help him.
To this day I wonder if he maybe felt guilty about insisting on the abortion, because he was raised to be a good Catholic, as I was. Even though he was the one who wanted it mostly, I remember the day I had it, and when I came out of the OR, he was white as a sheet and looked very scared, even though I was "fine". The only person in my family who knows about the abortion is my middle sister (the lawyer).
I asked the doctor when I had the abortion if he could tell if it would have been a girl or a boy. He didn't want to tell me, but he finally said "boy". That means, if he'd lived, he would be almost the same age as my 16 year old nephew.
- Susan
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