View from my Home in Vermont
Bennington Battle Field Monument
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Sunday, September 23, 2012
MY FIRST ABORTION
It really wasn't my abortion because I was in Sixth Grade and couldn't fully understand what an abortion is or was. I didn't even know anything about parts.
Memory is a funny thing. Events that happen to us years ago re-surface when we have the capacity to process them or examine them. This was my first exposure to abortion while I was in sixth grade.
We always played on the street and my parents deliberately bought a house that abutted the playground of our elementary school. We had a wide open place to run around and bike around. We were always outside, winter or summer. This was on the shores of Lake Erie, East of Cleveland.
The housing development was plopped down on a former golf course where my Dad used to play golf when he was single. Now, he was raising his family on the land where he used to divot. All the streets were named after golfing terms. We lived on Fairway Blvd. The next street over was "High Tee". And, yes, there was a "Divot Drive".
Although High Tee was the next street over, there was no through access to Fairway Blvd. so we never went over there to play with kids on that block. There were plenty of kids on our block so we didn't really have to venture that far off to find com-padres in crime.
So, it was quite unusual one day when Eddie Melbasa came over from High Tee. He seemed upset & I couldn't figure why he came over. I was distracted. My younger brother was horsing around with his friends & my charge was to keep an eye on him & them, participate, but keep all of us out of trouble.
I knew Eddie from school but he never hung with us at home. He began to tell me how his grandmother had scraped a baby out of his mother. He told me that his mother was in a great deal of pain. He told me there was a lot of blood. I did not know what Eddie was talking about. I didn't yet know women bled from there. It was just the week before that the girls were taken out of class for some mysterious reason and all the boys got to go outside.
Eddie told me his grandmother put the baby in a Tupperware container and put it on the curb with the garbage. For the life of me, I could not fathom what Eddie came over to tell me or why. Now I know.
Eddie had witnessed his mother having an abortion at home.
Now, in the era of Facebook, my sixth grade classmates are posting our class pictures and re-surfacing in my life. Maybe this is why this memory from sixth grade has come back.
Memory is a funny thing. Events that happen to us years ago re-surface when we have the capacity to process them or examine them. This was my first exposure to abortion while I was in sixth grade.
We always played on the street and my parents deliberately bought a house that abutted the playground of our elementary school. We had a wide open place to run around and bike around. We were always outside, winter or summer. This was on the shores of Lake Erie, East of Cleveland.
The housing development was plopped down on a former golf course where my Dad used to play golf when he was single. Now, he was raising his family on the land where he used to divot. All the streets were named after golfing terms. We lived on Fairway Blvd. The next street over was "High Tee". And, yes, there was a "Divot Drive".
Although High Tee was the next street over, there was no through access to Fairway Blvd. so we never went over there to play with kids on that block. There were plenty of kids on our block so we didn't really have to venture that far off to find com-padres in crime.
So, it was quite unusual one day when Eddie Melbasa came over from High Tee. He seemed upset & I couldn't figure why he came over. I was distracted. My younger brother was horsing around with his friends & my charge was to keep an eye on him & them, participate, but keep all of us out of trouble.
I knew Eddie from school but he never hung with us at home. He began to tell me how his grandmother had scraped a baby out of his mother. He told me that his mother was in a great deal of pain. He told me there was a lot of blood. I did not know what Eddie was talking about. I didn't yet know women bled from there. It was just the week before that the girls were taken out of class for some mysterious reason and all the boys got to go outside.
Eddie told me his grandmother put the baby in a Tupperware container and put it on the curb with the garbage. For the life of me, I could not fathom what Eddie came over to tell me or why. Now I know.
Eddie had witnessed his mother having an abortion at home.
Now, in the era of Facebook, my sixth grade classmates are posting our class pictures and re-surfacing in my life. Maybe this is why this memory from sixth grade has come back.
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