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I became pregnant at 19 and a mother at 20.

As a teenager, I held a strong conviction that not everyone should be allowed to be a parent, especially for the wrong reasons. I recall heated conversations, arguing that aspiring parents should attend mandatory classes which educate on the follies of having children to fill a void. Bringing a child into the world to fill voids creates more voids, renewing generational patterns of suffering for other souls to carry.

I’m now 55. I’ve witnessed uncanny markers of the same pain pass cyclically across generations ruining countless lives. Innocents born to broken homes, to emotionally immature, broken people who suffer from dysregulated nervous systems. So much is broken, the painful wheels turn and they break it again.

I was an oops pregnancy. Being born into a volatile, dysfunctional, messy relationship, neglect is inevitable and it’s easy to struggle with self-worth. You share your parents’ mess, riding a carousel of pain that becomes all too familiar. You ride the confusion of their story while you dream of the day you can get off, believing somehow you will be different.

Here’s a Story.

She isn’t a bad girl, just an empty one. She’s lost and has lost sight of her little-girl dreams—if she ever had them. She used substances to fill the void. She was desperate and afraid, a drowning person grabbing at a lifeline. Choices made without vision of what they would bring. 

Chaos swirls. She magnetizes it, stumbling through an impenetrable whirlwind that spins out of control. No clear thought or direction as she sinks deeper into a mire of hopelessness. Dark days interspersed with bursts of light, exposing the mayhem that blankets the floor of her room like a war zone. Clean and dirty clothes, belts, receipts, and food wrappers mixed with yesterday’s mistakes create a cornucopia of despair, she dissociates into dreams of fairy-tale rescue.

Then it happens. There’s a spark. She reaches for it. Another desperate attempt to save herself—wanting connection, wanting to be loved, her once empty womb conceives new life.

Oh…and she now feels hope. This will fix her life. She and the man with whom she conceived will heal; their demons banished, forever changed by new life. She seeks escape at the expense of another soul; a life now destined to join her in a dance with codependency. She thought life was hard before—unimaginable adversity awaits when she feels the pain of her child.

Bringing children into broken relationships fixes nothing. I’m amazed we still haven’t learned the destructiveness of bringing life into broken places. How can life thrive where it can only exhaust and break down an already exhausted and broken environment?

Instead of fighting to overturn abortion rights, we should be fighting for mental health, therapy for families, emotional-regulation education, and working to better humanity. We need to teach our young ones that nothing outside ourselves can heal us, that bringing another life into an ongoing war is not the answer.

I am pro-choice. I am pro-peace. I am pro-love. I am pro healing humanity by healing myself.

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