seven

All In

I sat on the bathroom floor and with shaking hands wiped my face with a wet facecloth. I flushed the toilet so that I wouldn’t have to stare at my breakfast which, for the third day in a row, had been unable to stay down. It had to be the flu, I repeated to myself. I’d been on the birth control pill for the last two years. Had I missed one since Kevin and I returned from training? I didn’t think so. I reached for the upper drawer and pulled out my circle of pills and double-checked the last day I’d taken one. Wednesday. It was now Thursday. Relief overcame me as I took my scheduled pill then rummaged around for some Gravol before heading out to the base hospital.

I sat freezing on the paper-covered gurney in my bra and underwear, and when the doctor walked in I recognized her as the wife of a logistics captain I had served with at the service battalion. She grilled me with questions. How old was I? Was I in a steady relationship? When was my last period? She prodded the glands at my neck and moved her hands down towards the outer sides of my breasts. I flinched as she did so. She handed me my combat shirt and signalled for me to get dressed.

I responded to all her questions a bit puzzled. What was going on?

She advised me that I needed a pregnancy test before giving me any medication. It might just be the flu, she concluded, but she wanted to make sure. She handed me an empty vial and pointed to the women’s restroom.

“That’s not necessary,” I responded in haste and handed the vial back. “I’m on the pill. I haven’t missed any.” There was urgency in my voice, as if I had to deny the possibility of being pregnant before it could take root inside of me. “I have the flu. My boyfriend had it last week and I’m sure I caught it.”

She responded that I was on a very light birth control, and that there was a slight chance I could be pregnant. They needed to eliminate that possibility before prescribing anything else. A flood of memories came back to me and dread filled every fibre of my being. This couldn’t be happening. I’d taken the necessary precautions.

“It will only take a few minutes.” She forced the vial back in my hand, then she looked deeply into my eyes and told me not to worry. It will all be very confidential, she said.

I gave in and headed for the restroom. After handing in the small receptacle to a medical assistant, I paced around the waiting room, experiencing flashbacks of doing the same pacing five years earlier in Winnipeg, until finally my name was called. I entered the examination room. The look on the doctor’s face was unmistakable. I felt an earthquake in the pit of my stomach and my head became a pressure cooker. I started seeing black spots and quickly sat down in the chair beside her desk.

“You are pregnant, Sandra,” she said softly, putting her hand on mine.

“Could it be a mistake?”

“That will be for you to decide,” she answered.

“No, I mean the test.”

“No.”

I burst out crying. I couldn’t do this a second time. It had taken me years to bury the guilt I’d felt after terminating my first pregnancy. I could not survive this twice.

“You’re probably about five or six weeks along, I’d say. We’ll run an ultrasound and see.” Still crying, I quickly did the math in my head and landed on the night Kevin and I had completed the second day of the Battle Fitness Test. He really had carried me up the stairs to our bedroom and I had giggled the whole way. He’d left a few days later to train in Lake Placid with the National Team.

The doctor told me to take a few days off, and to come back to see her so we could discuss the next steps.

Dazed, I drove to the Infantry School and pretended my world wasn’t falling apart until I could get home that night. I sat at my desk staring blankly at my lesson plans, trying so hard to keep it all together.

When I had told my parents I was moving in with Kevin, my father stood up from the dining table mid-course and walked out of the room. My mother eventually assuaged him, and gradually he accepted my decision to live with Kevin without getting married, but he never approved of it. I would be such a disappointment to him now, as well as to my mother. All three of my sisters were married; two of them had already begun their families. They were doing it correctly, following the rules: you date, you get married, you move in with your new husband, and you put your career on hold to have babies. “Qui prend mari, prend pays,” my mother used to say. She who takes a husband agrees to follow him, in work, in family, and in life. She would be devastated. Despite that, I knew she would find it in her heart to forgive me, offer me all the compassion a mother can give, and be an ally in getting my father to understand that I was still a good girl. God, that sounded so bloody old-fashioned for the 1990s, but it was my world then.

I was scheduled to start Phase 3 infantry training in less than four months. The thought of pepper-podding and crawling around in the grass with a child growing inside of me made me cringe. Phase 3 and 4 were back to back, which meant I’d be sporting a round seven-month belly to start Phase 4, assuming I would even get past Phase 3, the hardest stage of training. It was ridiculously impossible. I’d have to be re-coursed for the following year. And even if through some act of God I could graduate, I could only imagine the disgust from my senior officers when I arrived at the regiment asking for maternity leave after only a few weeks. To make matters worse, Kevin was scheduled to leave for a six-month peacekeeping tour in Cyprus just before Christmas, less than four weeks away. What a catastrophic way to start a new life, for me and my baby. How could I even think of raising a child while being in the infantry? I’d be deployed for months on end and so would Kevin. My parents lived in Ottawa, five hours away, and both worked full-time. His parents were even farther away. Thoughts of trying to find sitters, juggling our schedules, and dropping the baby off at daycare every day filled my mind. I realized with enormous guilt that this child was not even born and all I could think about was how to pawn it off on someone else. Despite having had the most caring, generous, and nurturing examples of motherhood, I would be a terrible mother. I hated myself. I thoroughly despised myself.

I was planning to leave the office early but instead I stayed at my desk until it was well past suppertime. Kevin would wonder why I wasn’t home and reluctantly I put on my jacket and headed out. A light snow was falling and, as I headed for Valcartier’s North Gate, I passed the biathlon trails that would be groomed in a few weeks. I slowed down and looked longingly at what I would miss this year. I had planned to try out for the national biathlon team in preparation for Phase 3 training, but now my life had changed. I would be eating goddamn pistachio ice cream and sour fucking pickles instead.

Ten minutes later I parked in our driveway, and sitting in my Volkswagen Fox I tried to find a way to make it all go away. My mind ventured down one path after another, only to hit a wall every time. I’d reverse and try another option. The end result was always the same. My vision of having a family was very far away. And it was skewed. I wanted to be the one coming home to kids who had just finished taking their baths or completing their homework, the smell of homemade lasagne wafting through the air, and my spouse asking me how my day in the field had been and would I please take out the garbage before taking off my combat boots?

I wanted to be the husband.

I needed a wife.

I needed a mother for this child growing inside of me.

I did want children someday. But I wanted to be in the infantry now. I couldn’t imagine giving up a child for adoption, and I couldn’t even say the other a-word, after all those years. I sank down on the ice-cold seat of my car and cried and cried until the windows were covered by a thick frost. I could barely see the light inside the kitchen window. How could I do this again? I wanted to die. I wrapped my arms around my body in an effort to choke out the pain and considered the possibility of letting myself freeze to death. Oh, how much easier that would be. Finally, I dragged myself out of the car and slowly made my way into the house.

I could hear Kevin doing the dishes. “Made stir-fry!” he yelled from the kitchen. He came out of the kitchen with his biathlon rifle hooked neatly on his back and a dishtowel in his hand. He often wore his Fortner rifle in the house, claiming that it needed to become an appendage before the upcoming World Cups. One Saturday morning, Jehovah’s Witnesses had knocked on our door and Kevin had answered it with the barrel of his new “appendage” sticking out behind his head. Their selling pitch was brief, to say the least.

“What’s wrong, Sand?” He pulled up my chin and could see I’d been crying.

“I have to tell you something. Let me change into something comfy and I’ll be right back down.” My head started spinning when I bent down to remove my combat boots so I sat on the floor to unlace them.

“Hard day at the Combat School?” Kevin asked, staring at me apprehensively. Without answering, I hurriedly headed upstairs to change into sweatpants and a baggy cotton sweatshirt. I had a habit of pulling the cuffs over my hands in the winter, so all my shirts had stretched sleeves. Soon, they would have a stretched belly too. I looked down and rubbed my hands over my flat stomach. I couldn’t stop crying.

By the time I came back down, a steaming bowl of stir-fried veggies with chicken was waiting for me on our small round dining room table. I approached it but the smell caused me a whirl of nausea. I ran back upstairs to relieve my stomach of its meagre contents. Kevin ran after me.

“You’re not feeling well?” he asked with the tenderness of a loving partner as he pulled the damp hair out of my face.

“What was your first clue?” I responded harshly.

“I’ll run you a hot bath and get you to bed early. There’s Gravol left over from last week when it was my turn.” He rummaged through the drawer of the vanity. I put my arm on his to motion for him to stop. He looked at me, puzzled.

“Kevin, I’m pregnant.” I barely got the words out before starting to sob again.

“But you’re on the pill. How can you be pregnant? Did you miss one?”

Crying convulsively between each word, I told him that I didn’t think so, but that I couldn’t be one hundred per cent sure. I blew my nose and took a deep breath. “Doc says it can happen even when you don’t skip a pill. I’m such a fuck-up, Kevin! What am I going to do?”

“Well, there are options, honey. We’ll figure it out.” He held my hand in his and waited until I calmed down. He took me in his arms and held me for a long time. “Have you considered an ab—”

“NO!” I yelled, knowing exactly what he was going to suggest. I wouldn’t even consider that, I told him, given that I was Catholic. As if that explained everything. I’d told Kevin about my first pregnancy, but the circumstances had been different then. More justifiable somehow. Now I had no excuse not to have this child.

“Sand, I think we’ve done non-Catholic things before. God knows we’re living in sin and having sex before marriage. If He didn’t know before, He’s probably figured it out by now.” Kevin smiled. I gave him a look that let him know I was not amused. “It will be okay, Sand. God forgives these things.” Kevin wasn’t religious. He couldn’t understand the intense guilt-induced programming I’d been subjected to since I was a child. I knew for a fact that forgiveness did not come easy.

And what if I do end this pregnancy, I thought, then for some reason God decides that I can’t ever have children again because he’s already given me two chances and I blew them both? I had visions of me on the operating table, the surgeon mistakenly pulling out everything that was going to enable me to have children later on.

“Oops, sorry, miss, but your uterus was attached to the baby and we mistakenly pulled it out …”

Wave after wave of guilt and self-hatred poured into me. I should be worrying about this child, not about my future abilities to have more. Nausea and dizziness were warring for my attention and I didn’t know if I was going to throw up or faint. I held my throbbing head in my hands and tried to quiet the voices screaming at me from within.

I told Kevin that I did want children. Someday, but not now. I rubbed a hand to my stomach as if to apologize to the little being inside of me who could hear my rejection. This time, the child had been conceived in a perfectly loving way. My reasons for not wanting it were entirely selfish.

“Who will stay with him when we’re both gone on exercise? We can’t even take care of a cat for God’s sake.” Kevin knew better than to argue.

“We’ll figure it out, Sand.” He tried to comfort me but I could see that he was tormented as well. I stayed crouched on the cold bathroom floor for a long time and cried until my eyes were so swollen I could barely see Kevin sitting beside me, holding my hand, waiting out the tears he knew were of self-reproach. Finally, he put his arms around me.

“I’m not ready to be a dad either, but it’s your choice, babe. I’ll love you no matter what and we’ll do this together.” That was Kevin: strong, solid and resilient. He was my rock. “Come on, I’ll run you that bath now.”

•••

military life means packing up every few years and moving to a new city, a new province, sometimes even a new country. My friends were now far away, physically and emotionally. I didn’t have anyone close with whom I could talk, but I needed advice. I could have picked up the phone and called one of my sisters but they too were far away, in Edmonton, Victoria, and Charlotte, NC. Besides, I couldn’t have confided in them anyway. My eldest sister, Line, mother of three, had been through hell to have children, with three miscarriages in between the birth of her daughter and two sons. Nathaly, my younger sister, had just given birth to a baby girl. Nancy had just married, and it was only a matter of time before she too would start a family. They couldn’t possibly understand why I would not want a baby. It was what we did, us good Catholic Perron girls. We were baby machines, my mother would say proudly, counting her precious grandchildren like winning lottery tickets. They’d all be so happy that I was pregnant, even if it was the last thing I wanted. They would shower me with love and tiny baby slippers and “don’t worry, it will all be wonderful once you see that little treasure” comments. They would tell me that in thirty years I would have no regrets about having had a family, but that I would have nothing to show for it if I chose my career instead. “Nothing to show for it,” in their terms, meant children. If you chose a career, you’d end up alone. If you chose babies, you would have grandchildren. My sisters were investing in their future. I was investing in “nothing to show for it.”

Apart from sharing my secret with Kevin, I didn’t discuss it with anyone, but it was only a matter of time before people found out. On most days, I was green until noon, and overly quiet. I fell asleep a couple of times at my desk in between lectures. I cried myself to sleep at night.

A couple of weeks after I’d found out I was pregnant, I called Valerie in Calgary. I was desperate to confide in someone and to get her advice. I hadn’t had the courage to call her the first time I’d become pregnant, but I forced myself to open up to her now. We had managed to keep our friendship going despite the distance, the differences in the paths we’d chosen, and both our hectic schedules. She had just given birth to her second child.

I pleaded for her advice. I told her that I didn’t know what to do, given that I couldn’t stay in the infantry if I had this child. I probably wouldn’t even stay in the army. I couldn’t go back to logistics, I told her. I’d be too ashamed. And finally, I couldn’t give it up for adoption — it would break my heart, and I’d never be able to give it away once it was born. Valerie and I had been best friends since we were fourteen. We used to go to church together and sit in the pew in front of my parents. Since we weren’t allowed to talk in church, we’d learned sign language so that we could spell out words without getting into trouble from my father. She knew my parents well and understood the pain I would be inflicting on them with this pregnancy.

“There are so many unwanted children in the world,” she said. I could hear the melancholy in her voice, from so far away. “It’s sad for a child to be born into this world when they are not wanted. I know you would love that child, Sandie, but do you want it?” I wished I could un-hear her question, rewind and erase it before it provoked a chain of images in my mind. All I could see were visions of me cold-heartedly leaving behind a child who wailed as I left the house for weeks and perhaps even months. Over and over again, the comments of my military peers echoed in my mind:

“Women aren’t reliable. As soon as they get slotted for a tour they get pregnant and go on maternity leave.”

“You can’t expect to take a year off and then come back as if nothing has happened. We worked while you were on vacation.”

“Hey, if you want to take a break to have a baby that’s all good but the ship continues to sail for the rest of us.”

Having a baby was still debilitating for most military women’s careers. There were exceptions of course, with an understanding boss perhaps, or forgiving circumstances and fortuitous timing, but for the most part, women accepted that they were going to lose their place in the fast lane. It was a compromise in exchange for having a child. I was neither strong enough nor willing enough to have my career slowed down by a baby I would have to leave behind as soon as maternity leave ended.

The more I considered Valerie’s question, the more it rattled me. Of course I would love this child, but I couldn’t raise it to the same standard as I had been raised, and that’s what it came down to after all. That high watermark, left by my own mother, was unattainable for me. My mother, a young administrative clerk, had left the army as soon as she had married, stayed home to welcome us into her arms when we arrived from school, and held the ship afloat when my father was called away for training or deployments. Qui prend mari, prend pays. She’d given up her career for her family without a second thought, loving us beyond measure, and desiring us more than anything in the world. Yes, I could love this child, but I couldn’t pretend it was wanted, and that saddened me profoundly.

It was at that realization that I made my decision. I was sitting at home cuddled under a heavy braided French-Canadian catalogne blanket on the couch in our living room, crying. I cried a lot those days. I called my aunt Diane to ask her if I could come over on Saturday because I needed to talk to her. My aunt Diane was my godmother and I knew she would give me all the compassion a friend can give, without judgment or condescension. I felt safe with her. That Saturday, she made arrangements through a “friend who knew a friend” at the Centre hospitalier de l’Université Laval, so that I could terminate the pregnancy.

A week later, Kevin held me in his arms while I wept interminably and once again begged for forgiveness from the world.