A Reality in Which I Don't Exist

Coincidently, I ended up talking last night with an old pal who edited me back in the day. She’s famous, and therefore maintains a public façade.

But the public façade is not the private truth.

I am feeling so blue, she said. I haven’t seen my daughter in a couple years and she initiated it. I don’t know why. And it broke my heart, what’s left of it.

It’s so sad to think of my own difficulties with my mom, and my certainty that I would never face the same with ______, thinking we were so close. Ugh. I am kind of a permanently sad bunny all the time now, with occasional pleasures that perk me up.

The coincidence is that I wrote that stuff about RTT yesterday, and today would have been my mother’s 85th birthday.

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I had three abortions before I had my kids.

I get that for many women, abortion is an awful choice, but for me, it was nothing: I didn’t want a kid at those particular points in my life; there were cells growing in my body that had the potential to become a kid: Get rid of them.

I hadn’t been irresponsible about birth control either: Twice, I got pregnant using a diaphragm; once I got pregnant with an IUD.

Some years later, a kindly gynecologist informed me that I had a tipped uterus. In other words, my uterus tilts backwards, which means that my cervix was not where those helpful “and here’s how you sl-l-lide the little cap over the cervix!” diagrams showed it to be.

So funny. I certainly looked at my cervix often enough back in my Berkeley Feminist Health Collective days when armed only with plastic speculums, our collective mission was to engage as many female humans as possible in rapt contemplation of the interior portions of their own reproductive tracts. You’d think I would have noticed my own tipped cervix! But I did not.

(I can’t imagine now why we thought that an inside look was the key to raising feminine consciousnesses. Berkeley in the 70s! Ya gotta love it.)

Anyhoo, I remember once mentioning these abortions to one of my kids.

In retrospect, this was oversharing on a massive scale.

But back then I maintained the fantasy that it was possible to have a completely open relationship with one’s offspring.

It’s funny that I don’t remember which son I had the conversation with.

But I do remember the son recoiled in absolute horror as he realized, Whoa! She could have done that while she was pregnant with me! And then I wouldn’t exist!

The specter of his own nonexistence was just the most terrifying thing he could possibly imagine. And I had had the absolute power to do that! Damn! His mother is a monster.

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I always thought my mother would have had a much better life if she’d had access to abortion when she was pregnant with me. She was only 17. True, she had mental health issues. But maybe they wouldn’t have manifested quite so severely had she been able to exercise somewhat more control over her own life.

I don’t feel guilty or anything that I was born.

But I feel detached enough from the fact of my own existence to contemplate a world where I have never existed.

My own kids are not detached, and that’s probably a good thing.

I was never allowed to have much of an ego growing up. In consequence, while I have all the trappings of someone with a strong ego—a vivid social persona, strong opinions etc.—I’m actually quite egoless. Or so my Tibetan lamas tell me. They say it as though it’s a good thing.

But one of my goals when I was bringing up my boys was to reinforce their egos, imbue them with the confidence that it seems to me, I lack. To that end, I used every positive reinforcement trick in the book every chance I could when they were infants, while I was teaching them basics like toilet training.

I’m sure if you had a heart-to-heart with either of them, they would confide that they lack confidence and that’s all my fault.

But I’m inclined to think that’s the fault of the economic factors that shaped the reality around them.

Because the fact remains that neither of them can contemplate a reality in which they don’t exist.

And really, I can’t either.

Whereas I can very easily contemplate a reality in which I don’t exist. Which, de facto, is a reality in which they don’t exist, I suppose.

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Happy 85th, Lynn! Hope you’re having a much better time in the life you’re currently inhabiting.