That Was What Hurt Me the Most Page 7

At the age of sixteen I was being thrown out of the foster home I had been in living in for months. My social worker had tried to get my mother to take me in since she and my father were now separated and living apart, -but she refused. I don’t remember how it came about, but my aunt and uncle took me in. They were nice enough, and I liked my cousins. It was nice to be with family again. I went to school, did some of my homework and spent all of my free time with my boyfriend who had proposed and given me a tiny heart-shaped engagement ring. Since our homes were now literally on opposite sides of the city, I wasn’t able to spend as much time with him as he had wanted. Some days he would come to my school and stand outside of my classroom. When class was over he would walk me to my next class and wait again. At the time I thought this was so very sweet. I believed that he did this because he loved me and wanted to be with me every possible minute. The days when he couldn’t come I would call him as soon as I got home from school and we would always end up fighting. He would accuse me of being with other boys while I was at school. He would call me horrible names while I begged him to believe me when I told him that I didn’t even talk to another boy. He claimed he had spies at my school who told him that I dressed like a slut when he wasn’t around to watch me. I would cry into the phone until he believed me.
At night, when I was finally alone in my room I would think about the abortion and cry myself to sleep. I always awoke in a sweat from nightmares. Sometimes involving my boyfriend, sometimes involving my mother or father, but always involving the ‘baby’ I would have had. My boyfriend refused to talk about it, my family pretended as if it had never happened and I was too ashamed to mention it to my friends even though I was aware that everyone had already known about it. I didn’t have a social worker to talk to anymore since I was no longer in foster care. When it came to the pain and regret I felt about the abortion, I was all alone and was certainly not handling it well. One night I woke up -at least I thought I woke up- because I heard a baby crying. In this dream I sat up in my bed to see a baby covered with blood lying on the foot of my bed screaming it’s little lungs out. I jolted awake for real, jumped out of bed and ran to turn on the light. In my panic I couldn’t remember exactly where the light switch was. I moved my hands frantically along the cold wall until I found it and flicked it on. Instantly I looked at the foot of my bed and was relieved to see there was nothing there but a bunched up blanket. I stared at the blanket for what seemed like an eternity before I slowly made my way back over to my bed. I plopped down, grabbed a pillow, hugged it tight and cried. Eventually I ran out of tissue and had to go to the bathroom to grab some toilet paper. I stood at the sink and splashed cold water on my face, then looked in the mirror. My eyes were red and puffy which only made the dark circles -from lack of sleep- look even darker and bigger. I opened the door of the medicine cabinet and was scanning the contents when I made the decision. I started picking up bottles of pills and looking them over. Not knowing anything about medication I chose the bottle with the biggest, scariest looking pills.
I had taken almost all of the pills in the bottle and was lying in bed when the pain started. I felt really sick and tried to lay still while the pills did what I hoped they would do. It didn’t take long for me to become really scared about what I had done and I didn’t want to be alone. I called my mother and cried into the phone as I told her I was really sick -although I didn’t tell her why- and I wanted her to come and get me. To my surprise she actually agreed to get out of bed, get dressed and drive over to my aunt’s house to get me and take me home.
I crawled into my mothers bed and tried to forget about the pain. I just wanted to fall asleep and never wake up and now it was perfect because my mother actually seemed to care about me, at least a little bit, and now I would fall asleep with that as my last memory. But the pain wouldn’t let me fall asleep peacefully. I couldn’t stay still and I couldn’t stop crying. My mother kept telling me to stop moving around. Each time she had to repeat herself she became angrier until she finally yelled at me, -then I blurted out what I had done. My mother got out of bed shouting at me to get in the car, -she was angry. The drive to the hospital was a short ride, but it was long enough for her to let me know how mad she was at me for doing this to her when I knew she had to work in the morning.
It turned out that the pills I had taken were harmless enough. All they would do -and did do- was cause me pain and make me nauseated, but that didn’t compare to the embarrassment I felt as I could hear the hospital staff making fun of me for trying to kill myself with antibiotics. I rolled over trying to get away from the humiliation. I saw my aunt, she had recently shown up with the bottle containing the few remaining pills that I hadn’t been able to swallow. She and my mother were talking angrily to each other. It took me a few minutes, but I was able to make out what they were saying. They were arguing over who was going to take me home. Neither of them wanted me. That was what hurt me the most.