In a World Where I've Never Been Born...

At least two people would have had very different, perhaps better, lives

A chain reaction, we spark each other, light fires in each other’s brains & hearts.

This week Emily Singara’s (But Emily, do you wish you’d been aborted?) excellent essay/article/post, inspired by

Jessica Valenti

’s Abortion Everyday, came across my field of vision (thanks,

Nan Tepper

). That’s the daisy chain. The domino run. That’s how we roll.

I forwarded Emily’s post to three friends:

• one had a successful reunion with the child she gave up at age 16;

• one whose reunion was disastrous, ending with someone in the psych ward; and

• an adoptee who also happens to be a single mom and recently got in touch with her birth mom.

Because as much as we are all the same, we are all very, very different, but enough about Emily, Nan, Jessica, and my friends to be named at a later date (because it’s not my place to out anyone). I’ve always believed my parents would’ve been so much better off had I never been born and that my father never wanted kids. They probably never should have been married, at least not to each other, either, but that’s an essay of a different color.

They met. They married. Things were going along fine, until…the baby talk.

That’s not the pity pot talking. There’s no poor me, nobody loves me, think I’ll eat some worms. This is an objective look at the facts, the choices, and what could have been. An evaluation of the impact I’ve made in the world, or not. The damage I’ve done, or not. Pondering the value of being alive at all, which I’ve never thought was much of big deal.

🩵

Where would we all be if I hadn’t been born?

Well I, for one, wouldn’t be writing this, because I’d be nowhere. Gametes that passed in the night. But the two people who contributed bits of DNA, sacrificed a lot of their life, freedom and dreams, who suffered humiliations and loneliness to bring me to life—what might their lives have turned out like?

Criminy, this could be a whole book; I’ll try to keep it relatively short.

The Backstory: They meet

She’d (Ma) had her first marriage annulled¹ and possibly slept with one or two men in between the dissolution of (voided) marriage number one and the will you marry me from number two, my father (Fred).

A tall, stunning natural redhead, she believed she had nothing to offer the world but her looks.² She like broken things, taking them home and putting them back together. Vintage furniture, a foreclosed house, roommates plucked from group homes, and men. Mom is where I learned the false equation that {being needed = being loved}. It was the 1950s and at 20-something, she was considered damaged goods & past her prime, coming up on the specter of spinsterhood.

Enter, Fred. Handsome, charismatic and humiliated by his father, smothered by his mother, he’d cultivated a misdirection of swashbuckling bravado. He created personas—that’s code for lies, but I believe he lied to himself as well. He was shame, secrets and lies poured into a tall, dark and intense mold. Forty-seven years after he’s passed, I’m still trying to figure out what was true and what wasn’t. One secret threatened to break him completely, a lie he’d wanted to take to his grave, but I forced it out of him (more further down).

They were a fabulous looking couple, they validated each other. Did they love each other? 🤷‍♀️ Neither had a reference for healthy marriage, but they completed some image in their heads of what marriage looked like. They played their parts and were stronger together than either could have been alone.

Add any another person to the mix and it all would go to shit.

🩵

Another person gets added to the mix

They might’ve worked, might’ve been happy if she hadn’t wanted a baby so badly. Actually, she’d say she wanted a dozen and both husbands lied about wanting children.

Fred needed to be the primary focus. He’d explode with some version of “I married you so you’d spend time with Me,” when he felt “his wife” was spending too much time with a friend. Or a child.

A child. That’s code for me.
Note: I put “his wife” in quotes because that’s what she was to him. She was not Elayne and never my mother, even though she was. She was always his wife, a possession, something he’d acquired and was afraid of losing.

I was the thing that came between them.

She’d think about leaving, getting a divorce, but growing up without a father, raised by a single parent in the Depression, she didn’t want that for me. She considered killing herself³, but said she didn’t want to leave me alone with him. Even so, more than once she’d be in her room packing to run away and leave me home with him, saying she didn’t even know how she’d support herself, where she’s live.

Whenever she showed signs of breaking free, terrified of the humiliation and loneliness of her leaving, his grip tightened, making her want to that much more. He used the child (still me) as bait, sending me in crying when she was throwing clothes in a suitcase. She might’ve left him, he knew, but she couldn’t leave me.

Ironically, she became the breadwinner and stayed long after I was out of the house. The truth was, she needed to be needed and his broken fit right into that. {Her need to be needed + his broken bits = A 45-year-unhappy-marriage}

If she hadn’t wanted a child

Here’s where I used to get confused. I knew she’d wanted a dozen kids, so why was I the only one? What about adoption?

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“I’m not taking care of someone else’s little bastard,” he said, using the word in the literal sense, not the pejorative.

“I see how he is with you, I couldn’t put another child through that,” she said, privately.

🩵

Both were true. Up until my mid-late 50s, I knew they’d’ve had a better life without me. It wasn’t me, in particular, but any kids. I’d discover more after he died. He’s not dead yet, not in this part of the story. In this part of the story he’s very much alive.

Fred wasn’t the worst father or the worst husband, but he wasn’t good at those things, either. He felt better when he drank, but rarely did. He should’ve drank to oblivion, hit a bottom, gone into a recovery program and learned how to live life. That’s how it worked for me. So tightly wound, his control issues stopped him from drinking and trapped him with all the terrible things his brain told him about himself, about how to be a man, about what real intimacy was.

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Every single decision—yes, even the smallest ones—creates a unique trajectory; we spend our lives careening around like pinballs bouncing off bumpers and flippers. The path from plunger to gobble hole is different each time, you’re never able to replicate the exact amount of tension when you release the plunger, or timing, or wear on a bumper or the playfield.

How different would my life be if in 1979 I’d taken the studio on Cornelia Street; or the one bedroom over the bar on 1st Avenue & St. Marks Place, or that walk up with the skylight in the bathroom on Avenue D, instead of the one I did take at 41 East on 7th Street. So many variables. Cornelia Street is closer to Washington Square Park (bad), but also to my friend Amy (good), in a neighborhood full of tourists (annoying). Living above a bar is a questionable choice for an alcoholic like myself, for the same reason living anywhere with stairs would eventually become a challenge. I could’ve bought the Avenue D apartment for $3000 (good). It was sunny & gorgeous (good), but it was in the middle of blocks & blocks of abandoned buildings (bad), that frightened cabbies, cops and normal people (bad) and many of those empty buildings had been reclaimed by heroin dealers (bad in ‘79, but a year or two later I’d learn to love that and it would’ve killed me).

Each decision opens a multiverse of options and possibilities.

The Multiverse Version Where There is No Me

Let’s agree that not only is there no me, there were no other children either; Fred & Elayne meet, marry, and remain childless.

In a world where I exist
Crushed by the pressure to support a family he doesn’t really want, he opens a photography studio—doing weddings, bat mitzvahs and graduations. There is no joy in that. They struggle for almost fifteen years; working together and financial difficulties strain their marriage. He is unsuccessful at a series of jobs after they finally close the studio: driving instructor, selling telephones over the telephone, hypnotherapist, enrolling women in stewardess school (yes, really).

To help pay the bills she will be an Avon lady, door-to-door market researcher in freezing weather, telephone marketing, running my father’s photography business, bookkeeper.

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In a world where there was no me
With no pressure to have a financially successful business, Fred pursues photography artistically; his early photos showed a good eye and promise.

They probably never move out to the suburbs—Levitt houses with backyards were designed for growing families. Maybe they stay in the city—the Bronx or Queens. Maybe somewhere better.

Without Levittown, Elayne won’t meet her best friend, Edna.⁴ Fred never meets the any of the women he had affairs with, and if their marriage isn’t being torn apart by financial stress, the act of trying to get pregnant, or the way rift in parenting styles, maybe there’d be no need for extramarital relations.

She wouldn’t’ve been driving on Old Country Road and gotten into a car accident requiring surgery.

She wouldn’t’ve met her boyfriend, Sal, at the senior center, which sounds sad, but maybe she’d have a fulfilling life with or without the man who’d’ve been my father, not having to wait until 79 to meet a good man.

They could have traveled extensively

Maybe Fred & Elayne go live in Israel.

Or Italy and she learns to cook authentic Italian food and they walk on the beach holding hands.

He returns to his mind reading act. He might out-Kreskin Kreskin. Originally billed as Frederick Duff, maybe he sticks with the ridiculous story that he’s Scottish and where does that take him?

She becomes a competitive ballroom dancer. She and her first (voided) husband cleared the floor, they were stand back and watch us good.

She could have left him and started a new life, maybe better, maybe not, but different.

She might have continued to pursue acting or finished college

Neither would’ve been trapped by a legal and moral sense of obligation to the child, to each other, to society and their families.

More than anything, had she not insisted on having a child; not gone to doctors to find out why she wasn’t getting pregnant despite all their efforts, he’d never have had to reveal his secret and while it may have driven them apart eventually, apart they had choices.

All my life I felt my father didn’t want me, didn’t want any children and while we did love each other, I never wavered from that belief. Somewhere in my 50s, Mom accidentally revealed his secret. He had what I’ve learned was an intravaginal ejaculation disorder, preventing ejaculation during intercourse. He’d hidden it, faking orgasms during sex, and would’ve died with that secret but for the “I want a baby” chorus coming from my mother. IVF wasn’t even a twinkle in scientist’s eye in 1955.

Everything fell into place when I heard that. It all made sense. He didn’t want me, I was right. I was a reminder of his humiliation, of that thing that made him feel less than a man. I was a reminder, every time he saw me. Every day. He wanted to keep her so badly, he’d have done anything, and so, he sacrificed his self-esteem in order to keep her.⁵

I’m sure she felt she was falling short as a woman, unable to bring her man to orgasm, and they had tried everything.⁶

Bringing me to light & life meant they both had to be humiliated, made to feel flawed, forced to bring those flaws into the light, talk about it to each other, and get passed it.

Kind of kills the romance and eroticism of the moment, eh?

I wish I could say everyone got therapy and walked away well and happy; I can’t. I doubt that he ever discussed it with anyone. I know for a fact she’d never told anyone other than me.

In a world where I didn’t exist, he can keep believing his own stories & feel like a man. She gets to feel attractive and desirable.

🩵

A friend says Mom wouldn’t have been better off, who would give her the care I’m giving her now? Maybe her third husband would have left her better off financially. Maybe she dies in some spectacular way having the time of her life and doesn’t have to suffer the inequities of dementia and incontinence and losing the ability to even stand on her own.

Or maybe not. I’m not there. I don’t know.

1. If an annulled marriage is considered to be invalid from the beginning as if it had never taken place, isn’t it an oxymoron to say she had an annulled marriage because the annulment voids the marriage so there was nothing to annul?

2. Her aunt would introduce her, “This is my niece, who used to be beautiful.”

3. She has been stockpiling pills for as long as I can remember. There is a shopping bag full secreted away in my kitchen.

4. I walked into Edna’s house the day she moved in & told them the furniture was in the wrong rooms. Dragging me outside, she asked loudly, “Who belongs to this obnoxious child?” I was three. I introduced Mom to the woman who would become her best friend and my surrogate aunt.

5. I’m just realizing that the guilt she must have felt over his humiliation is probably another reason she stayed with him.

6. I have way too much detail about the everything that was tried…

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