My mind is continuously perplexed by the teenagers who stand around in my yard making out one second then chasing a ball and playing the next.
She especially intrigues me. ‘I love taking pictures!’ She tells me, as she twists the disposable camera in weird angles to snap my photo. ‘Hey stupid!’ Pipes in her boyfriend. ‘You’re holding the camera crooked!’ ‘That’s the point, asshole!’ She says turning on him to take his picture as he tries to hide underneath a greying baseball cap. She leaps to tickle him and then collapsing into his lap they begin to kiss deeply. I turn to go back in the house. ‘Hey, where you going?’ She demands.
I like to tease them. Standing in the kitchen I grab my husband and kiss him sloppily while they are in mid-sentence. Unfortunately, instead of getting the point they decide to make-out at the same time. I sigh and forbid them to do this in front of the kids or on my couch.
Recently she asked me if I could help her get on birth control. It’s amazing how just one question can wrench my mind out of control into ten million confused directions. Somewhere inside I tend to think that the answer should be an obvious ‘NO’. I can’t help but think about her body. I have heard many a mother pine after a body like that. It’s hard not to want the thin, petite, frame and beautiful, proportionate, curves. But it is a young body that is not ready to sustain life. It is a body that has helped me to see the beauty in stretched breasts, wider hips, and supple bellies. (I have seen the scars on a thirteen-year-old belly that tried desperately to stretch and contain a seven-pound boy; the owner of that belly recalled how painful it had been as her skin seemed as though it might rip apart.)
Her boyfriend’s mom lives across the street from me. ‘If that child gets pregnant, they’ll take her away.’ I ponder exactly who ‘they’ are as she goes on to tell me that ‘they’ will also lock her son up for statutory rape.
‘I got my period one year ago this month . . . ’She says ‘The year after my dad died.’ She adds as if it is only an afterthought. The one thing she is sure of is that her boyfriend loves her. During one of their many ‘sweet’ post-breakup reunions they talked about having a baby. Consequently she is not worried about me taking my time on the birth control issue.
I am.
My mind can’t help but visualize dismembered fetuses. I wonder at how people fight for rights to encourage a thirteen-year-old to ‘terminate’ a pregnancy. Perhaps it is partly easy when movies portray abortion in such a romanticized-sad-reality way. The woman: weak with a surreal smile pushing back tears is wheeled out of the operating room and into the protective arms of her boyfriend. ‘She just needs your comfort for a while.’ We need a movie maker who cares about truth: to show the procedure, the monitor they use, the disposal system they have. Show the girl who, thought to be unconscious, woke up to see the arm being ripped off of her baby with forceps. She felt the distressed baby convulsing and kicking her womb. A place of life now turned into death.
I can’t imagine her nightmares.
‘I had no idea.’ She said ‘No idea.’
I have met many who have had abortions, but none that don’t regret it deeply. I often wonder if they would wish their situation on someone else.
I want to love and protect our women. The wombs of our mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, and selves are too sacred to be a place of death.
