My daughter asked why I never talked about the years before she was born, and I told her I had never learned how. She asked whether something bad had happened, and I said something had happened that I had spent years convincing myself wasn’t important. Then I told her that after the abortion, I had gone back to work, made dinner, answered questions, and continued living as though being functional meant I was fine. She looked at me and asked whether her father knew I wasn’t. I told her he had known I was hurting, but he had preferred the version of me who said yes whenever he asked if I was okay.
She sat quietly for a while before asking why I had stayed with him for another twelve years. I told her that by the time I understood what I had been doing, silence had become a habit. I had learned to say yes before I even knew what the question was, because saying anything else usually created an argument I didn’t have the energy to have. She asked whether that was why I had seemed distant when she was growing up. I told her that some of the distance came from being exhausted by a life in which nobody asked what I actually felt. Then I told her none of that had ever been her fault.
My daughter started crying and said she had always wondered why I seemed uncomfortable whenever people talked about pregnancy or babies. I told her I had never wanted her to carry the history of something that happened before she was born. She said she understood, but she wished I had trusted her enough to tell her when she was older. I admitted that I had spent so long protecting everyone else’s version of the past that I had forgotten I was allowed to have my own. Then she asked me whether I had ever told anyone the truth before her. I said no, and she reached across the table and held my hand.
Before she left, she asked whether I wanted to talk about it again someday. I told her I did, but only if I could do it without apologizing for having feelings about something that happened to me. She smiled and said that sounded fair. After she went home, I sat in the same quiet kitchen where I had spent years answering “yes” because it was easier. I realized that the word had once been a way to survive, but it didn’t have to be the way I lived anymore. And for the first time, when I remembered that afternoon in 2001, I didn’t hear his voice telling me I was fine—I heard my own, finally saying that I wasn’t.
