“Look at how cute you were!” The text from my mother was accompanied by a photo of me at around 8 years old, when I was a flower girl at a relative’s wedding. The bride and I wore white dresses; we each held a bouquet of roses and baby’s breath. My smile was naive, milk teeth showing. I was missing one in the front. I’d seen the photo before but not for years. A rock formed in my stomach; I knew it was me, but I didn’t recognize myself as that little girl. I tapped the screen to close the text app. I wept. 

My parents divorced when I was 5. At 7, we moved in with my mother’s old flame. He drank. He’d soon turn violent, and my mother would follow suit on both counts. We didn’t know that when the photo was taken. 

I was a precocious child and a voracious reader. I knew big words but not always what they meant. I was probably also a little sassy, a combination that didn’t bode well around grown-ups who liked to drink and sometimes got violent when the empty beer cans began to pile up. My childhood had scores of fill-in-the-blank details regarding alcoholism and domestic violence. However, this story is not about those years. 

The violence and alcoholism escalated. I lashed out. In homes like mine, this often happens. Someone becomes known as the black sheep, and the family pins their issues on them. I was that sheep. My mother gave up custody when I reached 13 and turned me over to the family court system. Over the years, my placements ranged from juvenile detention to residential programs to group homes. 

The goal of the foster care system is to reunite children with their families, if possible. My social worker was kind and saw a bright something in me that she knew the system would crush. When I was 14, she helped my mother make plans to move to Arizona near our closest relatives. This was a beacon of hope, a carrot on a stick; once my mother moved away from her boyfriend, I’d be able to go home. I talked about the move with my counselors and the other kids. That summer, I had a hard time thinking about other things. Moving to Arizona was a mantra I couldn’t get out of my head. 

“You’ll go home as soon as we can get your mother on her feet,” my social worker said. I studied her dark ponytail and glasses. She was younger than my mother. She’d never lied to me. It was easy to believe what she said. 

“How soon?” I asked. “When will I get to go to a new school?” I weighed the possibility of moving right away and starting my first day of high school in Arizona rather than another placement.

“When are we moving, Mama?” I asked. I was on a day pass. On Saturdays, I was allowed out for a few hours. We went for Italian food at a strip mall restaurant every week, then we’d run her errands. I pushed spaghetti around on my plate. I’d always order water and the cheapest item on the menu so my mother could save up for the move.

“Soon. I just need to get some things in order.” 

My mother dragged a piece of bread through the sauce on her plate. It was always a similar answer: “I need more time.” “Soon.” “Be patient.” It took me a long time to realize she was only ever saying, “We’ll see.” Later, she’d drop me off at the residential center and go home to her boyfriend. 

Summer came and went. I started high school in the same center. I spent holidays there when some of the other kids got to visit home. Home was still unsafe for me with my mother’s boyfriend there. I trusted my social worker and my mother. I believed she was moving. Someone would have told me otherwise, but there were delays. I didn’t know what they were, but it was easy to convince myself that I was at fault. 

I considered the delay often, wondering what I’d done to make her mad. I needed to be better: better behaved, better grades, better daughter. I obsessed over this but never arrived at the correct answer. “Good enough” fit. I vowed to make myself good enough that she’d finally move and let me come home. 

Fast-forward through my teenage years. I bounced around from placement to placement. Moving to Arizona lost its form as language. It was as much a part of me as my hair color or the shape of my hands. My mother was moving. All I needed to do to get her there was to be good enough.

We never moved to Arizona. I believed I wasn’t good enough. I turned 18 and aged out of the system. 

Fast-forward through my 20s. I was angry but lashing out only at myself. There was nobody around to tell me certain things weren’t a good idea. There were drugs, some worse than others. I took my clothes off for money. I pierced and tattooed myself in regrettable ways. I went to jail. Twice. I was not good enough, and I was hell-bent on proving that to myself and everyone else. 

Fast-forward a bit more, because I got my shit together in an exceptional way. “Good enough” and “moving to Arizona” had been there since I was a teenager and they’d never left. It was the only way I could relate to my mother. Thus, without realizing what I was doing, I spent many years demonstrating that I was good enough. I got an education and a good corporate job. I have initials behind my last name. I married well. I spent lavishly on my mother; I had no idea how else to demonstrate “good enough.” 

I had anxiety. I had mood swings. I had insomnia. I had medication to dull everything to a perfectly flat line. However, regardless of my achievements, I never stopped trying to be good enough. Sometimes, anxiety paralyzed me when I’d leave my mother’s house. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t need to. I had a pill for that. 

Circle back to my cell phone, the text message, “Look at how cute you were!” and the photo of me as a flower girl. 

“That little girl had no idea,” I sobbed to my husband, referring to my photo in third person. It was an ugly cry. I was red-faced and shaking. I wiped my nose on my sleeve. He wrapped me in his arms, unsure of what to say. My tears dampened his shirt. He knew every inch of my history. “She might as well have been following a bouncy ball toward the edge of a cliff.” The child in the photo had never been hit, kicked or slapped by a grown man. She’d never let strangers pay to touch her. 

What is the opposite of a damaged human? The answer is that photo. I was shattering in my husband’s arms, remembering what I’d been through: physical violence, abandonment, longing for my mother to love me enough to move to Arizona and all the ways I laid down in the gutter in anger at myself. I pulled away from my husband. 

“Look at how cute you were,” I repeated my mother’s text message between sobs. “You did this to me,” I spat at her, sobbing, even though she was many miles away. I collapsed into my husband again. “You never moved. That little girl had no idea what was coming.”

I had a powerful moment of clarity: I’d spent decades trying to be good enough when it was no longer feasible for me to “come home.” Our entire relationship was based on what moving to Arizona meant to my teenage self. 

I haven’t spoken to my mother in a few years. You’re not supposed to say this out loud: I wish she would die. I’ll mourn, not for the loss of her as she is but for the loss of the mother I never had. I’d like to get it over with. I want to grieve for that little girl, begin to heal myself and finally move on. It won’t break me, because I’ve built a solid support system in my life. However, I know it will try. 

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I Wish My Mother Would Die So I Can Get On With My Grieving

I work for a mining company. We mine sand. I've been there two years now, but I've been doing mechanic-type stuff for years. I live in a rural part of New Jersey. People are great out here, but if you're talking about ideologies, it's definitely more conservative.

I have a kid on the way, and I’m really excited. I can’t wait, to be honest. I’m more ready than my wife is. I’m excited about the whole experience, I guess. Honestly, it’s something I never thought I'd go through until recently.

I know that having a baby is pretty intense for the woman. So for me to be around to help my wife through that recovery period is a big deal. I need to be there to help. I think it's unfair just to have someone be like, “Alright, well, I'm going back to work.” 

My wife and I will be raising our kid pretty much by ourselves. I’ve got family around, but we’re not super close. For the most part, it’s just my wife and me, and that’s probably how it’ll stay. So it’s extra important for me to be able to be here to help out and pick up some of the slack.

But also, I just want to experience this to the fullest. This is my child—my first child—and I want to be there during this time. I'm having a daughter, and I want to be there for her. Obviously, I’ll be there for her in the dad role or whatever, but I also want to be there for every aspect. I don't want to just be like, “Yeah, I make money; you should be thankful you have running water,” and that's it. Being a good dad is pretty much the bottom line, and I think a lot of that is just being around for life as it happens and not just going out to make as much money as you can. Because it's never enough anyway, you know? 

So I’m taking the full 12 weeks of family leave that I’m entitled to through the federal Family and Medical Leave Act to be there for my wife and baby. I mean, that's what they give you. So I don't see a reason not to.

I’ve gotten a lot of pushback for my decision to take time off. It’s actually kind of crazy. It really doesn't affect anyone else at all, but they all have a lot to say about it, for whatever reason. 

At first, it was just at work. Not from my bosses, which is what I hear the most from other people. I have neighbors that say they got a lot of grief from their bosses, like, “Oh, what are we gonna do? We're gonna be shorthanded. It's really going to screw us over for you not to be here.” For me, it’s coming mostly from my co-workers, asking why I have to take all of the time I have coming, which doesn’t make any sense to me, since they have the same rights to time off.

My parents have been even worse. My mom called me out of the blue to tell me she doesn’t approve of me taking family leave. “That’s not what a man does,” she said. “You’re supposed to be out there making money.” She went on like that for 30 minutes. It got so crazy, my wife recorded some of it. 

There are a lot of people who think that the man’s role is supposed to be the breadwinner, that his responsibility is to be making money for his family, not being there to spend time with them. A lot of guys like it that way. I’ve had men be like, “Well, don’t you want to be at work?” I was talking to a co-worker and asked him if he’d taken family leave, and he was like, “No, I was back at work the next day.” I asked him what his wife did, and he said he didn’t know. I didn’t say it to him, but I was like, “You don’t care? You just went back to work?” 

These other people aren’t the ones who are having the baby. They’re not the ones going through the physical pain or doing all of the exhausting work. 

I want to be there in whatever ways my wife and our baby need me for. I know for sure I'm going to be doing all the chores. She’s going to have her hands full. I just want to make sure she has everything she needs, that she doesn’t have to worry about laundry, doesn't have to worry about dishes or stupid stuff like that. 

Plus, I want to spend time with my newborn too. I want to spend time with this new person. I've always wanted a daughter for some reason. People tell me I'd be a good girl dad. It’s not any one thing that’s exciting to me about it—it’s the whole thing. Just being there and watching somebody grow up and helping them through all this stuff and giving advice or whatever—just normal stuff.

These other people can keep trying to push their ideas on me. I'm not letting any of that change my mind. I'm still taking all my leave. I just think it's bizarre that all these people think it's so wrong to do that. They all seem to think I'm taking advantage of a system or something, when I feel like I'm doing the opposite. Family leave is a government program, and I pay my taxes. It is what it is, you know? 

I'm not going to let anything get in the way of that. There's always another job. There’s maybe not always another family, you know, but you’ve got to do what you can with that. You can disagree and do what you think is right. And that’s what I'm doing.

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I’m a New Dad Taking Family Leave—and People Are Mad

A woman has a right to decide. That’s the typical argument of a pro-choice person. This is also what I repeatedly told myself when I made that choice. A choice I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

When Roe v. Wade was overturned, I felt relieved because thousands of women would no longer subject themselves to a traumatizing experience that I still regret to this day. Despite that relief, I felt alone, as most women in my community, including close friends and family members, rallied together to speak out against the Supreme Court’s decision. “My body, my choice” posts and hashtags were posted in feed after feed, and I couldn’t help but wonder if those individuals have had to make that choice themselves or understood the negative repercussions it could have.

I made that choice nine years ago. Although I try to bury it, the procedure is as clear to me as if it happened yesterday. As much as I wanted to have a child and start a family, at that time, I didn’t feel like I was ready for several reasons. I was 23 and in college, just a semester short of completing my undergrad. I was afraid that a child would hold me back and that others would judge me for it. Looking back now, trying to make sense of that decision, I realize that there was always a negative stigma built around children being such a burden to women; as I saw it then, women could not be successful if they had a child.

I made that decision mainly out of fear. I was raised in a traditional Filipino Catholic home with a strict mother. I thought that if I kept the baby, there would be pressure for the baby’s father and me to get married, and I feared that I’d have to give up on pursuing my undergrad. I questioned my future and the likelihood of disappointing my family. I’m a nonpracticing Catholic with a firm belief in science and logic. I believed in God, but that did not mean that life did not have gray areas. Because the abortion was a procedure legally available to me, and one that could be kept a secret, I ultimately carried through with it.

When I arrived at the clinic, I tried not to think about how I felt or what consequences I’d face. I focused on how I’d be in and out, back to living my everyday life soon as if nothing had happened. I repeatedly told myself this to keep from changing my mind because I was deeply conflicted. During the procedure, I wanted to find every reason to say that I didn’t want to go through with it, but I remained silent.

The doctor informed me that I’d be awake but groggy during this procedure and that the anesthesia would take several minutes to take effect. I heard the device switch on, which sounded like a vacuum with loud suction—a noise that reminded me of being terrified by a vacuum when I was a little girl, running away from my mother as she plowed through the carpeted floor. I always thought that the vacuum was a monster, ready to suck the life out of me. Ironically, as an adult, I was the monster allowing a vacuum to end the life of my unborn child.

The procedure began. I felt the pressure, and then I felt the suction. I held my breath as I felt the doctor maneuver the thin tube around my canal. I held the nurse’s hand throughout the procedure, my right hand tightly sandwiched between her two hands. I remember painfully looking up at her in tears.

It felt longer than I anticipated, and I wanted it to end. Then, the suction stopped, and the doctor swiftly removed the tube and the clamp simultaneously. I breathed in deeply, letting out a trembling exhale and whimpered. The nurse brought her head closer to mine while still holding my hand and said, “You are no longer pregnant.”

These words still painfully haunt me to this day.

I will always live to regret what I did. This has been an unbearable emotional burden to carry, and now being a mother of two boys, I know there was no good reason to justify why I did it. My decision was out of convenience because of what I felt then.

Becoming a mother has shifted my perspective in many ways, notably in ways that could have shaped a different decision back then. My two boys are the best things that have happened to me, and the world did not stop for me because I chose to be a mother—because I did not let it.

The more research I’ve done on this controversial topic, the more I discover that, logically and scientifically, it doesn’t make sense to me to prioritize one life over the other. Although I understand that there are special circumstances that warrant getting an abortion, such as rape, incest and medical conditions that endanger both the mother and baby, I believe the narrative that terminating a pregnancy is a woman’s right regardless of her reasoning is hypocritical and needs to be challenged. There are other ways to support each other as women than to deprive lives.

Similarly, the narrative that an abortion is a common, everyday medical procedure is problematic. It sensationalizes ending the lives of unborn children, and I find it no different from sensationalizing murder and suicide. Supporting these narratives, in my opinion, perpetuates the idea that women don’t have any other choice and they must choose one over the other: a career over a family or their life over another’s.

Having a baby is scary. There are many uncertainties, fears and worries that stem from an undefined future. As much as we try to plan and prepare ourselves, we’ll never know what can happen. But having a baby is also filled with an overwhelming sense of love and hope that we can, in turn, instill in our children.

We hope that they grow up to save the world. We hope that they have better opportunities, better relationships, better chances and better lives than we did because there’s a possibility that things will get better. We choose to have faith that it will. Otherwise, why would we be living? Children give us that hope. They grow to question, wonder and dream—things that we adults have done and should give children the chance to do.

As women, we should ask ourselves if we should let fear and uncertainty dictate denying a life. That very choice would be to deny the possibilities of a better life and a better world. A choice that will continue to perpetuate fear.

As the proverb reminds us, it takes a village to raise a child. As a community, we can all benefit from working together to be proactive rather than be remedial and resort to abortion as a solution. We can be proactive with better policies that support working mothers and fathers. We can choose love. We have the choice to support our community, build stronger foundations to help uplift the difficulties and burdens parents face and raise our children to think beyond themselves as individuals. We have the choice to rally together on this highly controversial subject and choose to prioritize educating our youth about prevention through contraception and the other choices that women have, such as adoption and safe haven laws in certain states.

Everyone has a different experience that shapes their opinion on abortion. Unfortunately, my experience is living with the reality that I chose my life over that of another. Although I don’t think it's right to shame any woman who has made this difficult choice, it’s one that I’m not proud of.

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I Wish My Mother Would Die So I Can Get On With My Grieving

I’m a New Dad Taking Family Leave—and People Are Mad

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