The Celebration

He celebrated. That’s the bit I can’t get past. Even now. He celebrated.

I was eighteen. Pregnant. Terrified in the way you can only be terrified when you’re barely an adult and the person who’s supposed to be in this with you is treating the situation like a close call rather than a catastrophe.

He didn’t want it. Made that clear in the way men like him make things clear. Not by shouting. By creating a climate where only one outcome is possible and then standing back and watching you choose it so he never has to say he made you.

So I chose it. The appointment. The waiting room. The forms. The drive home afterwards with a pad between my legs and a silence between us that felt like a wall.

And he was relieved. Visibly, physically relieved. Like someone who’d narrowly missed a speed camera. Like the whole thing was an inconvenience that had been efficiently managed.

I bled on his bathroom floor and he went to rehearsal.

That sentence should be the whole story. There’s nothing I can add to it that makes it worse than it already is.

I wanted that baby. Not practically. Not logically. I was eighteen with no money and a boyfriend who slept with prostitutes and celebrated when I lost a pregnancy he’d pressured me into ending. Practically, logically, it was the right decision.

But wanting isn’t logical. And grief doesn’t care about your circumstances. I grieved for years. Quietly. In the way you grieve things you’re not supposed to grieve because you technically chose them.

Nobody tells you that you can choose something and grieve it at the same time. That consent and loss can live in the same room. That a decision made under pressure is still a decision but it’s not the same as a free one.

Five years later I got pregnant again. On purpose. With someone else. And when I held that baby I cried in a way that had nothing to do with the child in my arms and everything to do with the one I’d let go.

He celebrated.

I’ve never forgiven him for that. And I never will.