The Diary of a Military Wife ~ The Start of a Life Changing Experience
It was the winter of 2015, mid December, when I found out I was pregnant, and you know something, there was a part of me before then, that knew I was pregnant. It wasn’t so much of a thought that I had, it was more so of a spiritual and physical feeling that I had. For a lack of better words, it was an intuition.
My body felt different and my spirit felt different, therefore I knew something about me as a woman was different. However, from the moment I got home in the first week of December, I was not one hundred percent positive that I was. I remember calling Shawn and talking to him about how I was feeling. I specifically remember telling him that I was late on my period, but we didn’t want to jump to conclusions just yet. I’m famous for stressing out over the smallest things, in which ladies we all know that stress can cause a late period. So, we agreed to wait for about a week or two until I took a test.
Well, a week or two goes by, and I finally decided to go out to the store and get a test. I was nervous about taking it at home, so I went to a department store’s public bathroom to do it, I took my pregnancy test in Kohl’s. It was my first time taking a pregnancy test. I have never been so nervous. Although the line was very faint and a grayish blueish color, it was one hundred percent positive. My stomach dropped, my legs became weak, my heart started racing, and my eyes started to water. I sat down on the stall with my the palms of my hands in my face and tears just started flooding my hands.
An older woman in the bathroom could hear me in the bathroom stall sobbing and crying, “Ma’am…are you okay?” she asked me.
I stood up and walked out of the stall and said to her, “yes, I am fine thank you. Can I ask you a question?” I said to her.
“Sure..”she said.
Showing her the faint grayish blueish line of the pregnancy test, “I have never taken one of these before, how accurate would you say this is?” I asked her.
She looks down at the test and says to me, “it’s accurate, any type of discoloration of the line on a pregnancy test means it’s accurate, and the faint line could just mean that you are very early in your pregnancy. What are you going to do?” She asked me.
“Honestly, I have no idea.”I replied to her.
“Well, I know we don’t know each other, but I know you are probably scared and confused about what decision to make, so if you need anything here’s my phone number. I have a daughter about your age who is going through the same thing, call me if you ever feel like you need someone to talk to.” She gave me a hug, I said “thank you” and she walked away.
I traveled not too far behind her, heading to my car. I sat in my car for an hour to an hour and a half just crying. I had so many thoughts running through my head in that moment.
My first initial thought was, “oh my God, my parents are going to be so angry with me.” My second thought, “Shawn is not going to stick around for this. He barely even knows me, why would he stick around to help me raise a child across the country?”
After sitting in my car in the Kohl’s parking lot for an hour, I finally headed home. I walked in the house acting completely normal. My dad was upstairs on his computer doing his work and my mom wasn’t home yet from her job. I went into the kitchen grabbed a snack and a glass of iced tea and went upstairs to my bedroom, to cry again. As I started to cry again, I text Shawn and said, “Babe, I took a test. I think you should call me.”Not long after I texted him, he called me.
“What did the test say?” He asked.
“It’s positive.” I replied.
For a moment there was nothing but complete silence over the phone.
Crying and trembling over the phone I softly said to him, “please say something. I’m scared and I don’t know what to do. I’m afraid of what my parents will do and say, and I am afraid of what you might do.”
“Baby, calm down. Do you trust me?”He asked me.
“Yes.”I said.
“Then trust me when I say that I’m not going anywhere and that we are going to figure this out together. I love you.”He responded.
It was in that moment that I knew that Shawn and I were meant to be together. In that moment, he gave me reassurance, comfort, stability, safety, and love. We agreed to tell my parents that night. He knew how important it was to me to not keep it a secret from them. First I told my dad, who did not appear to be angry, but I could tell he was disappointed. Then I told my mom, who just cried like a baby, and stayed in her bedroom all night. I have never felt so ashamed and so embarrassed in my life.
***
About a week after I found out I was pregnant, Shawn and I started discussing some plans of what we were going to do. Yes, as painful as it is for me to admit it, abortion was our first plan, and him and I were both set on that plan. Deep down I didn’t want to have to make that decision. I was not ready to be a parent nor was he ready. So, to make things better in the event I wouldn’t be able to follow through with the abortion, going full term and considering adoption was our second plan. Finally, our third plan would have been to just grow the fuck up, I move to California with him, and I have the baby out there and we raise the baby together. If the truth be told, I did not like neither one of those plans. I was scared to become a parent, I was scared to raise a child with someone I barely knew, not only that I was fucking scared of giving birth dude!!!!
In order to take the next step with the abortion, I had to know how many weeks I was in my pregnancy. So, I made an appointment with Planned Parenthood, in which that’s where I would have gotten my abortion done. Yes, you read that right, would have…keep reading. I went with my dad to my appointment in Harrisburg, PA. When I got into my appointment and they did the ultrasound, they found something yet odd and very strange. They determined that I was about ten weeks pregnant. However, there was no embryo and therefore no heartbeat. All they found was the amniotic sac with no embryo. I asked the nurse what it meant, and she said to me, that my pregnancy is very abnormal and was nothing that she has never seen before.
She still gave me the option of proceeding with an abortion, however, because I was so sketchy about the information I received and more scared and confused, told her that I wanted a second opinion and that I would consult with my gynecologist. I walked out of Planned Parenthood that day, with no abortion and strangely what seemed like no baby either. That same day I made an appointment with my doctor. Unfortunately for me, because it was close to the holiday’s and she was entirely booked up until Christmas, I was not able to see her until after the New Year.
I tried not to freak out and make a big deal about it so I tried to stay as calm as possible and deal with the fact that I might be dealing with an abnormal pregnancy for another two weeks, until something strange started happening to my body. A few days after the New Year passed and as I was leaving the gym one night, I felt a slight cramp just below my abdomen. I went back into the gym to use the bathroom and all I found was some light spotting of blood. Panicking in the bathroom stall, I called my mom and told her what was going on and what I was feeling like.
“Do you need me and father to come and get you or do you think you can make it home?”She asked me.
“No, I think I’m okay. I can drive home. I’ll be there soon.”I said to her.
The cramping continued later on that night into the next day, but it was not as bad as you would think, it was more like a slight period cramp, which can be normal in some pregnancies. Later on that evening I talked to Shawn over the phone and told him how I haven’t been feeling well, and that I was cramping, feeling nauseous, and this time bleeding. The cramping had gotten worse and the bleeding began to pick up more and more. He and my mom both suggested that I should bump my appointment with my doctor to a day sooner, which I figured was a pretty good idea considering the information I received from Planned Parenthood, now I’m bleeding? What the heck is going on here?
That next morning I called my doctor’s office and asked them if I could move my date up sooner. The soonest they could get me in was a day early than my scheduled appointment. I figured, “well that’s better than nothing, so I will take that.” They recommended that I wear pads if the bleeding gets anymore heavy and to take Tylenol if the pain continued, and if all else failed….head to the emergency room. It was about midnight, four days after the New Year, and it was that night when my entire life flashed before my eyes. I was awaken out of my sleep from the most excruciating pain that I have ever felt in my entire life.
Barely getting out of my bed, I struggled crawling to the bathroom. I managed to make it to the toilet, but once I was there, hunched over, I could not move. The pain was so bad it felt as if someone had stabbed me in my lower abdomen and was twisting the knife around. Every second and every minute the pain got worse, and for every second and every minute of that pain, more and more blood came from my body. I yelled for my mom and dad, awaken out of their sleep, my mom came rushing downstairs only to find blood in and on the toilet and me hunched in a ball.
My dad followed not too far behind her. He didn’t need another second to think. He picked me up like a baby, carried me downstairs, and put me in the back of the car. The next thing I knew we were on our way to emergency room. In that moment, that was the first time I ever felt the closest to God himself. All I could do was just ask Him to please take the pain away, please just end this for me, because I couldn’t handle it. I just wanted it to all be over.
Vashti S. Moore 