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Amy
Colorado,
United States
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I love stories. In college, I was a psychology major in part because I was and still am fascinated by people’s stories. How did they get where they are today? What makes them tick? What do they believe and how do those beliefs affect the way they live their lives? I have been an English teacher for nearly 20 years because I believe that stories are powerful. I believe that through stories, through our words, human beings connect with one another, understand experiences that we may not have understood otherwise, share what we value and why.
To me it is highly, highly significant that God used words to create the universe and everything in it. He said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. It’s significant that in the beginning was the Word – Jesus – and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” It’s significant that the Bible itself, the story of God’s creation and love for us, our separation from Him as the result of sin, and His plan for bringing us back to Him is called the Word. Words and stories are powerful.
I grew up in a family of storytellers. Whenever my extended family got together – aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents – one of my favorite parts was when the grownups would tell stories to remember their shared history and to add on the most recent chapters.
In these family stories, my dad was always cast in the role of Mr. All- American. Dad was quarterback on the football team, captain of the basketball team, president of his class. After high school, he became an Army officer and flew helicopters in Vietnam. He was handsome and successful and seemed to be perfect.
My mom, by contrast, was sort of the wind beneath everyone’s wings, quiet and seemingly content with supporting the dreams of the members of her family.
My older brother, Tommy, took more after my mom but was cast in the role of the easy-going screw-up, who was constantly getting into trouble. Stories about Tommy went something like this: “Remember when Tommy was little and it got quiet in the house and everyone began to worry? And one of those times, after the quiet, we heard a toilet flush and went running to the bathroom, just in time to see the brand new kitten swirling head-first down the toilet?”
Unlike my brother, I took after my dad. In our family stories, I was cast in the role of the high-achieving perfect child, Daddy’s little girl who could do no wrong. Stories about me went something like, “Oh, we only spanked Amy one time and that was enough. It was that time she had climbed into the dish machine and refused to get out. When I spanked her, I like to broke her heart and mine. Now we just have to tell her how disappointed we are in her and that’s all it takes.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but those words, those stories, were powerful. They were a lot to live up to, or to live down, for each of us.
Like my dad, who I wanted to be like, but more importantly, who I wanted to be loved by more than anything, I equated my worth with my accomplishments. The approval of others was like heroin to me: addictive and toxic.
So I was a straight A student from preschool through college (well, except in 7th grade, when I got a C in science because I refused to catch and kill bugs for the big life science project). I won spelling bees and writing competitions. I was a state champion gymnast who competed internationally, a dancer who was invited to perform in Denmark and the former Soviet Union (when it was still the Soviet Union), captain of my high school cheerleading squad, on the homecoming court, a member of National Honor Society and student council, elected Best All Around girl my senior year, graduated 23rd in a class of over 500 students, went to college on a dance scholarship, pledged a sorority and graduated magna cum laude. By the time I was in 9th grade, I was worn out, but I kept going and going and going, because what value did I have I if I didn’t?
How did I come to believe that about myself? It’s been said that truth and beliefs are caught rather than taught. To the extent that that is true, the truths I caught growing up came in part from the subtle and not-so-subtle messages about my role in my family’s story. My beliefs also came from various sources outside my home, whose messages I heard more and more, while I heard my parents’ less and less.
The messages I clearly caught were these:
1) a person’s value comes from his or her accomplishments – the more and better you do, the more you are worth;
2) a person’s value comes from his or her outward appearance – closely tied to accomplishments – the better you look, the more you are worth; and
3) a woman’s value, in particular, comes in large part from the value placed on her by men.
I caught, and lived by, these beliefs despite the fact that my family went to church every Sunday and all holidays, that my parents led youth group and served in the church, and that I was baptized at the age of 7, attended Sunday school, and identified myself as a Christian unashamedly anytime the topic came up. I said grace at the dinner table and recited, “Now I lay me down to sleep,” in bed each night. But, somehow, I did not ever comprehend that God had anything to do with my day-to-day life. Never did I get the message that my life had a purpose and that that purpose didn’t have anything to do with what I accomplished, how I looked, or who on this earth I pleased. I did not know Jesus, nor was I able to distinguish His voice from the enemy’s, which was speaking loud and often into my life, especially during a few highly critical periods.
One of those critical times was when I was very young – maybe 7 –when a cousin showed me some pornographic magazines that my uncle kept under his bed. I don’t remember if we were shocked, but I know we knew we’d found something that needed to be kept quiet, so we did. I remember giggling quietly as we took turns posing like the girls in the pictures on several occasions. Some of the images in those magazines were so powerful that I can still see them in my mind as clearly as if they were in front of me right now.
What was momentous about this was not what we’d found or done, but that one day the magazines were just gone and not a word was said about it. My cousin and I were just left to make sense of it all by ourselves. There is a picture in our family album of my cousin and me at that age dressed in black leotards with socks stuffed in our tops to make us look like the women we’d seen in those magazines. What if, instead of laughing at how “cute” we were or just ignoring the magazines, my parents had talked to me about what was wrong with them and with my wanting to emulate them? What if they had told me that I didn’t need to look like those women or act like them to be appreciated and loved? What if I’d been told right then that God had created me – and those women – for a purpose, and that it wasn’t to share my body with anyone but the one man he had chosen for me? What a different message I might have had about myself and what different choices I might have made later on.
A second crucial period in my life was when I was beginning to compete in gymnastics. In 4th grade, I was selected to join a competitive team, which meant that I left school 30 minutes early each day to go to the gym, got home between 7:00 and 8:00 during the week, then went to practice on Saturdays from 8:00-12:00, unless there was a meet that weekend. That schedule, in and of itself, and even competitive gymnastics wasn’t the problem. The problem was the messages I internalized about my value as a young woman, particularly from my coach.
Tammy’s primary coaching methods involved motivating by fear and shame. When I was scared to do a new skill, she’d tell me to stop being such a wuss. She’d rub her finger and thumb together and say, “Know what this is? The world’s tiniest violin, playing ‘My Heart Bleeds for You.’” Then I’d have to stand there until I got up the nerve to perform the skill. My fear of failure nearly always beat out my fear of physical pain, and my desire to please others always did.
Tammy had told us that we shouldn’t eat sweets or other fattening foods, and that if we did and we gained too much weight we’d likely be off the team. Each season, Tammy took our team to the University of Alaska sports medicine department where we had our body fat levels checked by water displacement. Tammy and the guy doing the weighing made such a big deal out of the fact that I appeared to have zero percent body fat – something I’ve since been told is 1) extraordinarily unhealthy for young women and 2) not strictly possible, as your organs need fat to function.
Regardless, one day when Mom picked me up from school and gave me a pack of Ding Dongs for a snack, I started crying. I asked her how she could possibly bring those for me to eat. Didn’t she know that Tammy would probably smell them on my breath and kick me off the team? So mom started bringing me healthier snacks from that day forward. If she told me that I shouldn’t worry about what Tammy said, that I was more than my body, more than what I could do with my body, I don’t recall it. Instead, I internalized Tammy’s messages.
A third powerful influence was the ease of access in the early 1980’s to cable TV, in particular a brand new network called MTV and another network called HBO. My friends and I spent all our free time consuming movies and music videos. I idolized the actors and musicians and wanted to look and act like the girls they seemed to prize. Again, if someone was giving me a different message, I sure cannot recall it.
So, these are the messages I heard and believed and lived by.
Given all of these circumstances and the way they’d shaped my view of the world and my place in it, it’s not all that surprising that by the time I was in 8th grade my friends and I had already begun sneaking alcohol from our parents, sneaking out of the house, and experimenting with sex – the things I had been learning so well to equate with acceptance, love, and worth.
The summer I turned fifteen, I gave myself away. One year and another guy later, I found myself a cliche´: the pregnant high school cheerleader. My boyfriend and I had been skipping school who-knows-how-often to go to his house. Unbelievably, no one at home or in the attendance office or in class ever said a word to me about missing school because I still managed to make straight A’s. I caught that message loud and clear: make good grades, look good on the outside, and no one really cares what you do otherwise.
We decided to tell my boyfriend’s parents first. His mom and stepdad were both alcoholics and drug users, who allowed us to drink with them, so we figured they would be the least judgmental. His mom said we should live there and raise the baby. As ignorant as I was, that didn’t sound like a very good plan even to me. Since there wasn’t much in the world I feared more than disappointing my dad, we told my mom next, and she said the same thing my boyfriend’s mom had said. I told her there was no way I could raise a baby, so she said she would raise it, or we could give it up for adoption. I told her I didn’t want to talk about it. I was scared to death, not just of having a child but of being pregnant – of everyone knowing and thinking badly of me, especially my dad.
At that point my dad had been retired from the Army for several years and was traveling to work as a defense contractor. When he came home, the three of us sat down to talk about it. I remember my dad saying that I was going to ruin my life if I had this baby (seemed I’d already done a fairly decent job of that). He said I was the captain of the varsity cheer team, I had plans to go to college, and what would people think? The only solution, he said, was to have an abortion. I climbed into his lap, sobbing, and agreed with him. Mom was defeated, and she was devastated. I didn’t know it at the time, but so was I.
When she took me to see our family doctor, and he confirmed my condition, Mom asked him if it was safe for me to have an abortion. He told us that it was actually safer than my having the baby. He said that as small as I was, there was a high risk for the baby and/or myself during delivery. He recommended an abortion, as before the second trimester, the fetus was nothing but a mass of tissue anyway. No big deal. Women had abortions all the time ... it would all work out just fine. Whether we believed him or we just wanted to buy the expedient lie, Satan had accomplished his purpose through that doctor. The deal was clinched. Over Christmas break my junior year, my mom, my dad and my boyfriend drove me to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Austin, Texas, where I lost my first child and what remained of my childhood and self-worth.
The experience was the single worst event of my existence. I have never felt such all-encompassing pain – not before or since. That doctor and nurse didn’t just extract my child from me – they sucked my spirit out as well. The sense of evil that filled the void was terrifying and total. When my dad and boyfriend met me on the way out with flowers and hugs and tears, the look of disgust I gave them must have been heartbreaking to see. In the car on the way home, as I heard my mom weeping in the front seat, I seethed, “Why are you crying? I’m the one who just lost a baby.” She brokenly answered me with, “So did I.” I spent the remainder of high school trying to cover my feelings of bitterness, shame, and worthlessness with alcohol, achievements, and more relationships. I spent as little time at home as I possibly could, eventually moving in with my latest boyfriend and his parents the summer we graduated until we both went off to separate colleges.
And just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, right before graduation, my dad came home from a trip and said he needed to talk to my mom, my brother, and me. We went out to the gazebo in our backyard. Instinctively, my brother and I sat on either side of Mom, while Dad sat opposite the three of us. He told us that he had not been a part of our family for some time now. That he had not been happy for even longer. He said that he’d made a decision many, many years ago that when my brother and I were both out of the house, he was going to find someone he was more compatible with than my mom, who had been with my dad since she was fourteen years old, had married him instead of graduating from high school, and had never held a job outside our home.
How could he think that just because I was graduating I was ready to not have my father and mother together? Why couldn’t he try to work things out with Mom? How could he just quit? How could they be married for 22 years and then just not be anymore? How could I ever hope to hope in marriage after that? How could he leave Mom without any way to fend for herself? How could he leave me? Didn’t he know how much I needed him?
I felt like I was being abandoned. I felt like everything I loved and trusted was, like my baby just a year earlier, ripped from me. Although he denied it, I was convinced that Dad’s decision was, at least in part, because I had disappointed him by getting pregnant. Enraged that the people I loved and trusted seemed unwilling to make any effort to keep our family together, I told both of my parents that I hated them and that I knew one thing for sure: I would never let a man put me in the position that Dad had put Mom in. Ever. Those were pretty much the last words I spoke to my dad until nearly four years later, when he walked me down the aisle, not because I wanted him to, but because what would people think if he didn’t?
In the meantime, I spent four years at four different colleges and still managed to graduate on time, magna cum laude, the entire time seeking desperately for Truth and acceptance, for something to fill the void and take away my anger. I embraced the philosophies of feminism, agnosticism and moral relativism that I studied in literature, philosophy, and psychology classes. Irrationally, despite the fact that I couldn’t even say the word abortion, I fiercely defended a woman’s right to choose. Well, it wasn't irrational really ... I suppose I had to justify what I had done. When a professor said in class one day that the Christian mythology wasn’t any different from the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian mythologies, and showed my class a few similarities in their stories, the little faith I had left seemed to fade to nothing. But nothing else felt right and nothing else filled the emptiness I carried around.
For a time psychology seemed to promise the answers. After graduation, I worked in a psychiatric hospital while I worked on my master’s in marriage and family therapy, which was more about attempting to heal myself and my family and hoping against all odds that I could have a successful marriage than about a love of the field. Eventually, I decided I was not cut out for counseling and went back to get certified to teach high school English. I had finally found my calling and subsequently threw myself into work, hoping that was where I would find meaning. I taught Advanced Placement English, Advanced Placement Psychology, coached cheerleading, went to workshop after workshop, and whatever else I could do to convince people and myself that I was a good teacher, a good person.
In the midst of all of that madness, I got married my senior year of college. Randy had come from an even worse background than I had, and one that was very different from mine. Our first years of marriage were turbulent to say the least. Any disagreement, anger, or seeming disapproval filled me with fear, anxiety, and a raging sense of insecurity. When we argued, my instinct was to run. The only reason we didn’t get divorced in our first year of marriage and many times after that was because we are both so unbelievably stubborn and absolutely determined not to quit, like my parents had.
We agreed, though, that children were a terrible idea for people like us who would surely mess up our kids just like we had been messed up. Never mind that I was scared to death that there was no way God would let me have a child, nor did I believe that I deserved to ever have one since I had killed the first one I’d been given. Never mind that we both worked 60-70 hours per week and who would raise our children if we did have them, anyway?
About eight years later, though, I became pregnant with our first child and was actually kind of excited about it. I called all of our friends and family as soon as I saw the pink plus on the stick. I bought a baby journal and started writing down my changes, my reactions, my hopes and dreams for the baby. I taped in a picture of the first ultrasound. After years of trying to fill the emptiness with performance, partying, marriage, career success, money, homes, swimming pools, cars, vacations, all leaving me just as empty as before, this was the answer. Being the best mom would finally give me true purpose and meaning and fulfillment in life.
And then, one day at school, early in my second trimester, I started to bleed. When I got to the doctor, there was no heartbeat. He told me I’d have to undergo a D&C (dilation and curettage – the exact same procedure as an abortion) the next day. I was certain that God was punishing me. But I knew I didn’t deserve to have a child after what I had done, so I could hardly blame Him. I felt worthless and hopeless and so, so alone. Poor Randy tried to help but couldn’t begin to comprehend the trauma I was going through. I was still too angry with my mom and dad to want either of them there. I couldn’t turn to God because I thought he was angry with me and, although we had started going to church because that’s what I’d done when I was growing up, I didn’t know His son at all.
The summer after that miscarriage, Randy and I decided to slow down. We took a biking trip across Scotland. We started thinking about ways that when (if) we did get pregnant again, we might actually be able to raise a child. We vacationed in Colorado every summer and loved it. Maybe we could buy a business there and even work together. When we found one, listed and sold Randy’s three restaurants in Dallas, bought the new business, found a house, sold our house, gave notice at my school and were about a month away from moving, I found out I was pregnant again.
This time, I didn’t tell a soul other than Randy. I didn’t journal. I didn’t dare to hope. I was scared to death. When we got to Colorado I made my first appointment at 8 weeks. They don’t normally do an ultrasound that early, but because of my history and my wrecked emotional state, my doctor suggested we just do one. I saw the baby’s heart beating on that screen at just 8 weeks gestation – younger than the baby I had aborted because it was “nothing more than a mass of tissue.”
And that’s when I started to hear God whispering my name. As I read the magazines about the development of the miracle growing inside me, with the full color pictures of tiny, clearly-living human babies with arms and legs and brains and hearts nearly from conception and wondered, how could this be? My eyes started to open to the lie I had swallowed, and I began the process of facing my grief and shame and fear and pain and my feelings worthlessness.
At nearly five months, however, I still hadn’t felt the baby move. One night, I lay in the bathtub, still guilt- and fear-ridden, with my hands on my belly, sobbing, praying for the baby to move. Suddenly, I wondered why God would answer the prayer of someone who never gave Him the time of day. So, in my ignorance and impiety, I made Him a "deal": if He would let me have this baby, I would follow Him. Not only that, I would make sure the baby learned about Him. I promised Him that the baby wouldn’t be mine; it would be His. I even convinced Randy that we needed to name the baby Caleb, which means loyal to God.
But how would I ever be able to teach Caleb about God if I didn’t know Him myself?
So I started reading the Bible for the first time in my entire life and was shocked to find Jesus there waiting for me! I had no idea He was so real! I fell madly in love with Him and His story! I couldn’t get enough! And I was so full of questions – arguments against Christianity from college, things that had me convinced that I couldn’t believe in God and still be a sentient human being. So I began to read the apologists: Josh McDowell’s More Than a Carpenter, Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ, C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. And I began to see and to believe and to accept.
At first, I could not even fathom that God could forgive me. I mean, lying, cheating, drunkenness ... those sins didn’t even come close to taking the life of your own child. Surely that must be unforgivable.
Then I found out about a group called Silent No More Awareness Campaign, a Christian organization whose purpose is to bring awareness to the devastation abortion causes in the lives of men and women who are affected by it. I heard story after story just like mine – hundreds and hundreds of other women who had had abortions thinking it was no big deal but then gradually spiraled further into self-destruction and relationship difficulties. Some even suffered physical effects such as multiple miscarriages, infertility, or even cancer. All those women’s stories had power – the power to change my life! I was no longer alone! But more importantly, story after story claimed that even women who have aborted babies have worth in God’s eyes. What? That could not be true...
So I went to the Bible for confirmation, and – sure enough! – I was stunned to read about men and women God had chosen – Moses, David, Paul, the woman at the well – whose sins were so similar to mine. And He loved them! And He forgave them! Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound! That saved a wretch like me! Why not me? Soon it struck me as really quite arrogant to continue to think that I was above (or below) God’s mercy. And if He could forgive me, then surely I could do what I thought was even more impossible and forgive myself. And forgive my parents.
My involvement with Silent No More Awareness ended when God started calling me to share my story publicly, to help other men and women who were suffering from the after-effects of abortion. One of Satan’s most powerful tools is secrecy. He wants us to keep pieces of us to ourselves, to hide them in the darkness, where they fester and ooze poison into our lives, a poison that immobilizes us and renders us ineffective in furthering the kingdom of God. Satan wants us to believe, sure, we might look good on the outside, but there are parts of us that are too horrific to ever be forgiven. God wants us to give Him every single part of ourselves, especially those ugly parts, so he can cover them with the blood of Jesus and use them for his glory.
But God is the author and perfecter of our faith. He keeps shaping us and refining us and urging us on, even when we put on the brakes.
Just a few years ago, I began to understand that, even though my sins had truly been forgiven and I was unquestionably saved, forgiveness and salvation don’t cancel out the consequences of sin. I saw that principle when I read the stories of Abraham, Sarah & Hagai, David and Bathsheba. I came to realize that my sin was still affecting my relationships with my parents, with my husband, with my children, and with my friends. So, more than 20 years after my abortion, I participated in a recovery program called Forgiven and Set Free. I discovered that I still needed to face the guilt I felt towards my children – the ones I gave birth to and the ones I didn’t.
For the first time ever, I consciously thought about the life that might have been if I hadn’t aborted it. To do that was nearly unbearable. I could only bear it because Christ was beside me every step of the way, telling me He’d carry it, telling me that fear does not come from Him. One night I had a very clear and highly uncomfortable vision of a 24-year-old man named Jesse smiling at me from heaven, telling me that he was waiting for me, his mom. This vision kept really bothering me, partly because it was unlike anything I had ever experienced before, and I was not a little creeped out. Finally, I did some research and found out that the name Jesse means Gift, or One Who Is. Not One Who Was – One Who Is. I sobbed when I read those words because I was able to acknowledge that my aborted child does still exist and that a horrific experience one that Satan intended for my harm, my LORD had turned into a precious, life-giving gift. How long might I have gone thinking I was a Christian and never really known Christ, if not for the circumstances that broke me to the point that I had nowhere to turn but up? Might I have stood before Jesus at the end of my life saying, “LORD, LORD,” only to hear him say, “I never knew you”? What about my family who didn’t really know Jesus either, my children, my students, my colleagues?
People in my immediate circle of influence now know Jesus because I finally heard and believed His story.
And then when I was recently asked to share my testimony at a women's retreat, I was prepared to say no because I hadn’t yet told my boys my story, and I didn’t want them to accidentally hear it from anyone else. I prayed and sought counsel and decided it was finally time to give God complete access and control. I had to tell my boys something no child should have to hear about his mother. The fear, again, was just awful. What they would think of me? Might they hate me and fear me and hold my sins against me?
But, yet again, mercy and forgiveness overwhelmed me. I asked Jesus to carry my fears, then I explained to my boys that I felt that God was calling me to share my story with others so that they might heal, too, or maybe even come to know Jesus and His amazing grace for the first time. I told them that I couldn’t share my story with anyone else until I shared it with them first. Their loving and forgiving responses were one of God’s greatest blessings to me. I’ve often wished I could see Jesus face-to-face here on earth, like the disciples did, like the woman at the well did. When my boys hugged me, cried with me, and told me that they didn’t really care about what I had done in my past, it was as if Jesus himself were doing those things.
Another blessing is the joy I have in knowing that God, and God only, gives my life value. All those years I had tried so desperately to find my value in what other people – flawed, human people – thought of me. Yes, we should serve others, but when we serve others outside of God’s purpose – no matter how noble the cause may seem –, looking for their approval and their accolades, or just to feel good about ourselves, there is always that sense that it isn’t enough, that there is still something missing. That’s because we don’t belong to other people – that is slavery; they don’t give us our happiness and they shouldn’t have the power to take it away. We were created by God and for God. We belong to Him, and Him alone. And we can only find happiness, meaning, and value in our lives when we are where He created us to be: in a relationship with Him. Then we can find happiness in relationships with other people, in serving other people. Then our lives have the kind of value that doesn’t grow old or fade or rot but lasts for eternity and affects eternity.
The biblical account of Esther shows us this in a very literal sense. Esther was valued for her beauty, for her humility and obedience, and for pleasing a man. But Esther knew that her value came not from what an earthly king thought about her but rather from what the King of all heaven and earth thought of her. In spite of her fears, Esther was willing to literally give up her life if necessary to stand before the king and tell him her deepest secret, the part of her story she had kept from him. In telling her story at just the right time, Esther saved her people.
Words and stories are powerful. Esther’s story, my story, your story, the stories of the hundreds, thousands, of others whose lives intertwine with ours ... they have power when God is in them. When His story is knit together with ours, it gives ours meaning. Our value lies in our ability to share our stories in a way that shines light on His story and rewrites the story of another person’s life so that Jesus plays the starring role.
After so, so, so many years of being lost in pain, guilt, and shame, I have finally found God's forgiveness and healing which has allowed me to forgive myself. Because I am truly forgiven and set free, I am silent no more! I look forward to God using my story to help other men and women who are suffering from their abortion experiences and to help end the American holocaust of aborted babies.
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Silent No More Awareness Campaign: Reach Out - Educate - Share
www.silentnomoreawareness.org |
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