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You Can’t Lie

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Clarissa

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This is from a memoir of a childless woman who got pregnant at 39 and had an abortion. The events described take place immediately after the abortion:

When I reached Twenty-First Street, the truck was there, as expected. I ordered my all-time favorite comfort food. Not raw, but still vegan: a Mediterranean platter with a pile of silky hummus, pickled cabbage salad, tabouli, and the most delicious falafel with tahini sauce. I took it home to my cozy backroom office, sat at my desk, and scanned through new emails, while devouring the food. Almost as if I was trying to quickly fill the space that had just been otherwise occupied. Baby out; falafel in, I thought. Then I got back to work.

The Girl with the Duck Tattoo: A Memoir

Of course, after this the woman proceeded to self-destruct in the most egregious ways. You can’t lie to your psyche. It knows when you do violence to it and repays you severely.

14 responses to “You Can’t Lie”

  1. random reader Avatar
    random reader

    You have a strong stomach to be able to read a book like that. I do not believe I could.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      It’s enormously fascinating. Nobody would read a memoir of a good, self-regulating, psychologically healthy person because her life would be very boring to everybody but herself.

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      1. Random reader Avatar
        Random reader

        I have no doubt it is interesting and well written. It just takes a special kind of evil to equate her own baby with a falafel. And that’s why I could never be a literary critic. Although I like reading, there are just some books I couldn’t get through no matter how well written.

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        1. Socal Dendrite Avatar
          Socal Dendrite

          From this short excerpt, it reads to me as if that is exactly the point: that the falafel cannot of course equate to a baby. These words seem deliberately chosen to convey the sad sentiment (that she feels the void left by the baby and is trying but failing to fill it): “Almost as if I was trying to quickly fill the space …”

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  2. ed Avatar
    ed

    Sounds like a very nasty woman. Are you reading this Clarissa?

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    1. ed Avatar
      ed

      I mean if you’re reading her memoir “The Girl with the Duck Tattoo: A Memoir”

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  3. Avatar
    Anonymous

    In college (many decades ago) I had a girlfriend. She was 18. She told me that she had gotten pregnant in high school. Her mother insisted that she get an abortion — which she resisted until she could no longer withstand the parental pressure from both her mother and father. When she told me this, she broke down in tears. “It would have been such a beautiful baby!” she cried out. I almost wept myself. Abortion is horrible — especially when the mother is healthy and can almost certainly deliver a healthy baby. Even if the baby could not be cared for by the mother, there are countless infertile couples who would leap at the chance to adopt.

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    1. bluebird of bitterness Avatar
      bluebird of bitterness

      I had a friend fifty-plus years ago who had a similar experience. At that time, abortion wasn’t legal in our state, so her parents shipped her off to New York to get the babies killed (she was carrying twins). I don’t think she ever got over it.

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      1. Avatar
        Anonymous

        😢

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    2. el Avatar
      el

      \ there are countless infertile couples who would leap at the chance to adopt.

      I am always shocked when people blithely assume adoption is a solution to the problem of abortion.

      Adoption Trauma: The Damage to Relinquishing Mothers

      These are studies detailing the long-term consequences to natural mothers (“birthmothers”) of surrendering a baby for adoption. This is information that is in standard and widely-known social work and psychology articles and research reports. Adoption “professionals” are familiar with these studies — the findings are common knowledge.

      https://www.originscanada.org/adoption-trauma-2/trauma_to_surrendering_mothers/adoption-trauma-the-damage-to-relinquishing-mothers/

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      1. Avatar
        Anonymous

        I know a lady this happened to. High school, her parents shipped her of, not to an abortionist, but to an unwed mothers’ home, where she was forced to give the child up for adoption.

        It was, in fact, traumatic.

        She does not wish that the child had been aborted. She did make contact with him through an adoptees’ registry when he was an adult. He’d been adopted by good people, had a good childhood, had a family of his own, and they keep in touch. She is, to this day, staunchly against abortion.

        The only people I know who’ve been through that wringer for whom it was *not* a traumatic thing they have horrible regrets about to this day, are the big-family Catholic girls, who had the baby, and then the baby was adopted by its grandparents (this is traditional, and if you’ve already got 8 kids, fitting another one in is no big deal) and raised as a sibling. Everyone adores the kid, kid grows up surrounded by bio-family, and bio-mum is never left wondering how the kid is getting on. She just isn’t the kid’s primary caretaker, so she can finish school, the kid can be raised by competent adults, and if and when mum finds a man who’s willing to marry her, she’s not encumbered.

        The girls I knew who had babies while still in high school, and kept them… that seemed to turn out better for the mothers than being forced to give the kid up, but kind of a mixed bag for the kids. Some ended up in great families with fantastic stepdads. Others… about the same outcomes as for kids with divorced parents. Not great. Could be worse.

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        1. methylethyl Avatar
          methylethyl

          –Curiously, I know several women who got pregnant in high school.

          Looking over their experiences, there is *one* obvious solution to this predicament that I emphatically do not recommend, though it does come up at times in my social circle: DON’T MARRY THE LOUT. I know people who’ve done it, and I don’t know a single case where it turned out well. 100% divorce rate. I won’t rule out the possibility that it could in some rare cases work out, but from what I’ve seen: there is basically no overlap between boys/men who knock up teenage girls, and boys/men who make good husbands/dads. All but one of the women in question– I guess taking care of a baby was salutary. They grew up, became responsible people. The boys didn’t.

          …and one of the perpetual problems with current US legal setups, at least, is that if you do opt to keep the baby in this situation, you are often stuck dealing with the lout who fathered the child for 18 years. I’m against abortion, but I don’t think you can ignore that in the logic chain, either. It’s a problem, and one feels there ought to be some legal recourse for it.

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      2. bluebird of bitterness Avatar
        bluebird of bitterness

        No one is claiming that giving a baby up for adoption is not difficult for the birth mother; what doesn’t make sense is how a mother can love her baby too much to allow it to be adopted, but not too much to have it sliced and diced and flushed down a drain. If you’re in an unhappy marriage and you want out, you can divorce your spouse, but you don’t kill him/her. If you’re fed up with a freeloading adult child living in your basement, you can send him/her packing, but you don’t kill him/her. Why can we not extend the same courtesy to a child in the womb?

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          A baby born at full term doesn’t feel like a fetus at 6 weeks. It just doesn’t, not for most women. I don’t see the point of pretending it does and that absolutely no bonding occurs throughout the entire pregnancy, growing a relationship bit by bit. It’s a relationship with milestones and a lot of complexity and progression. Men can’t remotely understand it because they never felt it. But we, women, have felt it. We have built relationships with the babies inside us. Why should we throw all that away and pretend that it’s the same relationship at 5 weeks as it is at 35? Why do we devalue the most magical, amazing thing that only we can do?

          I very sincerely don’t get it. What’s the gain? There will be exactly as many abortions whether we downgrade ourselves this way or not. It’s all loss and no gain for women.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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