Impossible Motherhood Testimony of an Abortion Addict by Irene Vilar: Unflinching, unforgettable

I am fascinated by stories of survival even controversial ones such as this one.

A woman who had undergone fifteen abortions in fifteen years.

But it was a wrenching book to read because I'm a mother. Reading about abortion is never easy. But as a writer,I was curious. I wanted to analyze it, to see what drove the author to expose herself to eventual scrutiny, to possible vilification. Why do it? And as a reader I want to discover the emotions lurking underneath these abortions. To unearth the past that led her to this situation. And to understand.

This book is one of those books I've read quite quickly because I wanted to see the conclusion already. And this in  uncommon because I have a pile of books that are still half-read, waiting for me to pick it up again. My interest wanes fast if a book doesn't give me something to think about or root for.  But here, I wanted to know what happened to the little girl who saw her mother jumped out of a moving car or the young woman who got involved with a much older professor and had more than a dozen abortions? I wanted to find out right away.

However, just as it was an emotionally difficult read, it was also a little difficult to write about it too because re-reading through it again was like re-living through her ordeals anew. Her accounts had been achingly raw and personal like reading through her diary. But that’s what makes this book unforgettable, its unflinching honesty.

"What comes next is difficult to tell. I stood in the middle of an empty room unable to think of anything but how to get him back, wavering between the piercing need to make a move and the dread of never moving again. I had no future other than being in this man’s life. I had to make an appointment for an abortion. I didn't have a choice."

It’s easy to judge her, I know but it’s her courageousness to come out and admit these abortions and delve through the emotions leading up to it makes it an interesting read.

Going past the first few chapters, it would seem that her older lover who didn't want children, prompted her to do it. That and her naiveté as a teenager and her hunger for approval from him. But as you read further after these lines, there is more to it than her desire to keep him.

“He had told me that family kills desire, not to mention love. A child at my age would turn me into one more gender casualty. He was thinking of me, shielding me from a woman’s fate and the shackles of domestic live we all took on when the challenge of freedom seemed too much of a burden to bear. I was pregnant with a child I wanted and he knew he would despise. I was ignorant and uncultured and he was brilliant and smooth.”

“…I locked myself in the apartment unable to move. Without money any action seemed impossible. I was not accustomed to staying still. Doing nothing turned into a death wish that, frighteningly, seemed reasonable. The idea of being exposed  to the man I loved, looking weak, worthless, and alone, plagued my thoughts.”

"I had aborted a pregnancy I wanted, had almost died, and all I could feel was terror at becoming a man’s problem. I struggled to find an explanation, something to make him understand I wasn't a mess, that I could do something right, after all, something to put his life at ease so he could finally write the books his women kept him away from."

And just when you thought, that her helpless pining for him would never end, a surprising twist of circumstance happened, she developed a backbone and became stronger as the years went by. Perhaps, one of her major turning point  as when she had to steer their large sailboat by herself to avoid a storm. He gave her the wheel while he was sleeping down the deck. She got past it successfully and it became the spark that made her trust her own abilities more.

"Early in the morning the next day, we were entering the Gulf Stream. We had sailed under power over the banks some ninety miles through the night and not hit ground or coral. I had steered most of the way with both radar and GPS helping me decipher the treacherous currents. Dead reckoning at night in the banks with a seven-and-a half- draft sailboat was dangerous, if not impossible. When the sun finally came up and I saw the indigo blue of the stream against the white hull of Sarabande and the entrance landmark of Memory Rock behind me, I let go of my tight grip on the steering wheel, finally, and was sent to tears."

She also began to trust her writing abilities more especially when her father liked her manuscript.  That part was a memorable personal and emotional validation of her writing that she needed that time.

"In the morning, my father handed me back the partial manuscript of the memoir I’d been working on and shared with him. I had been awake most of the night, fearful of what he would feel, think, say, when he saw his portrait, the obvious connections between his actions and my mother’s unhappiness and ultimate death…Ashamed, I looked into his eyes intent on assuring him that if there was anything he disagreed with I would not publish the book."

“Honesty, Irene, is the only thing we can hold on to and know it won’t let us down,” he said, shaking his head and staring down at the manuscript on my lap. “That is some book. I’m proud”.

And enlightenment on her part happened when she least expected it. It struck when she separated from her lover and was caring for her dying dog. That moment, she realized why she kept going through the abortions like an abortion addict. It rooted from her mother’s suicide when she was eight, when her mother leapt out of their moving car. When her mother chose death over her family and she chose it for herself too, fifteen times. The care for her dog awakened her. She had to leave it in a kennel while she was on tour, while it was sick and dying. She realized then that we are capable of neglecting the people we love and loves us and that it if we have a second chance again of redeeming ourselves we'll take that chance like her mother could.

"As I dug the shovel into the frozen ground, I thought of my mother’s burial. Her coffin had been wrapped in the Puerto Rican nationalist flag. To think that for most of my life, I had forgotten the love of a mother, yet, remembered it, felt it again, in Oliveira’s eyes. It was as if tending to Oliveira, I was given the chance to see her come back after she abandoned me, and feel all the remorse, all the love, and want nothing else but to repair what she’d been destroyed. I had left my dog in a kennel for over a week blind to the fact he needed me, that he was frail and dying. I was his whole world. My mother left me too, blind to the fact I could not live without her. She was my whole world. It baffles me to this day how by coming to be so delicately known by my dog, I felt my mother’s love revive in me, if for a brief period. I saw how at some moment or another we could be capable of unthinkable neglect. I feel empathy for my mother then, saw that she would have cared for me had she had a second chance."

After her time of clarity, she finally decided to have a child. She finally made peace with having a life growing inside her. And though, she didn't dwell in too much regret or remorse about the past abortions in her text, the phrase”shameful mass of thirty-five years” may have summed this up. 

"I have been called a survivor, but truly I wasn't one. I was a deluded creature in suspended animation…I was not a survivor until I overcame my fear of mothering the child in my womb. It was halfway through my sixteenth pregnancy that I found peace with my maternal desire and fell in love with my situation and the future gestating in me. My daughter Loretta Mae became the coherence emerging from the shameful mass of thirty-five years."

Tonight, after I put you down to sleep, I returned to the room and stood by the crib. It anguished me to realize for the first time. “I will die and have to leave you.” It also occurred to me that one day not in the distant future, you would stand by a crib watching your own child asleep, realizing the same thing. I grew calmer. The calm, as always seems to be the case with me, was made of resignation. But no matter how painful, I look forward to watching you grow, to hearing the sound of your voice to change, all linking the woman I am to the child I once was"

Honestly, I am parts shocked, saddened, enlightened by this book. I have my own opinion about abortion and I admit, I was shocked that she went through with it fifteen times, saddened because there are many women trying to conceive, spending money to have a child of their own. And at the same time enlightened because you realize that it was never an easy choice for women like her, that sometimes their underlying reasons are so deep and painful by that they had no choice but go through with it. 

We may never know the moral issues that they will have to grapple within themselves or the community they live in or if their choices haunt them sometimes but as readers we can only look on and not judge. We can only try to understand their plight and be happy that they have lived through it and are having a better life than what they started with.