When the clinician inserted the tent of seaweed into my cervix, a practice as outdated as Japan’s abortion laws, the tiny stab caused an involuntary jerk and gasp. She firmly pressed one of my knees with her free hand, saying, “Deep breath.”
As I exited the room, I nodded, a slight bow to answer hers, and acknowledged with wide eyes every woman in the lobby, the pinch and burn needling with each step.
With several hours before the rest of the procedure, I lay on a lichen-covered bench in a nearby garden, looking up into the trees, my mind emptied and my heart void.
* * *
When the lines appeared, there’d been a moment of joy before the dread set in. With the kind of whim that had led my partner and me through our twenties, the same whim that brought us to Japan to teach for the year, I almost thought, “Let’s do it!”
I let us have that moment, tried not to rush to any conclusions, then recoiled to the couch, breaking into a sob. He held my hand so tenderly—the same tenderness with which he’d always treated my hesitations; the same tenderness I knew could define him as a father.
Despite my perfectly rational arguments, my decision wasn’t from a place of reason at all but born of a terror I didn’t yet understand, an urgent repulsion to my body making a body. It would take me the next ten years to unravel it.
We spooned in bed, my hands tingling, the muscles of my chest pulled tighter by each repeated, shallow breath.
* * *
The next day I searched the internet for a doctor who spoke English. Not knowing how to make an appointment, I just took the train to her office and walked in.
A nurse led me into an examination room. Embarrassed by the tall, lean fact of my western body, she bowed profusely as she handed me a robe, far too small to ensure my privacy, then exited. When the doctor arrived, she echoed the same phrase I’d heard everywhere—sumimasen—what seemed an apology for existing. Eyes downcast as she found the precise English words, she explained this would be my confirmation appointment, and that, if I would like to, I could see her throughout my pregnancy. There was an excitement in her voice, one I wondered if she had for all her patients or if, perhaps, mine would’ve been her first American baby. She motioned me into the stirrups, squeezed gel onto a transvaginal wand, and inserted it.
Shifting to get the angle at which she could catch the tiny embryo, she finally said, “Here it is.” Before I could look away, she turned the screen toward me, a white bubble on a shifting black background, what so many wanted to see but exactly what I didn’t.
“What do you think?” she asked, smiling.
I told her I already knew I wanted an abortion.
Her smile vanished, and she looked into my bright green eyes open in precisely the way local plastic surgeons tried to mimic for their patients, her stare lingering far longer than was culturally acceptable. She pointed at the embryo. “See, see,” she said, “it is your baby,” as if I didn’t understand.
“We’ve already decided,” I repeated, because she didn’t.
Medical abortions are not legal in Japan, so I’d have to wait until a surgical option would be available—a minimum, she told me, of three more weeks. Before she left the room, she stood next to the examination table, her fingertips gently brushing against my arm.
“Go home,” she said, looking down. “Talk to your husband. It is a healthy baby.”
* * *
In the fall of my eighth-grade year I won “Best of Show” at the county fair, not for my husbandry skills but for a drawing I’d done of a man’s face contorted in pain or rage, so large it loomed over the other entries, innocent drawings of pets and flowers. People shuffled by, staring as if it were a cow giving birth to a calf, equal parts fascination and confusion. I’d felt the same way working it out, square by square, classmates peering over my shoulder and asking, “Where’d you learn to draw like that?” I shrugged my shoulders, smiling.
The drawings were exhibited on pegboard displays along the edge of a large pole barn, the rural equivalent of the industrial artist collectives in the nearby liberal bubble. At the center were long rows of tables through which the spectators dutifully filed, paying their respects to the county’s best canned jams, heirloom vegetables, and crocheted scarves. Placed strategically throughout were sponsor tables, your local HVAC experts, plumbers, and window specialists, and a few political and religious organizations.
Opposite my drawing was a pro-life club from a local church, signs with cherubic babies asleep in white blankets, which asked, “Are you afraid?” On the corner of the table was a box of Lions Club mints with a slot in which to drop two quarters. Intending to do so undetected, I approached, but the girl manning the table said, “Hey.”
“Hey,” I said, removing my roll of peppermints.
She shifted in her seat, a rounded belly under a Nirvana T-shirt that barely contained her, and peered up with disconcerted eyes as if she knew I was judging her.
My dad appeared beside me and started asking about the club with an honest interest in the cause, one I’d learned to adopt in name before I knew what it meant. She sat erect, answering in stilted sentences, her eyes turned up as she remembered each thing she was supposed to say. At the end, he pulled out his wallet and handed her two of his last three twenties. “One for your club, and one for you,” he said. “I admire what you’re doing.”
I smiled and said, “I do too,” repeating the ignorance of a man who’d never been there himself.
Turning back to my drawing, I was eager to show him my ribbon, but he was already down the line, leaning close to examine an heirloom tomato. “Now that’s a specimen,” he said, as I passed by.
On the quiet ride home I pried the last peppermint out of its foil packaging and wondered if she was afraid. Had she been in school, and if so, what had all her classmates said to her? I felt hackles rise along my spine, imagining the kids’ cruelty.
* * *
Later that year I was in the kitchen when I heard my dad and brother yelling their way upstairs from the basement.
“My house, my rules.”
“I’m a man now, asshole.”
The basement was my oldest brother’s teenage refuge, a concrete lounge in which he entertained girls and a bedroom with an egress window. When my dad said, “I saw her climb out,” it was enough for me to put two and two together.
By the time they got to the kitchen, they were throwing punches. I’d seen my brothers fight many times but never with my dad. I slipped out the side door and grabbed a basketball, pretending I’d been shooting hoops. I tried to block it out, but our house, a prefabricated model I’d watched come wide-load down the street, didn’t have good insulation. When the shouting stopped, replaced by the thud and screech of furniture, I started to cry.
Back then I was just beginning to recognize the contradictions in my body. Desire was something I didn’t yet admit to but that I knew full well existed. I knew that sex could lead to pregnancy, and pregnancy to shame. But I wasn’t ready for the anger I felt listening to their power struggle play out.
I thought of her again, the pregnant girl my dad had given money to, the one he lauded for having done the right thing. Sex was wrong but keeping the baby was right? I couldn’t tell you what it was, but I felt the contradiction in the situation. Even then, I didn’t quite believe that ponying up to one’s responsibilities could encompass the complexity of what she was facing, the absolute terror of having little choice. How could my dad not see that?
After my brother left (a several-days absence to follow), I let my tears dry before I went in. When twilight settled, I had no excuse to stay outside. Dad was standing at the stove, pouring a packet of spice into ground meat. Out of what felt like a deep well I was only just discovering, I suddenly started crying again.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said, eyes on the pan.
A few months later my brother died suddenly in his sleep, a jagged end on which this memory was caught for many years, divorced from context, unhinged from time.
I sometimes wonder if my father thinks of that day as I do my abortion, if he longs to unravel it from his past, a tattered edge, then gone.
* * *
Waiting due to the Japanese government and their arbitrary timeline, I spent the three weeks following my confirmation appointment in a special kind of purgatory, one in which I plan to never be again. When the word purgatory was mentioned in my childhood church, there was a hushed mystery to it that intrigued me. Who were the people sent there, and what, exactly, were they trying to purge? My questions, though honestly asked, were brushed aside with assurances that it wouldn’t be my fate, as if that’s all I was worried about.
In my first days of purgatory, I had a Pollyannaish impulse to turn my personal tragedy into an opportunity for self-development, something I’d later learn I had in common with the Japanese. Their ubiquitous idiom ganbatte means persevering through adversity, often alone. I wondered if the American tenet of “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps” had the same cultural root as this attitude acquired in Japan’s rehabilitation after WWII. I hoped, as perhaps the Japanese did, that this theoretical abstraction could do what I needed it to: cancel my personal pain by considering the long history of human suffering.
As the shell of theories fell away, the purging began. First to go was feeling. Numbness seemed my only line of defense against the hormones. A refusal to engage. After my husband closed the heavy metal door and left for work, I’d turn to the window, studying the lines: the thin strips etched into the glass so in an earthquake they’d shatter into fragments, not shards; the sagging clothesline, a collection of pins sunk at the center spinning aimlessly in the wind; the gathering of wires on long, thin poles, powering the corner vending machines, never out of sight. Each was what she’d never see, a cruel thought I caught in midair and released.
I repeated this same routine: Walk to the store and buy lunch. An onigiri, an octopus salad, pickled cucumbers, and a can of what I thought was soda but may just as well have been hard seltzer, a big shiny peach on its side. The clerk apologized as she scanned each item, then placed them, two-handed, into a bag, as if each were an egg she didn’t want to break. This being the only interaction of my day, my bow lingered longer than was socially expected, causing her to blush.
When I got home, I’d unlace my shoes and place them to the left of my slippers, which I’d slip on methodically as I’d seen women do at the onsen. I’d take each item out of its container, arrange them on a plate, then rinse the single-use plastic to add to the corresponding pile in the recycling bin, engineered to slide perfectly together, like tight-fit nesting dolls. I’d eat slowly, saliva breaking down each bite into its subsequent nutrients, the body doing what it needed to keep us both alive.
By the third week my ascetic practice was breaking me down too. Bouts of tears would come—which I tried to explain away with the mysteries of my body, the ones I’d heard could make me feel a million ways—but I couldn’t stop them. On the day before the procedure, as I stood in line at the store to buy lunch, the cheery ding of the next aisle’s register sent me into a tailspin. My tears swelled up so suddenly that I abandoned my little basket on the conveyor belt, the clerk apologizing for whatever was upsetting me. When I got home, I didn’t bother taking off my shoes but went straight to the bath, ran the hottest water, and stripped everything off, throwing it all out the bathroom door. I winced at my face in the mirror, covered in the red patches that had always given me away, even when I cried in silence.
I spent far too much time in the water, draining cold out, running hot in, for what could’ve been hours. I hadn’t been given a pamphlet of dos and don’ts at the clinic. I didn’t know that my blood had already increased in volume, causing an elevated heart rate, nor that if my body temperature rose too high, my blood pressure could drop, causing me to faint. I didn’t have a notification to wake to each morning telling me the day-by-day miracle happening inside . I was just trying to pass the time. Meet an arbitrary limit. Follow the rules.
When I stood up, I fell toward the toilet, and when I awoke, I was squeezed between the bowl and wall, a tight crevice in which I barely fit. My arm was throbbing, and I looked up for what I’d hit, the toilet-paper holder protruding several inches from the wall. The tissue in my arm was so deeply damaged that years later, a doctor discovered a lipoma she ordered removed for biopsy. The surgeon asked if at any point I’d experienced blunt trauma to that arm, something that, at first, I blankly denied. But then it came rushing back to me.
I spent the remainder of that afternoon curled on the floor, a dysphoric state in which I no longer recognized myself. Every feeling and thought I’d tried to repress was suddenly upon me. The guilt I felt for what I was going to do and the shame that silences so many who’d done it were indistinguishable. What was I feeling, guilt or shame? The despair of choosing to stop a process in which, perhaps, the most important person to me might be born; the terror of going through with a process in which, perhaps, the most important part of me might be destroyed. Who would it be, her or me? I couldn’t escape this line of thinking, perhaps because that’s all I’d ever been taught to think about abortion: it’s right or it’s wrong, there is no in-between.
As I lay there, the sun beginning to set on my final day in purgatory, my mind went eerily quiet, the quiet I’ve learned to fear the most. I was lying on the floor, sobbing, completely taken, and yet I knew I was lying on the floor sobbing. The terrifying detachment I had learned through years of trauma, that constant sanity, was what almost drove me over the edge.
I returned to the clinic the next day, my husband with me to sign the papers as required by law but not allowed in the operating room. Some part of me would never leave that clinic, the best part of me, I was sure.
After the insertion of the laminaria, there’d be no turning back.
“You are sure?” she asked, and I nodded.
. . .
For more of this essay or other great literary nonfiction in Issue 21.2, order now in our online store. Digital copies are only $5.
Megan Rich is an instructor at the Charlotte Center for Literary Arts and lives in Chicago with her husband and daughter.
