i let myself get pregnant. it was a suicide mission. if i ever get pregnant, i told myself, then i would finally do it, i would finally drown hang burn slash. there would be such shame in pregnancy, not willing to become a mother and not willing to become a baby killer, i would be left with no other recourse, but death. it would be easy, it would eliminate a proper suicide note. not that i ever consciously did it....i never protected myself against the invasion of another life form into my body except with vague prayers against it. i dreaded it and half wanted it. half even wanted to have a baby, a daughter, call her isabella, take her to ballet class and dress her as i always wanted to be dressed....mould her into the girl i never was and never could be...russian roulette. i was not a mother, i was sixteen, i was totally fucked up, i was a suicidal sixteen year old...those harboured fantasies of utopian motherhood were incredibly dangerous. my mother had those fantasies. my mother injured me in having me, didn't i spend half my life wishing that she had drowned me in her uterine blood? to never have existed because this existence was not meant to be, not for me. and didn't i always say i would never have children, never subject any other living being to that torture, of growing up, of not being well cared for? in all good conscience, the only thing to do once the infectious gestation had set in was to get a gun and swallow it. i don't know why i didn't. maybe it was the horrible sickness confused my resolution....i didn't eat for weeks, just bits of baguette soaked in vinegar...milky sugared tea. nothing else. just starvation and sickness. i lost twenty pounds. i fainted constantly. my eyes would go black and i would swoon and tumble and scream upon impact with the floor. it was absolute misery. i was a lamb. i denied the illness to whoever questioned, i walked where i was led, and my mother led me into the abortionist's....planned parenthood. the abortion factory. name, number, get in line, wait till that old sow has finished screaming, finished bleeding, then your turn in the stirrups. agony. humiliation. the doctor never even introduced himself, just shoved his cold hand up inside my under-sedated body....ripped out my baby. threw her away into the trash. my daughter. isabella. i think, at the time, i had named her isabella nirvana. she was going to be my salvation, my everything, my charm against boredom....oh, wait, i forgot, i was going to die...i mustn't be a mother, what a horrible mother i would make, sixteen and all fucked up, i was supposed to die....abortion was supposed to be hari-kari...everyone goes down in a fiery blaze, no one survives, everyone dies. and dies. and dies. there is no guilt when you don't watch your prima ballerina get sucked out and spit into the trash in a bloody red pulp. if she died i was supposed to go too. but i survived. my mother brought me home, no words, no accusations "you killed your baby, your daughter!" .....just brought me home to hand feed me soup in bed, my appetite suddenly ravenous with the infection scraped out of my womb. my mother crumbled crackers in soup and fed me like a ducklling. i drank gingerale and watched monty python. my baby died and i somehow survived. it was my seventeeth birthday. i killed my baby on my fucking birthday, that's how big a bitch i am. and i got pregnant again a year later. the whole unconscious charade of "i want a baby, i can't have a baby, i want to die, i don't want a baby, i want to survive, i want my baby" began again. to let it happen once, it's disgusting but understandable, in it's way. but twice was unforgiveably stupid and selfish and horrible. my two little sacrafises laid out in mourning....i would play with my babydoll, pretending she was nirvana. both pregnancies, both babies, had morphed into one in my mind. and i held my babydoll in her dirty blue frock, she was isabella nirvana, and we rocked and rocked and rocked and i sang lullaby.....i was rather mad, by now. i wanted desperately to die, and i wanted desperately to survive, and the guilt and shame and humiliation were tremendous...i was led again like a lamb to slaughter, never questioning...never even picking up a gun to save myself, redeem myself my trespasses against my daughter (she was one daughter, one baby, it all drifted together like stained snow). i forgot to die, and boyfriend's hand in mine, drying off the blood, i again somehow survived. all the worse for wear. but that murder was pleasant...a private doctor, cushy office. we had a meeting, he and i. we discussed the procedure: he told and i drifted off nodding in agreement,trying not to listen to the execution lab notes he gave me. but he was ever so nice, this doctor. he served me tea. and then they gave me drugs, all in my paper gown, and i woke up bloody and soiled and drunk. i didn't feel a drop of pain. i giggled on the cab ride home, stuffing my hungry face full of all the lovely food it had been for months denied. i felt like the fucking whore of babylon. just giggling and smiling and drunk and drugged and happy as hell while my baby drowned somewhere in blood. i never saw this one. i was asleep on the table, didn't notise a thing. i didn't get to say goodbye or see the body. the other, the first death, it felt like a birth, tearing from my body. and the second was like a tea-party. i was alice, or the mad-hatter, or someone altogether else....but it was a mad affair. two dead babies in the space of a year, one eighteen year old girl who should have been dead, who deserved both those deaths for herself, the agonised and the sweet release. i was so oddly underaffected, i staged a dead-baby shower for myself, i baked ginger cookies and bought a lipstick....i was so overwrought i actually went on birth control, and controlled my body, prevented this tragedy of farce from injuring me ever again. from doing this to myself and my sweet daughter ever again. in my mind, it was always the same girl, my isabella, my nirvana, this self-same daughter i desired and abhorred....perhaps when i am grown and matured and sane and healthy and wise i can let her back in again, and let her sleep all nine of her months in my gooshy bed, and let her bleed alive into my arms, to be my little ballet-girl. i killed her twice, but maybe someday, with the third time i'll be forgiven. but i could not sell her into my world of diseased hate. it has to be tea-parties with happy songs and ballet-frocks and sunshine smile flower romping or nothing. a life of hell is a far worse fate than painless sleeping death.