This Is All For You!

"Aren't you glad that your Mother chose life, instead of having you aborted" is a weird way to begin an argument against the right to choose. It reminds me of all the little nuisances that come along with life once you actually have some idea and cognition about the world around you. "Aren't you glad" as a blanket to shame myself or others, who, without prior knowledge of what life was like BEFORE BIRTH, and what it is like in the womb, against standing up for a woman to have the right to her own bodily autonomy. There is this culpable tone that those who use "aren't you glad" are almost gleefully enjoying as they mock and demonize women who have tormented with the idea of having to terminate a pregnancy. Pregnancies that were either unviable, unplanned, misdiagnosed, or even forced upon, that involve no one other than the pregnant person and that person's physician. It makes me wonder about all of the things that I have to be glad about, as a fully grown adult member in todays society.

Aren't I glad that my Mother chose life, instead of having me aborted? I would have never know otherwise if she had or not. The fact that I am here, living and breathing, means that she made a choice that suited her and she has gone on to live with that decision. What decision did I contribute to it other than being a fetus in a womb? Absolutely nothing. She grew up in a time period where a woman, or in her case, a 16 year old girl, dealt with the consequences of having sex. She was married to a boy, because he was about the same age as she was, in order to have a child that was not considered out of wedlock and a bastard. It may sound like something simple and plain, and for the time period, it probably was. Here I am, a product of that youthful union, regardless of how glad I would have felt if my Mother had made any other decision.

Do I value life? As consciously as I try to be anti-life, I am not pro "getting un-alived" any time soon. There are many things about this life that I enjoy, but none of them had anything to do with the fact that my Mother and biological father had sex. I value a life and existence that is far more different than the life I grew up in. A life where women needed to depend on men to make decisions and bring home the bacon in order to survive. I grew up in a life where children were seen and not heard and absentee parents were the norm. I grew up in a life where men hit women and women punished children for not being examples of purity to the men who did not measure up to fatherhood. I grew up poor and hungry sometimes and wondering if I would actually like the taste of good food if I knew any different. I had neighbors, and whatnot, contact child protective services multiple times when I was a child. I basically felt guilt for wanting my Mother to leave her abusive boyfriend in fear that the state would take my sisters, separate us, and place us in foster care until my mother got rid of him. I was afraid of being abandoned by my mother whenever times got hard, because when times got hard, she thought the best option for her was to give us up to the state. 

I grew up knowing that being who I was and who I am would forever be in question to the ones I love. Growing up a closeted gay boy meant that I had to invent a totally different person for the world to see so that I could be accepted. I grew up in a time period where the general consensus for having gay sex was that I deserved to get HIV/AIDS and deserved to die, because I dared to love someone of the same gender. If it wasn't for the access that I had to the public library system when I was younger, I would have never known what it was like to understand the feelings that I had. I lived in constant fear of being unloved. I lived with constant anxiety every time that my mother went out and left my sisters and I alone. I worried that something bad happened to her. I worried that death was just around the corner no matter what I did. I grew up fearful of almost everything and I spent so much time isolated and listening to music in order to escape my teenage depression. Thankfully I wasn't involved in after school activities because I fear the overwhelming pressure to succeed would have thrown me over the edge. 

Back to the subject at hand however, "aren't I glad" as if the alternative being nothingness would have been a better choice. What I know, in all my years as a functioning human being, is that what I don't know never really mattered. What I do know is that, despite being called beautiful and mysterious, and sometimes relegated to magical and wonderful, life is hard. Someone made a choice to bring me into a world and knowingly subjected me to some of the harsher realities that the world has had to offer children who were born into poverty. My privilege's have taught me that I began this life better off than others less fortunate than I or others of a different race than myself. I was forced to see a world through lenses that placed higher value on religious beliefs than they placed on simple humanity. A world without higher consequence meant a world without moral order. I was conditioned to believe that no matter how hard I tried, no matter what lies that I had to swallow, no matter what socio-economic system I belonged to, I would be able to rise above my class to make something out of myself because that was the American Dream. At some point I believed that I had a chance at being happy. And none of these things are ever guaranteed in life, because once you are here....you are here to get from point a to point b. It doesn't matter if I am glad. 

It never mattered, because a choice I was never given has always been used against me to make me feel guilt and shame for not appreciating the life I was given. No matter how hard it has been.