The Hardest Thing

It’s 1967 and I’m in my childhood home in Central California. There is a knock on the door. My mother, Pearl, looks at me and I know she can see the terror in my eyes. The next seconds will be the hardest thing. Standing on the porch is Dr. Gilbert, the family physician, and he is there to tell my parents that their sixteen year old daughter is pregnant.

My mother blanches at the revelation, wobbles and sinks down, down onto the sofa, stunned. Her deepest belief is shattered. She had faith that ten years of Catholic school, church every Sunday and a collection of glow-in-the-dark rosary beads would keep me a good girl. My father, Chet, just doesn’t say a word and doesn’t seem that surprised. He looked sideways the only time he met my twenty-one year old Navy boyfriend. He told me I couldn’t see him after that one disastrous dinner where David showed up high on LSD and tried to eat spaghetti.

I adored David, his manly-man good looks, his access to new mind blowing drugs and his forbidden status. We concocted creative plans to continue to see each other that mainly involve his enlisted buddies coming to the door to pick me up while his red Karmann Ghia idled a half a block away.

I am terrified. He told me he couldn’t make any babies, sterile he said. I had no education about sex. In religion class we did study the Pope’s Encyclical on Birth Controlwhich basically just mandated to make babies for God.

The very next day, my mother takes me to the Catholic Home for Unwed Mothers. The ancient nun sitting behind her oversized desk, painted dirt brown says “And what does Grandma think about all this?” Confusion on my part as myGrandmother is at home and then I decipher that she means my momwill be a grandmother and that means that I will be a mother.

Panic.

Clearly, I think to myself that cannot happen. There must be another way.

I get my hands on a pastel baby pink business card that says “Pregnant, need help?” I furtively call the number, whispering in the back bedroom, and am told that there is another option, an abortion. 

But not in a nearby hospital as abortions are illegal in the United States. I must travel to Mexico, to Mexico City. It is very clear to me that this must be the plan.

I get permission to go, knowing that my Catholic religion will condemn my soul for committing this grievous mortal sin. I gather the details with the emphasis on bringing the $300.00 fee in cash. I meet up with another pregnant girl in the Los Angeles airport at the boarding gate, each carrying a sad bouquet of faded dried flowers, our pathetic way to identify each other, strangers headed to both do something we were sure we would never have to do.

We both have the cash.

We both are beautiful.

We both are dizzy with fear.

A battered black sedan pulls up at the Mexico City International airport arrival gate and we acknowledge the Spanish speaking driver with the password we were given. 

The hacienda, a two hour drive away in the countryside, is stuffed with pregnant girls, some skipping rope to help abort their big bellies. When my turn comes, I don’t even bother to pray.

My plane lands back in southern California and I run, sobbing and bleeding, to the nearest pay phone to call my mother.

I am safe.

-Mara Lefebvre

Mara Lefebvre surrenders to her obsessions. She is a visual artist, writer and retreat junkie. She has an appreciation of beauty, excellence, and good design in all things. Fascinated with how memory works, she writes micro-memoirs and poems to reconstruct her past revealing lies, laments and lunatics. As an emerging writer, she was pleased to be given an Honorable Mention in the New Millennium Contest and accepted to Duende magazine. Her lifelong interest in yoga and frequent walking meditations support her creative curiosity. She lives in upstate New York in a ranch house with a red door on a dead end street.