by My first sexual sexual intercourse, just before I started with the university, was not planned. It would have been largely forgetting if we had used birth control.
Looking back it is difficult to admit to my own foolishness. I had the same boyfriend for 18 months. Although our Catholic upbringing was a factor in this long period of chastity, my unpreparability was also due to my mother’s warning that a girl who uses contraception, sinning by anticipating sex.
Five years earlier my parents relentless my older sisters decrease after they discovered that they were sexually active. Our household exploded in screaming and lectures about the “type of girl who didn’t want a decent man.” Loading was regularly searched.
“I would feel better if you didn’t use contraception and became pregnant,” our mother shouted. “At least your intentions would be good.”
My sisters gave the advice of our mother all the consideration it deserved, but as a slow -ripening 12 -year -old I took it seriously. I desperately wanted to please my parents, I took their words as a viable ethical position.
By the time I was 17, the dysfunctional marriage of my parents had become a cruel, albeit the silent war. My Philandering father often stayed outside all night. My mother lost so much weight that her colleagues thought she had cancer. Yet she would be in the doorway when Mitch dropped me from the dates, ensuring that I did not hang in the car that was parked in the driveway. She had started emptying my drawers.
I wrote to the University of California, Los Angeles, a few months after my 18th birthday and about a month after I had sexual intercourse for the first time. I came up with a waiting list for student housing. Because I lived too far away to commute, I stayed in the house of well -to -do family friends for the first quarter and I took a public bus to school.
The oldest daughter of the family, Laura, was a high school senior. Thankful that she had agreed to share her room with me, I was also grateful for her understanding of moral ambiguity. “I’m in the pill,” she said. “You can think of whether sex is right or wrong, but use contraception while you decide.”
In the meantime, my irregular periods were usually about 45 days apart, but I was not menstruation in more than two months. A few nights later, Laura crawled into the kitchen to empty and wash a glass mayonnaise jar. The next morning I peed in the pot, placed it in a brown paper bag and wore it in the bus, perfectly upright, in the hope that it looked like a taslunch and that it would not leak or break.
I waited two days for the negative results. I would set up a simple figure for the conversation with Mitch because I had to call him on a very public wage telephone. He was a second -year student at a university in the city, far enough that there would be a costs for ‘local long distance’. I brought a coin fair full of neighborhoods and dime.
When Mitch answered the phone, I said, “I’m not going to the mountains.”
“Wait,” he said. I heard him move through the room and pull the phone cord into the corridor.
“What?” He eventually asked.
“I’m not going to the mountains.”
“Are you pregnant?”
“I am not pregnant,” I exclaimed frustrated, my three minutes ended, the voice of the automated operator gave me my first warning.
A girl who stood in front of a vending machine turned to look at me. “Congratulations,” she said. I think she meant it. When she left, I got some chocolate cookies with change about the telephone conversation. That was the beginning of my first -year students, the fear pound.
I didn’t have a period until the academic quarter was over and I had moved to the dorms. As if all three missing periods were gathered until the dam burst, I became smooth with blood in the middle of the night. Anxious to disturb my new roommate, I found a towel without turning on the light and drawing it to the toilet. At that hour nobody was in the hallway to see my pajamas soaked with blood. I was cleaned up under a shower heads separated by white curtains.
Multiple thoughts came to mind: this could have been a miscarriage; I had failed my mother’s strict chastity standard; Mitch and I gambled with our future.
And yet I hesitated to act. Mitch was not willing to buy condoms because it was embarrassing. His interest in a girl he had met at work flourished and he sometimes treated me with cruelty, something that imitated my father’s behavior. Despite the dysfunction of our relationship and my fault when I came home and my mother caught searching my bathroom cabinets, Mitch and I occasionally walked into bed when one or the other of our roommates went home the weekend. I missed another period.
Sin or not, I pressed my luck. Now that I was on campus, the Student Health Clinic was within walking distance. I made an appointment for the contraception lecture, a requirement before I was prescribed the pill.
In the Student Health Center I have completed a long, invasive questionnaire about my sexual activity. I found it humiliating, as if an unseen judge was now my in Loco Parentis. After I never developed limits, I answered honestly.
After completing the survey, I sat with a group of girls who watched a movie. A memorable scene had a woman who spoke about how she was never without her ‘condominium’ – a beloved leather pendant bag, worn like a chain, which she squeezed open, and from which she pulled a packed condom. Ready leather was extremely popular ten years earlier, but this attempt to make contraceptive hip feel flat. All girls growl, shake their heads – and tolerate it. Because we have at the end of the film we came for: permission.
Although I finally had monthly pill packages in my hand, I was the assignment not to start them until the end of my next period, which did not show a sign of coming soon.
Mitch’s parents went away for a weekend, so we met in their house for our next date. Five days earlier I thought I had waited long enough. Without knowing when my next period would start, but sure that we would have sex that weekend, I started taking the pill. I thought it would make my period regularly, and my constant state of fear about the possibility of pregnancy would disappear.
When I met Mitch in his parents’ house, we had a typical afternoon. A meal, sex, what TV. I started to feel cramps low in my stomach. They quickly increased in strength. I went to the bathroom, sat down on the toilet and doubled. A mass of blood flowed out, heavy, full of clots, covered with fiber -like strings.
I wanted to tell Mitch that I might have a pregnancy a miscarriage. That it was in the toilet and I wasn’t sure what to do. But Mitch did not like talking about the female body, waved what he felt had a “ick” factor. The only thing I could say was that I had passed a lot of blood. He stared for a moment, shrugged and returned to the TV. I returned to the bathroom and rinsed the toilet.
Tens of years later I still think back to that moment, my denial of reality. It was clear that the affection of Mitch had decreased for me. My convenience as a sex partner was my most important attraction for him. He was not someone with whom I could have an honest conversation, let alone a baby, and I knew it. But I kept hoping that he would love me again and together imagined a future. After all, he was in my father’s model.
It would be a lie to say that day chases. And I imagine that if someone asked Mitch about it, he couldn’t remember. But I think about it regularly, knowing that if I accidentally ended a pregnancy, I changed the course of my life.
The author is shown in a recent photo in a library where she worked.
Photo thanks to Victoria Waddle
My parents died during the COVID-19 Pandemie. My father had been taken for a few years. That, in combination with the increasing dementia of my mother, brought my sisters and me into care roles. With the death of our father, we were packing what remained in their assisted living apartment and moving our mother to a more intensive care. I found a box of papers in the back of the cupboard. During the first movement we had drawn these papers from a safe bouted to the concrete floor, boxing and took them with them. Now I was through it.
“The wedding certificate of mom and dad,” I said. None of us had ever seen it. My sisters peered my shoulders. “April 18, 1954.” Four months before my oldest sister was born.
We were always told that our parents were married in September 1953.
We all came to the same awareness at the same time. That is why they were married in the parsonage instead of the church, our mother in a custom made suit.
“I’m so angry,” my second sister said, visibly shaking. “I’m not joking, I’m angry.” Our parents had been her cruelest and told her that, after he had slept with her boyfriend, he would bring his friends to him to have sex with her for him.
There was no way to talk to our mother about this. Deep in her dementia trip she had forgotten our names. Our sister conversation pinged. Was this pure hypocrisy? Did our parents think they were enjoying us, hoping to be ashamed of us not to do what they did? The only lesson I had learned was how your desk could miss.
An old joke from my mother came back.
“You can eat an apple for contraception.”
“Before or after?”
“Instead of.”
The author participates in a photo event during “Banned Books Week”, with a number of forbidden and challenged library books.
Photo thanks to Victoria Waddle
My sexual decisions were not to take my parents. Nor did they belong to the university with her lecture, invasive questionnaire and film. And although the country had since had to claim the issue, the US is now winding to a dystopian invasion of privacy and denial of their autonomy of women.
My career fees for adults always let me work with teenagers, first as a teacher and later as a high school librarian. When I read Girls and sex By Peggy Oanenstein to see if it was suitable for our library collection, I was not surprised to hear that research shows that teenagers who are taking purity team become pregnant rather than those who don’t.
Together with other informative sex -ed -titles I have shown the book in my library and rated it on my school library blog because I am sure: shame is not an effective method for contraception than ever. Girls must know that the only permission they need is their own.
Victoria Waddle is a writer nominated by Pushcart Prize and was recorded in “Best short stories of the Saturday evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2016.” The author of “Acts of Contrition” and “The Mortality of Dogs and Humans”, her upcoming novel about a teenager who escapes a polygamist cult will be launched in 2025. Previously the editor-in-chief of the Inlandia magazine: A Literary Journey and a Teacher and a Librarian teacher, she discusses both writing and library bookcensure in her substituk newsletter: “Be a cactus.”
This article originally appeared at Huffpost in June 2024.
