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Retirement Talk for Boomers, Seniors, and Retirees |
Frog Spit
Jackie Spinks
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Winning a Golden Glob Award for mothering, wasn’t Mama’s goal. Her goal was to turn out a finished product that was able to cope with the peaks and valleys of life without ending up in prison or going berserk. And hey, if she had to manipulate to do it…fine. She’d manipulate.
A fear that loomed like a Gorgon monster so hideous everyone who looked upon it turned to stone was a pre-marriage pregnancy. It carried with it an accessory of gossip, societal contempt and a long life of low self-esteem. This was—remember—the twenties. Mama didn’t abort me (abortion was illegal and back alley) and as I was a seven pound, seven month baby she endured a cultural contempt and a lifetime of justifying her decision in having me.
First off, let me tell you about abortion back in those venerable days of the twenties and thirties when every woman worth her salt was a noisy anti-abortionist. Although, except for Mama who was a rabid anti-abortionist, most of the rest of my family, in spite of being Mormon were lukewarm jack abortionists, but if any one of our family loosened their anti-abortion faith, Mama tightened it up for them. I mean, if someone tried to pussyfoot around the subject, Mama set that pussyfooter right.
Her theory was that the only proper punishment for those who aborted was to hang them or fry them. It was a much less offensive act, to murder an adult, as the adult was probably a good riddance and an odds-on, pain-in-the-collective-neck of society, while a baby only an inch long and so helpless was a different ball of wax. So spaketh Mama and I’m sorry to say—me. I was the ultimate stooge—a strict and loud death penalty advocate of those baby murderers.
Abortion came from having a low moral character and a lack of values-- but that was understood.
What wasn’t understood was that abortions also came from dealing with wild men. Fops, who wore coordinated shirts and ties, snap-brimmed hats and had clean fingernails. Those men with those hats were risky business. Women had to be on the alert for those fellows, those injectors of pregnancy and social ostracism.
“And just you mind, once they’ve trapped an innocent girl, got her in that hotel room, she’ll be unaware of what she’s doing and only awaken when it is too late—in the family way. Ruined.”
These “sheiks” would get a girl pregnant and disappear and the poor girl would have to go away, have the baby and then sign it away before it was born to keep from bringing scandal to herself and her family.
Mama often told me how her sister only escaped in the nick of time from one of those hat- wearing scofflaws. Her sister imagined she’d been in love and he’d almost talked her into proving it. But in the nick of time her good sense prevailed. Whew! That was a close one. She never wanted to be that close again. As for Mama, she insisted to her dying days I was a pre-mature baby.
The other alternative, if you got taken in was to disappear, go to one of the homes for pregnant girls and return to town with a baby. But oh, the shame of this. The disgrace of creeping off the “stage,” (the term used for buses in the thirties) and face everyone, with a baby in arms. Well, she might as well return with a 666 embossed on her chest and a Scarlet A tattooed on her forehead. She’d be THAT ostracized.
And anyone courageous enough to talk to her would be tainted by association. I sure wasn’t brave enough to talk to a fallen woman. And even if it had been Rosie, I would have walked on by, not recognizing her, rather than be tainted by my association with her.
But if she wanted to avoid all that and went for an abortion, which was illegal --woe betide her. Pity this poor little unborn soul, no chance to find a body, to be baptized and saved-- just a straight dive down the chute to the netherworld. Here the little unborn thing thought it had found a body and a murdering slut zapped its chances.
But the mother and baby would crisp in ground lava for all eternity. From about the age of fourteen, Mama would periodically thrust a newspaper at me about some woman who aborted and went on trial.
“She should have gotten the electric chair.” Mama would be so furious she’d froth at the mouth until she could hardly talk, “Killing a defenseless baby. But thank God, she’s in jail and can’t murder anymore. She got off too easy, though, with two years.” Mama would have cooked her without a trial.
Only men who drank up their Saturday paycheck infuriated Mama more.
And not yet versed in adult logic, I would counter Mama’s logic with my logic (logic I really didn’t believe in) —mostly (1) just to get her riled up and (2) sporadically, an enzyme secreted a tiny rebellion into my veins and I couldn’t help myself. The timetable for its release increased with age, until at the age of fifteen it was secreting about twice a day. And (3) it was fun to argue with Mama. Not that I cared about the subject, having no need for an abortion.
I would say stuff like, the teacher said the world might have trouble in the future with over-population.
“What in the world are they teaching kids nowadays?” Mama would retort.
“If she got an abortion, she didn’t kill anyone alive or breathing or feeling anything.” I knew this remark would open a hornet’s nest.
“How do you know what the baby feels?” “Besides, that makes no difference. What if I’d had an abortion with you? Just flushed you down the toilet. How’d you have liked that?”
“I wouldn’t have liked that?” visualizing myself floating around in purgatory with a lot of unwanted kids and indecisive agnostics. “I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Well, then?”
“But
I might not
have cared, then.”
”Who can say? You might have.”
“But Mama, is it really so bad. What if the lady getting the abortion, knew when the baby got here, it would starve and die anyway.”
We had only recently gone through a time in the Northwest when just about everyone was so financially challenged, starvation was a common occurrence and even the four horsemen of the apocalypse visited the quality folks up on the hill. “Maybe she did the right thing,” I said, stiffening my spine for Mama’s response.
“Never let me hear you talk that way again, young lady. There is good and there is bad. And we can’t do as we please in this world. You play and you pay. Now go practice your accordion. You’re giving me a headache.” And she poured sugar into the stew. I hated practicing my accordion, as I was any good at it.
The idea of getting an abortion was so frightening that I could have more easily been tied to a mast and offered up for flagellation, before I’d get an abortion.
The abortion scenario of death and damnation evolved thusly—abortion was a piercing, panic-filled, puking operation that nine times out of ten killed the woman. She’d get blood poisoning, because abortionists never washed their hands or she’d bleed to death from a knife stabbed through her womb, by a quack. And all abortionists were quacks, who’d been ousted from the medical profession.
And secondly, if she didn’t die quickly from the abortionist, say, on the abortionist table, but would go through hours of screaming agony, the pain would be so horrible she’d pray for death. But she had it coming.
And there she’d be, a bleeding, dead lump of protoplasm on a butcher’s block. Not even with an obituary in the newspaper.
She’d be an unknown death, dumped in the river or along side the road. And to add to that, God would further punish her, by assigning her soul to an infinity of erupting geysers of fire for doing something so sinful.
And if she tried to abort and failed to abort the baby, as her third option, she’d probably get stuck with a monster “Rosemary’s Baby.” Mama showed me a magazine article published around 1935, about abortionists who often half-operated on their patients, cutting off the arms or legs of the fetus, so the woman would still have a baby, but minus arms and legs.
If a woman aborted and lived and perchance escaped imprisonment for her crime she’d suffer in other ways. She’d have to spend the rest of her life grieving for what she’d done to a poor misshapen human-being.
Every time we went down town, Mama pointed out a baby with palsy, Downs Syndrome, a withered arm or missing fingers and say, “See, she tried to get rid of it.”
“Maybe not, Mama.” We were shopping in Kress. “There’s Mrs. Ratner over there and she wanted David real bad, remember.” David had a shortened arm.
“Why
hello,
“Oh, he’s darling,” Mama and I said in unison. And he was a pretty baby—husky, with curly hair and big eyes.
“He’s a sheer delight. He’s seven months and saying words already. Holden’s so proud. You know we waited a long time to get our little boy. Almost ten years.”
“She’s just pretending,” Mama said as we exited Kress’s. “You mark my word, she tried to get rid of him.” Mama wasn’t going to be BSed by Mrs. Ratner.
Although, whenever we saw one of those kids, Mama was always a little unsure, that something other than an attempted abortion might have caused a deformity, that she, a non-abortionists could possibly have a deformed child herself.
But she could relax. She’d had her family and all of us had all our parts in working order. I, though, moped along behind her, confident I’d have a deformed kid, just to punish me for my wrong-headed abortion thoughts.
So this is how I analyzed my future:
(a) I could become ostracized for having an illegitimate baby.
(b) Attempt to abort and have a deformed baby and a lifetime of misery or die.
(c) Successfully abort and be punished by the law for attempted murder if perchance I escaped punishment I’d
(d) Eventually, if not immediately, suffer Hellfire and brimstone for my horrendous act or even consideration of such an act.
What this fear of abortion did was make the worry of pregnancy a sword
of panic over my head during every sexual encounter.
“We can use contraceptives.” From my partner.
“No, they’re not fool-proof. I don’t want to take any chances.”
“But
when? I’m only human.”
“Don’t be selfish.”
“Who’s
being selfish.”
And talk of PMS… This kid
was so afraid her period wouldn’t
start, she had every symptom of PMS, plus some more she made up on her
own. And secondly, this conditioning has
given me an overwhelming admiration and awe of any woman with the
courage to
get an abortion. These women are my
idols. I can only bow before my icons
and superiors.
And for the lily-livered, mealy-mouthed, chicken-hearted rabbit that I am if anyone comments on abortion and abortionists, my politically correct or incorrect answer is, “That baby murderer earns my Oscar.”
As for Mama, over the years, and after abortion became legal, she mellowed—as invariably “absolutism” clashes with graying hair.