My sister said she had always wondered why I stopped calling her in 1996, and I knew immediately which year she meant. I had never told her about the pregnancy or the abortion because by then I had become very good at separating the parts of my life that hurt. I told her I had gone through something I didn’t know how to talk about, and that I had convinced myself silence was the same thing as healing. She asked whether my husband had known, and I said yes. Then she asked why I had stayed with him afterward, and I realized I had never had a good answer for that question.
I told her what happened after I came home from the clinic. I made dinner, cleaned the kitchen, and went to bed as though nothing unusual had happened because that seemed easier than admitting how badly I was hurting. My husband never asked how I felt, and I never brought it up again. For eight years, we became experts at living around something neither of us was willing to name. My sister listened without interrupting, and when I finished she asked why I had never called her. I told her I was afraid she would hear my voice and know that I wasn’t okay.
She started crying and said she had thought I had simply become distant because I was angry with her. I told her I had never been angry with her at all; I had been ashamed that I needed someone and didn’t know how to ask. She reminded me that in 1996 I had always called her when anything went wrong, even when it was something small. Then she said she had spent years believing she had done something to make me stop trusting her. I felt a different kind of sadness hearing that, because my silence had hurt someone who had never caused the thing I was hiding. She reached across the table and took my hand.
That night, I finally told her the sentence I had been unable to say for almost thirty years: “I didn’t stop calling because I didn’t love you.” She squeezed my hand and said she knew that now. We talked until after midnight about everything except the abortion, and somehow that was exactly what I needed. The next morning, she asked whether I wanted to tell her the rest, and for the first time I said yes. I didn’t know what would happen to my marriage, or whether telling the truth this late could change anything. But when I picked up the phone to call her again, I realized I was no longer waiting for permission to have feelings about what happened to me.
