Do you remember the exact moment in time when the course of your life was forever altered and life as you knew it was never going to be the same? One morning I woke up an my Dad was my best friend. By the time my head hit the pillow we would rarely talk again.

The morning started almost the same as it always did for a 13 year old girl living on a farm with her parents. Counting the minutes till my mom would leave for work so I can run outside and smoke half a cigarette and have the other half on the way to the field house. Wasting time I brushed my teeth and that was when the first wave of nausea over took me. I stopped brushing my teeth then and just counted the minutes.

Smoking was not in the cards that day and as I was rushing towards the school a thought hit me. Was my period late? Was that even a thing? Can this be happening for real? There is no time to think thoughts like that. But I had to make time for thoughts just like that. By lunch time I was sitting in my counselling office waiting for the Doctor to call with the results. The two girlfriends I chose to tell were excited about the prospect of having a baby to play. That is all said and good my friends but who is going to be getting up every two to three hours for the rest of their life? All I could think about was my Dad and how everything between us was going to change. I think that was my biggest fear. Not about the life that was growing inside of me but how I was going to tell my Dad.

The silver lining came when my counselor decided to call my mom at work and get her to come in. We decided to tell my Dad together away from the house. Just in case. My Dad tried so hard to prevent this scenario but here we were. There was nothing more that could be done. Before this super controlling and abusive boyfriend came into my life it was just me and my Dad. We would play catch until dusk with a sprinkling a ball games mixed in between. He was more than my Best Friend he was my life line and Coach. I still love him to this day even though I shattered his heart.

When you have an abortion at my age you will always be the slut. It doesn’t matter how you got to be that way it will always be your fault. The irony is there was a pack of birth control pills in my underwear drawer. Marvelon. My mom went to get them with me. She was trying to prevent the same scenario that happened to her. She had my sister at 14 now here I was just the same. The reason why I never decided to take those pills is right around the same time I started going to youth group and they had me believe that it was ok to say no. They told me through sermon that you can always chose to be abstinent. My older boyfriend would always hurt me in order to get what it is that he wanted. He would take out his anger out on me in so many ways. Biting and putting out cigarettes was easiest because you could always put them in places others can’t see.

I remember once he forced me to have sex with him in front of his younger sister. All I wanted was to die I hated everything that I was. In his desire to control everything about me I stopped doing all the things that I loved. I just sat there in that house waiting for a miracle and then one was granted to me. I think where everybody is wrong is having an abortion doesn’t make it so you were never pregnant to begin with. Everything is just that much worse because you are always plagued with what if.

When it was all over I tried to go back to playing ball. My Dad quit coaching that year. He couldn’t even look at me anymore. Before he sent me away that summer he came into my room. Patted my knee and said I am proud of your grades than not much more was ever said. He worked away a lot and also hated coming home. I killed more than my baby that day. I killed all my families dreams. After he came and got me at the end of that summer nothing was ever going to be the same not now or ever. I didn’t want to play ball anymore because it was always me and my Dad’s thing. He pawned me off on anybody who would play catch with me. Why couldn’t I have just listened? In my mind I like to believe that there was no way I could have met the man of my dreams at the age. If that were true, however, how come so many people I know from back then did fall in love and have kids?

I try to be kind to the girl inside who is broken and has suffered the loss of her childhood dreams. The biggest dream I ever had was to watch our families prosper and grow old together. I close my eyes and obsess over that time. My heart tries desperately to heal all that I have done although I know there will never be a way. The reasons I search for to validate my existence are quick and somewhere far between this reality and maybe the next. They lay in an alternate existence of time one I will never get to see.