A letter to my unborn son 24 years later
Dear Baby Kameron, You would be 24 years old (June 24), Mid-Summer’s Day, my favorite time of year. I mourn you every day. You would have had beautiful strawberry blonde hair, blue eyes, been a fast thinker, and so amazing.
I was so in love with your father. He pursued me and we worked together well. It felt fated. With that, we drew up a prenuptial agreement and I became pregnant. It turned out that he was married and couldn’t have more kids. I believe all children are blessings. I broke off the relationship, but he broke into the house with a gun where your 3-year-old sister was sleeping. I had no choice but to drop your sister off to safety and go with him to the clinic for an abortion. He stood by my side with that gun in his fanny pack. I was afraid to do or say anything, but got a permanent restraining order based on the helpers at the clinic testifying on my behalf later. Ironic how he was such a “religious” person.
I thought that I had grown enough beyond what I grew up with to make good choices, but turns out there’s a thing about growing up in that environment that blinds you to that type of behavior in other relationships and it feels familiar or normal. Your sister’s father threw me around the house trying to have me abort her before she was a viable embryo so she was untouched by this. I wished that I had been the one to never have been born, and I was destroyed by you not being in our lives. I had to live for your sister. We were so very poor being rejected by family and having limited opportunities.
I expect you know all this as I believe you watch over us. And that you know I believe firmly in a person’s personal choices on how they walk in the world, including abortion. We each have to answer to our own Creator for what we do in life. Abortion wasn’t for me, but everyone’s situation is individual, and your sister’s anatomy could kill her if she attempted to have children. I’m glad you aren’t in a physical body now, with the COVID creating meaner people who do whatever they can to get what they want. It’s not safe to go to the grocery stores at certain hours, there is little to no health care. Men often overtly objectify women and girls like they are perusing a mailorder catalog. It feels like kindness doesn’t exist except in remote corners of society.
After the Great Depression, your great-grandmother was told by doctors that she should abort your grandmother because of her Indigenous blood, and that she would die if she carried to term. So, she raised your grandmother at an arm’s length, to prevent heartbreak when that death would come. What that created was your grandmother feeling unloved, choosing poorly and even birthing kids as weapons to leverage against your grandfather. With that type of experience, all I knew growing up was that I was unloved while the two of them fought. They both didn’t have the capacity to be parents. This part of your story is called historic trauma handed down from genocide and I didn’t know what I was passing on. Today certain ideas are in our world where politicians sexually assault women or girls and still get elected, where people are actively undermining the Constitution, and regular people believe anything they’re told, creating a huge division among us all. Because of all that, Roe vs. Wade was reversed. While no woman uses abortion as a birth control method, this strips females of their full autonomy and being equal citizens alongside of men. In 2022, no one considers holding men accountable — it is a world about power over “others.” This stuff still isn’t taught in school, so it seems to grow bigger with each generation. I shudder to think what would have happened if abortions weren’t available for that terrible moment when you left me and what you would have suffered your whole life alongside of me, or even as an adult now. I did not choose your sister over you, I chose both of you when I did not take more action at the time. I wished you had been born, but perhaps that was God’s design also. Forever with Love, Your Mother.