Before Me: The Case for My Mother’s Abortion by Danielle DeTiberus

1979’s number one Billboard hit was The Knack’s “My Sharona,” written by a 25 year old obsessed with a 17 year old high school student. She had a boyfriend and wasn’t interested, but the man persisted and wooed her with concerts and lyrics like, Never gonna stop, give it up./ Such a dirty mind. Always get it up for the touch/ Of the younger kind. Seventeen year old Sharona posed braless on the cover of the band’s single, her dark, erect nipples prominent through her thin white tank top.

Perhaps this song played as an 18 year old Irish Catholic girl got pregnant by a 19 year old would-be drummer in the back of his pea green car. Her mother had only been dead a few years, so the pregnancy was not her first trauma. And it would not be her last.

My mother hates that I tell this story. My mother also tattooed the word poet in Gaelic on her wrist, presenting it as a surprise in honor of me. She contains multitudes. 

Once, when we were still speaking, my mother got drunk on cheap tequila in a cheap hotel room and began sobbing, telling me she had a secret that would change everything. I assured her that if the secret was that she’d considered aborting the fetus that ended up being me, then this was nothing to be ashamed about. Nothing would change, as I had assumed this reality since the moment I could understand what it meant to be a pregnant, motherless teenager. She assured me that this was not the secret, but after some questioning, promptly passed out.

Later, when I started to put the pieces together of my early childhood and had questions about possible sexual abuse, I could not turn to my mother with these questions. The woman who had been my only person for so many formative years was long gone. She’d made a boat for us and made sure neither of us drowned, but I grew tired of all that and longed for the shoreline. By the time I found land and turned back to show her my island, she’d already drifted too far beyond the breakers to reach. When I asked my aunt, a child when my mother was also a child raising a child, if this sexual abuse could have been the secret my mother almost revealed that night in the cheap motel filled to the brim with cheap tequila, my aunt told me it was probably another secret. So many secrets. And did I know, she whispered, how many abortions my mother had when I was young.

I love my aunt who mothered me throughout my childhood and who mothers me still when I need and want one. But I am fiercely loyal to my mother– or to be more precise, I am fiercely loyal to that young girl standing alone at her first proverbial crossroad. Something about my aunt’s voice in that moment made me sick. What in the world could possibly be shocking about a woman in her early 20s raising a child on her own, choosing not to have another child. We lived in a house often without heat, and my mother would preheat the oven before waking me so I could run down with clothes in hand and change in front of its warmth before school. 

1979’s number two Billboard hit was Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls.” Summer wrote the lyrics to the song after one of her record label’s employees was harassed by a police officer. The cop could only read the Black woman in a business suit as a sex worker. The toot toots and beep beeps mirrored the Johns pulling up in the cars, soliciting. Summer would later say that the song “had the message that, in a way, we’re all hookers to somebody.” Bad girls… sad girls… talking ‘bout the sad…bad girls.

Perhaps this song played as my soon to be mother and father drove home from the clinic on that chilly November morning. The leaves forming little tornadoes in the wind on the road before them. For this car ride and a little longer, the positive test result would be their shared secret. There was still a choice to be made. My soon-to-be father said the one word my mother begged him not to say, but how could he not. It had been six years since the US Supreme Court ruled to protect reproductive rights without excessive restrictions, and these teenagers in the car were so impossibly ill equipped. 

Later my mother would tell me how her hand was on the door handle as my father suggested she get an abortion, and how she thought for a moment about jumping out onto Route 84. She wouldn’t have known at this point that my soon to be father had seen his mother attempt the same end from the back seat of his father’s Chevy. So many backseats, so many secrets, so much alcohol and undiagnosed mental illness. My grandmother raised two boys while her husband stayed late in the city night after night, not alone. She had given up her career as a nurse to sip cocktails in a quiet Connecticut suburb. But that is another story. Or it is the beginning of the story I have already started. 

I have no idea why my mother wanted to give birth to a child at 19. Did she think the marriage would work? It did not. Did she think her own mothering might bring her closer to her mother? Perhaps it did. Surely at some point her mother must have regretted having seven children. Surely giving birth to and raising seven children in just over a decade took a toll on her body and her health. She died at 43. So many pregnant Margarets, so many ways to be an absent mother.

Many of my childhood memories are inaccessible to me– either because of trauma or because there is almost no one left to ask questions or for confirmation. My mother has most of my childhood pictures and home movies, a record of events just out of reach. She has her secrets, and some of mine. 

Last year, as I was dreaming of applying to Yaddo, I realized that the same place where Sylvia Plath– and so many writers I adore– wrote and walked the trails of upstate New York was probably only about ten minutes from the house I lived in when I was six or seven. We lived on a horse farm in Saratoga, my mother and her roommate/coworker and me. Was I six or seven? I emailed my mother to ask if she remembered the address or if she’d ever heard of Yaddo while she lived there. She and I had been tentatively emailing during the pandemic, though she refused to tell me where she lived and occasionally sent me screeds about my selfishness, my greed.

She responded to my email by telling me to fuck off and that she should have killed herself when she found out she was pregnant with me, too bad I didn’t jump out of the car on Rt 84. Was this the bottle or her undiagnosed mental illness talking. Was this a little bit of truth. A cocktail of all three, I suppose. 

In mid-November of 1979, when my mother was in the midst of making the first of many choices that would alter the course of her life, former governor of California and hack film actor Ronald Reagan announced that he would run for president of the United States. Jerry Falwell and what would become the new religious right in America would use abortion and the supposed morality of the Reagans as tools to ensure defeat of incumbent president Jimmy Carter. Reagan’s slogan was “Let’s Make America Great Again” and his campaign song was 1924’s hit “California Here I Come” which includes the lines “A sun-kissed miss said ‘Don’t be late.’”

Shortly after giving birth, my mother’s nurses tried to give her Parlodel to dry up her breast milk. If she hadn’t the wherewithal to refuse their many attempts to persuade her, how would she have afforded formula? When I was born in the summer of 1980, the number one hit song was Bette Midler’s “The Rose.” A frankly schmaltzy song from a schmaltzy film by the same name. Originally entitled Pearl, the filmmakers needed to change it after Janis Joplin’s family refused the rights to her life story. Probably because they could smell the stinker from a mile away. A woman’s life as written by two men.

Bette Midler now makes headlines mainly for being a white lady on Twitter, and has said ignorant shit that shows her hand as a person either lacking empathy or inoculated against it through her privilege, wealth, fame.  Her latest tweet controversy followed her directive that folks struggling to find formula to feed their babies should just breast feed, revealing of course that Bette forgot about biology or other people’s lived experiences. Because Bette’s brand of feminism isn’t intersectional; it’s a white, upper-class restrictive feminism that doesn’t make space for all the ways in which radical liberation manifests. That the right to choose is ingrained in the core ideology of feminism. 

The right to choose formula instead of breast milk. My mother choosing to give birth at 19 and then refusing the Parlodel insisted upon her so she could breast-feed. Or choosing not to give birth when she was already raising a toddler and then kindergartner on her own. 

Acknowledging reproductive rights in turn of course also acknowledges that a woman can do with her body what she wants. Without excessive restrictions. That she can write her own story. That Janis Joplin would choose to confront the bullying and hatred heaped on her by fully embracing her desire and finding physical pleasures where she could in her short life. But of course, no matter how much she fought for agency, there’s always going to be some dude named Dwight writing in the NY Times that “Joplin took in men and women the way most people take in the morning newspaper.” Dwight was reviewing a book about Janis written by another dude, John Cooke, her road manager from 67 till her death in 1970. In the book, John writes about a possible abortion that Joplin underwent in Mexico. Who knows if this is true. Who knows if this was the only time Janis had to make her way to another country to receive reproductive care she couldn’t receive in the States. Who knows what would have happened to her or to that child had she decided to or was forced to give birth. 

As someone who was once that child, as someone who has witnessed the mother who had a child before she was ready slowly succumb to addiction and mental illness over the years, I can speak intimately about the destructive, family shattering, psyche-scarring long term consequences of a woman having a child when she is not ready. And my mother chose to have me. She was not forced by her father or her boyfriend or the state or federal fathers and husbands that represented her in mostly theoretical terms. If my mother decided to finish college, though, if my mother didn’t have to marry my father in a shotgun wedding which would only last two years but would drastically alter both of their lives, if she could have had time to live her life, to pursue her goals unfettered by a crying, hungry, riotous, albeit wildly cute Shirley Temple look-alike baby, what would her life look like now?

And what of my life? Am I grateful for it? Of course. But I also have an irreparable wound that comes from being rejected and harmed by a woman who should not have had a child at 19. A woman who chose, yes, but who was raised in a strict Irish Catholic family and consumed a steady diet of misogyny in her religion, education, and pop culture. Technically, she had a choice. Just as Janis Joplin had the choice and the resources to fly to Mexico. Just as Donna Summer chose to have an abortion at 19, but then spent years in shame around it– as well as her sexualized industry persona– especially coming out of a strict religious household in which, for example, her father spanked her for wearing red nail-polish and told her, red nails are only for prostitutes. I guess we’re all hookers to somebody, even if it’s our own fathers.

Now we are on the precipice of facing even less choices, even more stigma. In June of 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, citing that access to abortion is not a constitutional right. This medical care is now left in the hands of state politicians. In my home of South Carolina, legislators wrote a six week ban a year before the Dobbs ruling so the “heartbeat act” could take effect just three days after the court’s decision. The law was found unconstitutional six months later, and perhaps it was this no– this affront to the established order of patriarchy– that led those same legislators to propose a bill allowing those who undergo abortions to face the death penalty. Not the coat hangers our mothers whispered about, but an updated punishment for this new century. Not a back alley medical death, but a more clinical, legislative one. Those with uteruses will continue to risk death and shoulder the shame while those without will go on tour, get a little apartment in the city, realize or abandon their childhood dreams on their own terms, wear what they want, fuck who they want, and then tell the story as they see fit.

Once, during an extended family vacation, my mother and her siblings and their spouses went out to a karaoke bar. After some drinks, everyone took their turn at the mic– surely in the late 80s, this was a thrilling novelty. The bar offered to record the songs and compile them on a cassette tape for a small fee. On it, my mother sings Crystal Gayle’s 1977 hit “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.” It’s a jazzy song filed under country because of the singer and the lyrics. It’s sad and stripped down, but the piano interlude is light and childlike, making it this hybrid mix of heartbreak and hope. Gayle sings, Tell me no secrets, tell me some lies/ Give me no reasons, give me alibis. The song is about sadness and how that sadness transforms us– sometimes for the worse and if we’re lucky, sometimes for the better.

My mother always sang when I was growing up, but she became more shy about it through the years. On that scratchy recording of that night in the bar though, a few drinks in, she sounded so beautiful. Like a star. It was maybe the first time I got a glimpse of the person she’d dreamed she’d be. Before me. Before motherhood: a wide and roiling sea.

Danielle DeTiberus’ work has appeared in Academy of American Poets, Copper Nickel, Hunger Mountain, The Missouri Review, River Styx, Waxwing and elsewhere. Her poems have been featured in Verse Daily and included in the anthology Best American Poetry. She currently serves as the Program Chair for the Poetry Society of South Carolina, bringing nationally renowned poets to Charleston for readings and seminars. 

19 July 2023