Generation Soon – Why I write

I write because I cannot simply live. Patti Smith wrote it in the back pages of her tiny, semi-fictional book, Devotion. I agree though agreeing has  not always brought me to its realisation. Instead, it is experience that has governed my inability to rencounce the pen: the raw, ungovernable, ruling intimacies of life, love and death.

My middle name is Dawn. It is the first name of both of my Grandmothers. One of them is still alive and the other died from breast cancer before I was born. My Mum tells me that her final words to her, whilst sitting in the armchair of a two-up two-down semi-detached town house, were ‘whatever you do, don’t get married too young.’ Mum's Dawn died in 1982, the average age for a woman to get married in the UK that year was twenty-seven. Add a year on to that and you get the age that my Mum eventually married: twenty-eight, two years before I was born.

Marriage has never appealed to me. As a child, I was more fascinated by worms than white dresses. Barbies were creepy and I vividly remember beating the moving eyeballs out of my baby Annabel when I was around five years old. (I smashed her plastic head against the brick wall in the alley beside my childhood home). I later decided, when I had my first serious (absolutely teenage) relationship, that instead of marriage, a love festival where everyone hugs and sings and drinks and no papers are signed was more reasonably suited to my natural human condition. I imagined that the inexpensive affair would retain its jolliness and seem far less ridiculous in the future, once the gooey things had fallen away, as they do.

Although quite recently, I fell deeply in love with a beautiful soul of a man and began wondering about the roots of my unromantic views of marriage. (It's sickening isn’t it, how love makes you question every damn one of your instinctual beliefs?) One evening when strolling back from a free meal at the local church, the person who I had fallen for suggested plans for our ‘union under the eyes of God.’ I wasn't officially religious, though he was. The greater problem however was that I couldn’t tell whether I wanted to be sick or run away. What is this resistance, I wondered? 

And so I wondered. The Marxist-feminist books that I had read when feeling lost in myself, first came to mind. Then it was the memories of sitting around an ash-trayed garden table overhearing my mum’s friends complain about their 'knobheads' of ex-husbands' and after drying up three ponds of white wine, declare that they would have always been happier alone. Then I thought of my childhood and the fortunate/unfortunate fact that I never saw my parents hug, kiss nor hold hands (at least soberly). Every conversation they had and that I remembered, was about money or the house or me and so probably, I thought, in my independent attempt to give pescription, even as a young growing mind, I had come to believe that marriage was only about material things: never love, nor passion or hope. But still, despite all of the mental galavanting, I found no entirely honest explaination for why I consistently cringe at the M-word. Each conclusion I had pinned down for a fraction of time, afterward felt like a fabricated excuse for my wholly intuitive and individual response to life. And so what, that I find marriage disgusting, pointless? For now, I have come to accept my desires and the possibility that I will never realise the origins to some of my beliefs.

Babies though (except plastic Annabelles), they are a different story. I want to be a mother and when I was seventeen years old, I drew a small image of myself with a biro-pen. The drawn image I had drawn was of me sitting crossed-legged, around the age of thirty-five, with a bobbed haircut and a fully rounded belly. I looked peaceful, satisfied. I would be a great Mum: I knew that even then. And when I had my first rough acid trip (it was on New Years Eve, after I had already drunk a bottle of champagne and eaten an entire saucepan of boiled magic Mushrooms), motherhood was exactly the theme of my accidentally intense trip.  I was sitting on my friends' bed, nestled in a pillowed corner of a bed in a hip, small-time creative warehouse in North London. I looked down and began to cry. I held my hands upon my womb. I watched myself melting away whilst giving birth to two-hundred small apes. I was becoming the mother of an entire hairy species. A being that could create another being. I was sobbing because I realised, in one sober wave, that it one day could happen and be no hallucination. I one day, might be able to give birth to another life. 

So last month, when I found out I was pregnant by chance in the darkened ultra-sound room of Royal London Hospital, it all felt all right: expected, familiar. Except the feotus, was hopefully, not an ape. All I could say at the ultrasound screen was a bunch of 'wows' and ‘it’s beautiful’. Of course I didn’t want to actually be pregnant. I was twenty-four; it went against everything that my dead Grandmother had told my mother on her death bed. I needed to travel first, explore this earth and her fruits. Nevertheless, I smiled at the Nurse who immediately congratulated me and measured the black and white outline of the foetus. 'And now let's hear it's heartbeat', she said. I listened excitedly to the ticking, imagining that I was connected already, that I could magically synchronise the rhythm of its pulse with mine. And damn, it was a wonderful feeling being pregnant: big breasts, no need for caffeine and a satisfaction inside that made pizza, alcohol and chocolate seem like petty, mortal anti-depressants. And I could have done it, followed it through with the beauty of it, the addictive comfort, the wholesome mental fullness brought by the knowing that in each moment, a tiny human expanded in the home of my insides. That tiny human, in the right place at the wrong time. 

 Every year in the UK 0.6% of the female population have an abortion.  Factual thinking helped to suppress emotions. It equates to 200,000 people a year. I, the mother already of a thousand acid apes was only one of them. It was a hard decision to make, of course but eventually, the most empowering offered so far. When else had I felt totally in control of my body and my future? In fact it was so empowering that, in moments, there was almost a strange mania to it. I was a God and I held two playing cards. An Ace: become parent. A Queen: another time. The only exception was that I couldn't skip the go. I had to choose. Queen I laid then, not telling anyone crept out of the darkened hospital room, where only a few days before I had grinned at the Nurse in joy, and joined a cohort of hushed, flat stomached women who live in the shadows of a life-sized question: 'what if?’

My emotion-numbing research also told me that one in three women in the UK will have an abortion by the time they are forty-five. It was comforting to know when my body was telling me to do everything but expel this rice grain from my squidgy waistline. I also checked with the clinician that it was true, again in the hope that I wouldn’t feel so alone whilst bleeding out a potential life. She confirmed, yes: one in three, 200,000 women a year. She added:

‘It’s an essential service and actually, since the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s been busier.’ I laughed nervously and wondered whether she too imagined a whole city of people making unprotected love behind Zoom calls.  

I thanked the clinician, took the prescription and was grateful to not of had to of popped any pills in situ. (Due to National Lockdowns, a policy was passed which legalised a woman to ingest the Mifepristone pill at home.) Abortion, I inhaled, was as much as a part of life as life is itself.

Double confirmation: Yes, I want to be a mother but not now. I feel her, the mother that I could become but I don’t want her yet. It is too consuming and I am self-absorbed and too available for other options, for career, for art, for other kinds of love. I have meditated on the choices and for the first time, the universe has told me that only I have a say in this. God, if there was one, is too occupied conceiving other lives, connecting ideas, creating beauty in where it is meant to be. 

The procedure was smoother than expexcted. Dosed up on two tablets of codeine, a stale bread roll and a Tesco-blended vegetable soup, around 10:30pm I squatted over my washing-up bowl that my partner kindly privatised behind a bedsheet hooked over a two horizontal microphone stands:

‘Really, you don’t have to do that.’ I said as he collapsed my mini recording studio.

‘It won’t take long, I do it every weekend.’ He is a musician.

I let him continue, smiling at the thought of him being a serious full-time abortion doula. (Yes, they exsit. Check out Zachi Brewster).

I was surprised at how I reacted. I am not religious though I craved it in this moment. I craved not forgiveness but people and solitude and a ritual to guide me through the complex process of grief and change. ‘You won’t recognise it, just flush it down the loo.’ The clinician had instructed me to bin the feotus but considering it had a heart, bog water felt disrespectful.  I felt it was a process that needed to be expereinced fully, as another inescapable transition of life. And so instead, I flopped the feotus sack into a glass jar, wrapped the jar in cloth and buried the jar in a padded box along with a letter and a fresh medjool date. My partner and I then prayed, sang to it, walked with it and burried it in the soil of the nearby cemetery on the unusually humid Sunday afternoon. 

The experience is still too near to say what it has taught me though two things did become clear. Firstly, I realised that spirituality, ritual and art played a powerful part throughout the journey and are helping me now to heal from the loss. It is therefore a shame, I thought, if this might be the same for other women too and that so many faiths condemn abortion and in the West, abortion is legally only offered as a 'standard medical procedure.' Not one of personal and spiritual transformation.

The other thing I realised is that I am lucky. I am lucky to live in a country where abortion is legal and often not openly protested against. Cycling back home from the gym last week (yes, even a few weeks of pregnancy gains you a few pounds), I saw faces rush by me, millions of pregnant people for whom this ‘choice’ was decided on by practicalities rather than personal life plans. Faces warped into uncovered spherical bellies marching towards clinics in protest lines whislt myself, a young Londoner stood on the side-lines, sipping tea and speaking on the phone to a kind NHS counsellor from my bedroom desk. We were equally hormonal and hurting, us women, each to different extents, uncertain on this journey. Though I had it easier than some. Some who, unlike me were married, migrants, American, black or poor. And what if it was me that was them? What if I was ‘settled’ in a married relationship but knew deep down I didn't really want children? Or what if I was legally unsettled, an asylum seeker who had just arrived to the UK by dinghy boat? Would the option of termination ever have entered my mind?  And how about if my only chance to proceed would have been to take a plane-length journey or order the tablets illegally online? What if simply I couldn’t have afforded it? A parallel universe emerged, an open portal glinting across the other side of the East London cannel upon which I cycled. The view through it was a life where I never had the choice. Where having a child was my only hope to be accepted as a woman. Where the path of abortion was a lonelier, riskier and colder road than the follow-through and complications of an unplanned pregnancy. Where the experiences I went through unravelled in a different place, a country where the process of abortion was illegal, discriminated against, or had to begin in a sterile room of an undergound sexual health clinic. I felt pain, hurt that some to-be mothers never had a choice, that some choices were made under the pressure of others and angry. Angry that, according to the stats, this envisioned universe most likely existed in the house next door to mine.

So I write because I cannot simply live. Because life happens and sometimes it is painful and to share that brings me hope and hopefully for another, a sense of togetherness. Because I feel that before I bring another human to this earth, I have something else within me to birth. I am young. I could be a teacher maybe or a Nurse, like the one who had helped me. I could serve something so extramental as an entire society and then later, a family (though I understand they are not exclusive entitites). And I write because I know, deep down that every woman, whether a mother or not, like me, senses this something else inside of her – this universal love, service beyond her bodily one – a nagging, quiet or sometimes intrusive voice that whispers you are beyond a sexy image on a billboard or only a married-up machine of creation. The part of her that says: Woman! Of course you can bring to the table the essence of creation itself – you can lay a meal down, a vase of flowers, a smiling child – but you can also bring an optimism, a humourous flame, a burning innocence, a raging perception of beauty that is a force pure enough to cure all nations of fear! And you can also bring a voice, one that is unique and utterly contagious. A voice that raises others to higher levels. A voice that speaks of the endless cycles of nature and of all of its wonders: the pains of the moon and her peaceful silences, the springtimes and their death. Woman, I write because we cannot simply live.