The Fortune of All Womankind

Ann Powers

Word Count 1435

It is not quite dusk, not quite winter. The highway, sky, trees, even the occasional other car, all shades of gray.  I am perhaps 25. Mother, perhaps 50.  There is a quiet ease between us, the hum of the car the only sound. Then my mother runs her hands through her hair and says,  “Did you know I was pregnant again after Sue?” 

I re-grip the steering wheel and glance at her. She is staring straight ahead, out the window, decidedly not looking at me. Her profile is sharp against the dusky sky. Her hair has been short for several years now, but I still feel a little jolt when I don't see the classic French twist she wore throughout my childhood and my college days, the style she abandoned after my father died, after she sold the land they had purchased with her small inheritance: the sixty acres, the house, the pond, the two horses, the tractor. All gone. 

When you begin again, there is a long tender period when the entire body is nothing but raw flesh. It is a painful process. To survive you must retreat to a dark, shallow place. Head for still waters. Warm, but not too warm. Nutrient-rich. You need calcium to regrow your outer layer. To harden up. If the water you swim in is nutrient poor you may never form that all-important new shell that will hold the new version of you.  Each time you molt, you emerge forever a little different. With luck, you grow into it and it becomes your skin.

 She moved into town to try out living in a regular house on a regular tree-lined street with a sidewalk and neighbors, to become a regular person, somebody less solitary. Each time I return to visit her at this “in-town house” I feel disoriented. Each time, her hairstyle is a different version of short. She hasn’t settled on the new version of herself yet, but she is getting closer. 

If she is gradually remaking herself, she is also remaking our understanding of her, of her life before and during her marriage to our father, the life we lived with them, but hadn’t really seen or understood, in the way of children, I suppose.  But this?

 “Pregnant?” I echoed. 

As the car moves steadily onward into the dusk, quietly, and slowly, she tells me that when my little sister was about four,  she had found herself pregnant with what would have been their fourth child, after me, my brother, and my little sister. But when she told my father, he said no. They couldn’t afford a fourth child. She needed to get an abortion.

 “At the time,” she said in a wistful voice, “At the time, I felt I couldn’t override him. He was the breadwinner.” 

I take a minute to absorb the fact of this sibling who never was, vetoed out of existence by my father.

“You wanted the baby?” 

“Yes,” she said with an apologetic smile, “I would have kept it.”

But she didn’t. 

Couldn’t. 

Instead, she took a bus to a different city where she got an abortion, spent the night in a hotel, then took the bus home the next day. 

As she spoke, a memory surfaced from my childhood: We were standing outside, bundled up in coats, arms clutching ourselves to keep warm, the sky that classic Pennsylvania winter gray, the same color as the pavement. We stood in a row - me, my brother, my little sister, and then our dad - as our mom got on a bus to “go get an operation.” She was tense but smiling. He might have been smiling too. Encouraging her. Go on now. We’ll be fine. Go, go, go. Shooing her toward the bus, up those steps. 

She was back home the next day. Our parents told us the operation was a success and she was fine. She said nothing more. Until this road trip, so many years later, when I no longer live at home and my father no longer lives.

I drive silently, trying to do the math: if Sue was 4, I was 11, so . . .it was… when? 1969? Before Roe then. That’s why she had to take the bus to . . . somewhere else?

I don’t say, “But where did you go?”

I don’t say, “A bus? Alone?”  

I don’t say, “I had an abortion too.” 

But I had. Ten years after hers. Was her abortion anything like mine? Had my mom been in an all-white room? Did a concerned face reassure her? Did blood clots drip out of her body in the middle of the night? For me, it was bad enough to feel the beginning of a life ripped out of me and cry myself to sleep in my boyfriend’s arms, but I wanted that abortion. For her? When she wanted to keep and grow that tenacious little seedling into a baby. 

I concentrate on breathing slowly and wait for the knot in my throat to loosen before I speak.  

“Mom?” I ask, “How was it?”

She looks out the side window for a long time. Finally, she says softly, “It was lonely in that hotel room.” 

Dusk turns to night, car headlights flash on, a few stars appear in the darkening sky. The trees on the side of the road blur. I imagine my mother lying on a rough brown bedspread covering a thin mattress in some Motel 6, staring at the ceiling, alone with her scraped-out womb. 

*

I married late and we didn’t start trying to have a child until I was 39. After a miscarriage, I gave birth for the first time when I was 41. At age 43 I desperately wanted a second child. My husband initially went along with the project, but when we kept losing pregnancies to miscarriages, he was ready to let the idea of a second child go. He saw some definite advantages to not having another kid. Ours was a discussion about a second child, not a fourth, but I imagine my parents’ conversation to have been similar – a conversation about what we could afford and what was practical versus my desire for a child, a conversation framed as a contest between the rational and the irrational, facts versus emotions. 

But unlike my mother - perhaps because of my mother  - I believed that my feelings counted, and mine were strong. My body thrummed with need. I was willing to articulate that need: I want a baby, I don’t care that we’ll be old, I don’t care that it will cost money, I don’t care that we’ll be trying to figure out how to pay for that kid’s college at the same time that we’re trying to figure out how to retire and live on a fixed income. I’m not claiming it’s logical or easy, I’m claiming it’s important to me. Even as I spoke the words, they sounded at once both imperative and petulant.  

(Why petulant? What is this assessment that emotion, especially female emotion, is both selfish and childish? Why was it lodged in my head? Was this part of what my mother faced? Not only my father’s overpowering certainty but her own self-doubt? Maybe for both of them, emotions were things to be brought to heel, obedient to the rule of the rational.) 

Eventually, my husband acquiesced and we adopted a beautiful baby boy. Years later, when I asked him why, he shrugged. “You wanted a baby more than I didn’t want one.” 

I suspect that would never have been my father’s answer no matter how articulate or passionate my mother had been. 

*

Since then she has created several other iterations of herself - a later marriage to a more amenable man and a life as an outdoor adventurer. Then, when that husband passed, she molted again. My mother is now happy on her own. She walks 10 miles a day, plays violin in an orchestra and a quartet, sings in a choir, and reads voraciously. She talks with her children on Zoom every Sunday. Although she has had several suitors, she turned them down. Independence is at the top of her list.  

For me? I remain married to a good man. But I am painfully aware of the rising tide pushing us backward. I too am changing.

*

When I was young, my parents loved to listen to Joan Baez sing folk ballads, including this lament:

Oh poor is the fortune of all womankind

She’s always controlled, always confined.

Controlled by her parents until she’s a wife;

A slave to her husband the rest of her life.

My mom and I would smile ruefully at each other, raised eyebrows acknowledging the little bit of truth behind the melodramatic lines.  We are smiling at each other, still.

Ann is a writer. Her creative non-fiction has been published in Brain, Child; Literary Mama; and Oregon Literary Review. In addition to my creative life, I've had quite a fun and varied career as an arts administrator and college professor. You can read more about me at my website: https://www.annwhitfieldpowers.com