If there’s anything relevant to be known about me, it is probably that an optimist, I am NOT.

It’s a little fuzzy prior to junior high, but as long as I can remember, my life has revolved primarily around two things: Drama, and DRAMA. The first kind of drama is the type I like to create to get attention, AND to unconsciously contribute to the second kind of DRAMA, a.k.a. neurotic emotional responses to even the most mildy unpleasant happening. Of course I’m not the only gen-xer with this propensity. I mean, hello, Kurt Cobain? DRAMA! Angst is kinda our theme. Pretty much every one of us can look at our lives and see how we unwittingly choose drama over pleasantness. I mean, why have fun when you can have pain and suffering?

But me? I’m a fucking drama expert. Give me a fun, relaxing event with some chit-chatting, some good food, some games: Yawn. Add a little gossip, some infighting, or even a mildly catty fight about religion and I’ll perk up faster than nipples at a strip club. And that’s just the beginning. As a teenager, my mission was to make the worst of every situation. I’m too fat. I’m not pretty. She’s prettier than me. Nobody likes me. Everybody hates me. I guess I’ll go eat worms. I just believed that happiness was over there. There was always something I needed to achieve in order to be happy. Or something I needed to have. Whatever “it” was, that was going to make me happy, I definitely never had it. I spend a lot of time crying and moping and doping and wallowing.

When I was twenty years old, and I had finally moved out of my parents’ house and was living with my boyfriend, it finally occurred to me that maybe I was depressed. The medical diagnoses of depression had been getting publicity for a couple of years, but I was an evangelical Christian, so of course, I knew that depression really meant that I was just an evil sinner. I also knew that I shouldn’t ever trust psychology because Dr. Dobson said so, and also because my mom had a book called, Why Christians Can’t Trust Psychology (a.k.a. science). So of course, I would never have self-identified with depression. But after I moved out of my parents’ house, I started to think that religion might be bullshit, and I pretty much quit believing in it. I mean, if things all happen for a reason and god has a plan, why does everything suck so much? And why does he hate most of us and want to send us to hell just because we don’t believe in or don’t know of some antiquated story in some book? I started to think to myself, why do I believe this story? It certainly wasn’t because it rang true for me or I found it to be useful. So like so many angsty gen-xers that had come before me, I decided I was agnostic and got a prescription for antidepressants. The antidepressants worked awesome, as both an antidepressant…and a sedative. I was very calm and emotionally stable, and sleeping nearly constantly.

Laying around on the couch and watching tv all day is great, once in awhile, if you’re normally active. But if you’re not active and you do it all the time, you will get fat, vitamin D deprived, and become a boring person to be around. I took the pills for about a year, and I was constantly tired, albeit even-keeled. I finally decided that it wasn’t worth the every-10-second-yawns and weaned myself off them. But goddammit, sans the pills I was just as depressed as I ever was.

In the middle of my pregnancy I happened upon this weird book by some “spiritual teacher”. I had purchased one of his other books in a prior fit of self-loathing and depression, but never quite “caught on” to what he was saying. But for some reason this new book just struck a chord. It talked about two different kinds of suffering, the kind that is inevitable: death, pain, etc. and the kind we create for ourselves in our head, by thinking about our problems really, really hard and magnifying them 100x, not to mention telling everyone about our problems and complaining ad nauseum.

Complaining is one of my most effective drama-creating techniques. If complaining were an olympic sport I would get the gold twice over. Complaining is fun because it often results in sympathy and reciprocal complaining from the other party! Yay! Double the drama! Not only that, but because it doesn’t do anything to solve problems, or require any action to be taken, it’s great for people who would rather create drama and have problems than be happy and solve problems. So as you can imagine, being nauseous and pregnant for five or so months, I had done a whole lot of complaining! But for some reason, complaining never really made me feel better! So I read this new-agey book and it argued that instead of bettering my situation, drama and complaining might actually be making it worse! Whoa! Could it be true?

It suddenly occurred to me that I should consider having a positive attitude about my pregnancy. And even more revolutionary… maybe I should consider having a positive attitude about life in general! In a few short months I was going to begin, literally, to shape the attitude of a brand new human, by my example.

I realized that happiness is a choice.

If you see the negative in every circumstance, your experience will be negative. If when something bad happens you magnify the experience with lots and lots of thoughts, complaints and attention, you make the situation worse! If you focus on the positive, your experience will be positive. If you accept and deal with your feelings immediately when having them and then move on, you will be happier. Wow. This was a total philosophical turnaround for me. It was almost a primal urge. Call it pregnancy hormones if you will, whatever. My attitude and my pregnancy finally took a turn for the best…

Catch Up: Part One, Part Two, Part Three

We left Planned Parenthood and headed back out to the interstate. To err, celebrate, or something, we stopped at Krispy Kreme. No sooner had I downed my first donut than I started to feel a bit weird. I had a funny feeling, I couldn’t quite place. By the time our trip was over the funny feeling had gotten a bit more specific. Ugh. I was definitely going to be sick. I ran in the house, and my extended and intimate relationship with the toilet began.

Now…I’d always heard about so-called ‘morning’ sickness. And while that might the common term, I like to refer to it as ’constant sickness.’ I don’t mean to be dramatic (blatant lie) but seriously, it’s not bad enough that in nine months I have to push a human through a passageway, that to be absolutely frank, hasn’t accomodated some generously sized penises without injury. But now, when I’m just getting used to the whole pregnancy thing, I have to deal with constant nausea, and vomitting in excess of 8 times per day. What the F? Evolution has not been kind to women. I mean, seriously, what do men have to go through that is remotely close to even menstrual cramps, let alone birthing a child? Pregnancy sucks!

I should note that I have a very small family. I haven’t been around ANY babies, like ever, and I don’t think I’ve changed a single diaper in my life. I have no siblings, and only two first cousins. I’d always been hippie-ish, and skeptical of convention. So instead of talking to a obstetrician or a family practice doctor about my pregnancy and impending childbirth, I decided to talk to the one Certified Nurse Midwife available in my insurance plan. At my first appointment, I was depressed, sick and, um, depressed. So she gave me a prescription for LSD.

Just kidding, but seriously, it might as well have been. The anti-nausea medicine felt like an acid trip. I got really drowsy and fell “asleep” on the couch. I say “asleep” because my dreams were psychotic. I felt like I was 15 again, watching posters melt off my girlfriends wall. And while, I might have been technically “asleep”, resting, I was not. It was the most fitfull sleep I had gotten since the night before my first day of high school. I woke up and puked immediately. Great. It didn’t even work. Not to mention the fact that I had insomnia for the remainder of the night.

I tried to be positive. It will get better eventually, I thought, and it probably won’t get worse, right? Wrong. Hello influenza.The combination of hypermeisis (clinical term for severe ‘morning’ sickness) and the flu was just too much for me. I literally lived with my face in the toilet for two weeks. At one point, I honestly thought I was going to die. But I didn’t, and after a couple visits to the ER, and some IV fluids, I was back to just being nauseous constantly. Yay! I even started to get hopeful that it would go away eventually.

The first three months passed, and I was still sick. I figured I was just one of those women who had morning sickness for a little longer, but eventually it would go away. Four months passed, still nauseous. Five months passed. Six months. It was around seventh months, that I finally gave up hope. By eight months, I feared I’d have morning sickness even after I gave birth.

Being pregnant unexpectedly and then so sick, and then even sicker was really hard on me emotionally and physically. There was definitely a time when I hoped for a miscarriage. Every day at work, when I was barely functioning at my job and spending most of my time in the bathroom, I hoped that they would fire me so I could just curl up on the couch at home and sleep away my problems. I pretty much lost any shred of enthusiasm that I had left for life. But then something really strange happened…

I didn’t get an abortion. (Read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series)

I packed up my stuff, got a refund and we left the building. Now before anyone gets their undies in a bundle, I want to clarify. This is not a story about, for, or against abortion. I didn’t get an abortion. That was the right decision for me. It may or may not be the right decision for you. It’s up to each individual woman to make that decision for herself. Abortion isn’t a fun and exciting thing. It would be great if every baby could be wanted, loved and taken care of. It would be great if every woman who got pregnant, wanted her child and had the support and resources available to her to care for it. It would also be great if all woman who didn’t want to get pregnant, had a 100% effective method for preventing pregnancy that didn’t affect their health. Heck, it would be great if men had to deal with it for a change! But that is just not the way it is. I don’t agree with forcing women to carry their unwanted pregnancies to term. So I am pro-choice.

And just so everyone is aware, I’ve been in ‘that’ camp. The camp that thinks abortion should be made illegal, and that anyone who gets an abortion is going to hell. I’ll be honest: Abortion makes me uncomfortable. I’m not ‘pro-abortion!’ In my case it wasn’t as easy or painless as I wanted it to be, and I didn’t even end up getting one! But at some point I just became uncomfortable with the idea that I knew what was best for every woman in America. This discomfort was even more emphasized when I got pregnant unexpectedly. Would I want someone else preventing me from getting abortion? No. It’s easy to look at someone else’s life from afar and think you know what’s best. I’m no longer willing to do that.

I know a lot of people will disagree with me, but I am pro-life too. I’m pro-life because I accept what is. Unwanted pregnancies happen. People have sex with people they probably shouldn’t. People have sex and don’t use protection. Birth control fails. Women have abortions and regret them, and have babies and regret them too. Women have back-alley abortions and die. Women give birth and die. Women get pregnant unexpectedly and have babies and love them and live happily ever after. Women get pregnant on purpose and hate their kids and beat the shit out of them. There is no clear-cut solution that will fix or solve any of these things. This is life and I accept it. The only thing you can do is deal with your own individual situation the best you can. That’s what I did. I accepted what life was offering me: a choice. I chose to have a baby.

And guess what? Parenting isn’t always fun and exciting either. It can be really, really hard. And really, really sad and really, really complicated and sometimes I want to give up, get in my car and drive away. (It’s happened - I came back.) It can also be really fun and immensely joyful. Mostly, I try with all my might to accept the “is-ness” of the situation and handle it the best way I can, be it joy or pain, unwanted or wanted situation. And I fail. And I succeed, and I try again. That’s life. There are always choices. Only you can make yours.

What do you think about unplanned pregnancy? Share your thoughts below…

Like any American, I have lots of problems, issues and neuroses.

The biggest of these is my inability to take action. For as long as I can remember I’ve had lofty goals and ambitions. I will take a few steps towards them, mostly in the form of extensive research. Then, I will methodically search for every conceivable problem that could possibly arise in the process of attaining these goals, then give up, eat a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and watch Sex & The City reruns for 4 hours straight every night for 3 months. Pick new goal, rinse & repeat.

Periodically, I would go through phases where I would panic, having not attained any of my goals, or achieved any “success” in the eyes of the world (education, job, money, possessions), and would rush to gain “success” only to have a nervous breakdown and stop just short of actually finishing something. Case in point: I might hold the record for the most undergraduate semesters taken to achieve an Associate’s Degree. Yes folks, it took me a whopping five and a half years (11 semesters) to get a 2 year degree. Now I’m not stupid. I just can’t make a decision and stick to it. So I started at one school, transferred to another, transferred back to the first and then transferred to another, had a nervous breakdown, and then gave up.

So how does this relate to the discovery of an unexpected bun in my oven? Well, when I realized I was pregnant, I had finally gotten a job that paid enough for a gal to actually live on, and might even keep my brain stimulated long enough for me to forget about my personal problems. I figured I was finally on the right track. So getting pregnant was the last thing I wanted to happen. I mean, if I hadn’t achieved my goals as a single girl with very little responsibilities, then having a baby was going to slow my already excruciatingly snail-like pace to a near-standstill, right?

An abortion just seemed like the most logical decision. And while my boyfriend didn’t seem to share my feelings about the situation, he respected my choice. Now, in the state where I live, an abortion requires 3 office visits. The first is an evaluation and counseling session. The second is the actual procedure, and the third is a checkup to make sure your parts are all okay afterwards. So we packed up and drove 90 minutes to the nearest Planned Parenthood for the first visit.

The first visit went off with out a hitch. I got an ultrasound and saw a ‘yolk sac’. They determined I was about 5 weeks along and I made a second appointment to have a chemical abortion. A chemical abortion is a series of pills you take that make your uterus inhospitable to a developing embryo. I was going to take the infamous abortion pill.

As an aside, many people like to call the so-called ‘morning-after pill’ an abortion pill. However, the morning-after pill is really a mega dose of the same hormones in your standard birth control pill. My understanding of the morning-after pill is that it prevents implantation of a fertilized egg. So if that’s an abortion, fine. But since as many 30 percent of pregnancies end this way naturally, many times without a woman even realizing she’s pregnant, it’s hard to muster up any moral outrage at the situation. I, on the other hand was taking the real deal. The real ‘abortion pill’. I would be terminating my pregnancy at about 5 weeks gestation. Approximately 25% of pregnancies end in miscarriage by this time. Plus, due to my health issues, I had a 30-50% of miscarrying naturally, anyway.

The night before I was to have my 2nd office visit at Planned Parenthood, my boyfriend started having a problem. He had vented to his friend about the situation, and rather than be supportive, his friend decided to get up on his moral soap box and tell him what to do. He called us selfish, irresponsible and said he would never be able to look at me the same way again. Lovely. So now my boyfriend isn’t so supportive anymore. He’s got questions. Were we being irresponsible? Selfish? I didn’t think so. After all we both struggled with serious emotional issues. We both deal with anger and rage issues, and I have been diagnosed as clinically depressed and deal with some pretty serious anxiety. Maybe it was selfish NOT to have an abortion. This is when things started to go down hill.  My confidence in my decision was gone. I didn’t want a baby OR an abortion! A deep uneasiness started to rise in my chest. This wasn’t going to be as easy or as simple as I thought.

In the end we decided to go ahead with the abortion. We took our second 90 minute trek to Planned Parenthood. The first appointment was easy. No drama. No nonsense. This time though, of course, there had to be protesters. Here comes the drama. We bypassed those insensitive fucks and made our way through security and up to the 3rd floor. We prepaid and sat down in the crowded waiting room and waited. And waited. And waited. As I waited, the anxiety started to build. I started to panic. I thought, what if this is what’s supposed to happen? What if I’m supposed  to have a baby? Maybe, ironically, having a baby would be the catalyst that would change my life? Fuckity, fuck, fuck, fuck. I just sat there, gripping the chair, the room swirling around me. What if they called my name now? What would I do? Could I go through with it?

So basically here’s the story:

I was an immature, somewhat naive 27 year old. I had just quit my job from hell (sales) and had gotten a pretty killer job. I was happy. I was flying high….It was the calm before the storm.

During my second week, I decided to pick up some pregnancy tests on a lunch trip to Wal-Mart. I had made it a habit of taking pregnancy tests every couple months because I have a health condition that can cause infertility and irregular periods. Being sexually active, I tried to take a pregnancy test now and again, since I wasn’t always getting my monthly “all-clear” (a.k.a. menstruation), just to make sure.

So on the 3rd day of my second week of my new job, in the late afternoon, I took the infamous First Response box down the hall to the bathroom, unwrapped the shiny white wrapper, and well, did the deed. Confident that I wasn’t pregnant, my mind drifted to thoughts of how awesome my new job was, and how glad I was that I’d waited for such a great opportunity instead of accepting a less lucrative offer. I glanced down at the pee stick and my heart dropped into the toilet bowl. Holy fucking shit hell fuck. There were two lines. Two fucking condescending pink little lines. I was f-ing pregnant! How did this happen?

(How it happened was probably covered in your middle school health class, and therefore I will not go into that topic at this time. If you have questions, or the fundamentalists in your town got all that unholy sex promotion banned from your middle school, you can learn more here.)

How: you’ve probably got that covered, but the ‘when’ was glaringly obvious. Christmas night, the last time I had gotten frisky with my boyfriend of 5 years. My heart was racing. My head was spinning. I started to panic. How could this happen to me? I was supposed to be infertile! I never wanted kids!! I had decided years ago, that I was too emotionally insane to properly care for a child. I could barely care for my exuberant pit bull. Shit. Shit. Shit.

I got in my car and raced home to tell my man. The whole way, I talked myself into an abortion. I had just gotten an awesome job, finally making a decent salary. With our combined salaries, my boyfriend and I could afford to buy a nicer home together and maybe even take a real vacation! A vacation somewhere that requires air travel and a passport! Now all of that would be ruined. An abortion was my only hope at salvaging my life. I’d heard it time and time again: Babies suck all of your energy and free time, and they poop a lot. Hell no, I wasn’t letting that happen to me now.

When I got home, I told my boyfriend the bad news, and despite his suggestion that it might not be as bad as I was making it sound, I made my first appointment at Planned Parenthood.