Five Flavors—Anonymous
I didn’t plan it like this, it just so happened that the day before I was supposed to get my abortion was the last day of school, so my second grader needed to be picked up at 12:30, sticky with Oreos and popsicles from the end-of-the-year party, but my almost 5 year old was still booked in pre-school till 3:30.
It was an unseasonably warm spring day, and we decided to take a walk till it was time to pick up little brother. My oldest suggested a certain trail he likes, in the redwood hills above the city, and it wasn’t till we pulled around the familiar bends of the road leading up there that I remembered this particular trail, its particular path, so soft you can walk shoeless, flat and easy around the curves of the hills sheltered in thick cool redwood shade, except for a few spots that burst out into sunshine and views of the city below. This was the trail I had walked the day before each of my two babies was born.
I remember those walks: heavy, awkward, portentous… the element of fear and of brewing power, the shape-shifting that pregnancy is, the incredulous knowledge that I was about to throw myself careening down the wildest of rides, the unknown, the surrender. I remember the way it felt to give in to the waves of birthing, and then, to the sweet drowsy smell of milk and sleepless nights and skin-to-skin contact. I loved having babies.
The weekend before I had knelt to watch five twelve-year-old girls disrupt the State Democratic Convention with a step routine cheering for the continuation of life on Earth. I felt my face start to twitch as they entered, stomping and chanting. I swallowed a lump in my throat when they shouted out over the suited delegates, “How many years do we have to stop climate chaos? Eleven!” I felt tears in my eyes when they recounted the 19 whales that have washed up on local beaches this spring, and the smoke from wildfires that had given them asthma last fall. By the time of the final chant, each girl stomping in unison, “Save our world- stop taking fossil fuel money! Save our world– stop taking fossil fuel money!” it felt impossible not to recognize that if God had a voice it would sound like this.
And I recognized my own small role in getting those particular girls to that particular convention- my job is to support urban youth in organizing for climate justice. I knew about the text reminders and permission slips, I knew about stepping between two boys who were about to throw punches, about presenting slide shows in bad-smelling cafeterias over the hum of refrigerators and boredom, about projectors that don’t work, and negotiating conflicts between idealistic and bossy principals and harried, suspicious after-school staff, about rides home after meetings and rides home after meetings that turn out actually to be rides to Hayward, 30 minutes away because they forgot to mention they were actually going to their uncle’s house that night, and rides home that mean sitting outside apartments in cars under streetlights and talking with a wet-faced teenager about cutting and getting in trouble and brothers who have been shot and bulimia and evictions and the end of the world and redemption. No one said God didn’t need some logistical assistance to be heard.
How much does it matter for me to be there?
How many is the right number of children to have at the end of the world as we know it?
What does it mean to fight for life?
On the trail through the redwoods, a young father approached brimming with nervous smiles, his baby bundled in a backpack. Excuse me, he said, can you tell me if the hat is covering his eyes? I want him to be able to see the trees,.
He’s looking at them, I smiled encouragingly, but just then the baby turned his head, and the hat slipped into blindfold mode. Should I fix it? I asked the dad. Oh yes please, he said, and when I did, the baby flashed a silent and toothless grin.
I have asked for that same favor on this same trail a few years back, I told him, and he smiled. I still had that embryo in my uterus; that utterly unplanned, statistics-defying, illogical, unreasonable attempt life was making to keep careening forward. That quintessential blessing. I wanted to tell the jolly father, I have another one coming! I wanted to be part of that wondrous world of new parenthood where despite it all– just look at the miracles.
We continued past the father and baby, my son sprinting ahead, the shady path so soft you can walk shoeless. And old grey grandmother tree, pine needles long gone, caught my eye, and reminded me, after your abortion you will be in another community, one less buoyant and public perhaps, but one present and thoughtful and strong: the women who have chosen not to carry their fertilized eggs into human form. The women who, usually in private, if not in secret, have exercised their Right to Choose. Because no one said God didn’t sometimes need some logistical assistance to be heard.
I have read that in Chinese cooking, a mix of all 5 flavors is what makes a meal complete: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and delicious. I know the TV men and the men in suits like their women one flavor: sweet. Like Oreos and popsicles. With the power, somehow, to carry life but not to extinguish it.
My grandmothers gutted rabbits. My grandmothers went out with shotguns to find the men that raped their daughters. They sat at bedsides and held the hands of elders taking their last rattling breath. They knew herbs: salty and bitter ones, too. They knew how to make a life delicious.
On the trail, my son ran ahead and back again, bringing me crushed and pungent bay leaves, pebbles shaped like awkwardly-drawn hearts. Miles away, mothers and their children crowded into chain-link pens under overpasses, and I don’t know the songs those mothers sang to put their children to sleep on the gravel, but I am sure they sang them. That morning I had gotten an email from the mother of a grown son who was on trial for bringing water to people crossing the desert, to prevent them from dying of thirst. I had gotten another asking me to contribute twenty-five dollars because there is a crisis of children under five starving to death just south of the Fertile Crescent, the number of them so big I can’t imagine it, but I am sure each one of them took their last rattling breath in someone’s aching arms. And on the other side of the planet, flying foxes were dropping dead from the heat, and fell from eucalyptus trees by the thousands.
I stood at the corner where the redwood path broke into the sun, and looked down at the view of the city. It was the same place I stood, where, 5 and 8 years before I had spoken to the about-to-be baby inside me and welcomed it into the wild spin and struggle of the world, invited it to come land for now on the soft redwood hills, to come into my arms, to come stand on the path with me.
Now, what was inside me was unequivocally not a baby. (I know what it feels like to be carrying a child.) But it was the possibility of another life. There was no doubt in my mind that this was my choice.
This time, I sent the prayer of possibility out over the city. I let it go. I would stand with the old grey tree and the silent women with no badge to mark them who had made a choice. In spite of everything, I would spend lazy mornings marveling over the miracle of my existing children’s round heads, because I could choose to, and not because I was on a ride from which I couldn’t escape. I would taste the bitterness of feeling in my body what it would mean to be denied my choices now, and of the mind-numbing fact that this generation of babies might come of age on a planet and society that won’t sustain their right to grow new life. And still, I would spend evenings in cars under streetlights, laughing and crying about getting through it all, and I would continue to fight, with every kind of power I have, despite the statistics, in spite of logic, for the continuation of life.
