Read More: A Q&A with Maureen D. Hall
Can you call it controlling if your boyfriend insists on keeping your journal because he’s afraid it might fall into the “wrong hands,” and the contents—entries you wrote about being pregnant and having an abortion—would land the two of you in deep shit?
You can’t blame him for wanting to cover his ass; you’d personally rather die than have your mother find out. It’s a fact that, sometimes, you’re a little spacey, despite being an A student, president of your high school’s National Honor Society, and second chair violin. But spacey doesn’t mean irresponsible, right? Your boyfriend—let’s call him Henry, even though that’s not his real name, because he’s all about anonymity—is worried you’ll leave the diary hanging around and your mother will find it. Which, in a way, is degrading, like he’s infantilizing you. I mean, you don’t go around accusing him of being irresponsible or treating him like child.
To be fair—because you’re nothing if not fair—you partly get where he’s coming from. Last year, when you had your first major pregnancy scare, you journaled about it. You were 16, naïve and freaking out, and erroneously thought that’s what diaries are for. Then your mother read it and was not happy. But seriously, what are the odds of that happening twice?
You’ve kept a journal forever. You’re a writer, even though you’re going to college for microbiology, because your mother doesn’t consider writing a real job. She thinks it’s a hobby, something you do in your spare time. Although, ironically, she acted like your writing was pretty goddamn real last year when she accidentally found and read your journal.
It fell off your dresser, where you’d left it a thousand times. A coincidence, your mother swears, the journal falling at the precise moment she set down a stack of your clean clothes, landing open to the incriminating page that proved not only were you having sex, but you weren’t even being smart about it.
“So. You think you’re pregnant?” She’d confronted you the second you walked in the door. “Get in the car. I made an appointment at an abortion clinic.” Like it was her decision. You knew you should have done your own laundry.
“It’s okay. My period came this morning.”
“Well, isn’t that convenient,” she snapped. Chaos and mass hysteria ensued, threats of grounding until you were 30, or better yet, shipping you off to boarding school. Like she could afford that. She’d vowed to call Henry’s parents, and you believed her enough to warn him, causing Henry to preemptively come clean to his own parents. He didn’t go so far as to tell them the two of you had done it, exactly, only that you’d talked about doing it. But to his parents the real crime was your ridiculous urge to memorialize your thoughts in ink and then carelessly leave them exposed for anyone to find.
And they were right. The predicament you’d landed in had nothing to do with laundry or where you left the journal; you were doomed from the first day you ever dared set down your private musings in actual words on the page. Fortunately or not, that doesn’t stop you. Because you’re a writer and writers write.
“Maybe, from now on you don’t need to write everything down?” Henry’s father had the audacity to suggest when you were over for dinner. His ballsy old grandmother in her gray wig cornered you by the front door. “In my day, we called it spooning.” She leaned forward to whisper in your ear, “Be careful, my dear girl, if you know what I mean,” her clawed fingers gripping your forearm. It was mortifying, these people knowing your business.
“I get it, the whole saving your butt thing,” you’d tell Henry later, slightly irritated. “But did you have to throw me under the bus in the process?”
Fast forward to this year to when you actually do become pregnant, two months before graduation, six weeks till Prom. You’re no longer naive enough to write about it in your “usual” journal, but still, it’s like therapy, this inclination to record and interpret your thoughts; it’s what you do. You buy a small blank book and carry it everywhere, writing constantly, compulsively. You write that you can’t tell your mother you’re pregnant because she’d freak out and hate you forever. That having a baby now would derail your entire life. You bitch about the nausea, the exhaustion, the painfully swollen boobs. You scribble that, as a kid, you’d decided on eight children—four boys and four girls—and your earliest memories are of hoisting up babies, barely able to carry them because you were still a baby yourself. Your obsession with children is written into your DNA the same as your mousy brown hair and freckles. You find them everywhere—neighbors, cousins, kids playing in the shallow end of the town pool—and they find you. You yearn to be a mother. One Day. Not now. Your own mother never lets you forget that babies are a ton of work. But they’re also sweet and cuddly and—added bonus—yours would resemble you and/or Henry. Amazing smart sexy funny generous Henry. There’s no one you’d rather have a child with. No one.
But. Not. Now. Now you need to go to college to avoid ruining your life and ending up like your mother, working three jobs to pay rent and buy food and afford your violin classes and SAT prep, not to mention the occasional pair of shoes or jeans, because even after you eventually stop growing, clothes don’t last forever, you know.
If and when, one day, you do marry Henry, you want it to be because neither of you can imagine being with anyone else. Because you realize you’re the love of each other’s lives and cannot bear being apart another day. Not because of some patriarchal bullshit forcing you to marry, have this baby, and ultimately resent the hell out of each other. There’s also the irrational, or maybe-not-so-irrational, fear in the back of your mind: what if, for some unknowable reason, you do marry, have the kid, and Henry leaves? Just abandons you and your sweet, demanding, colicky, whining, never-sleeping, ever-present, imaginary potential baby? What if he finds himself a girlfriend who’s smarter and sexier and more fun and, oh yeah, doesn’t have an infant? It happens every day. It happened to your mother, and to your landlady, Mrs. Campbell, who looks the other way when your mom pays the rent late, because she’s been there and knows what it’s like.
So yeah, that’s the kind of stuff you scrawl in your special edition abortion journal that’s not really a journal. At least, you think that’s what you scrawled. You don’t know for sure though, because Henry eventually confiscates it, and you never get to read it again, ever. Before it’s gone, it’s ashes, like in Ring Around the Rosie, only literally. […]
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Maureen D. Hall is a New England based writer/poet whose work has appeared in numerous publications including, Paterson Literary Review, Hospital Drive, Journal of New Jersey Poets, American Journal of Nursing, Vineyard Poets, Island Quintet. Her short fiction has appeared in The MacGuffin, Isele Magazine, Alma Magazine, Halfway Down the Stairs, Sunspot Literary, After Dinner Conversation, and Calyx. Her fiction and poetry have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Read More: A Q&A with Maureen D. Hall