The Decision I Made Alone, and the Kindness I Did Not Expect

The part nobody tells you

I was twenty-eight when I found myself sitting on the edge of my bath at two in the morning, holding a test I had taken three times because I did not believe it the first two. I am writing this now, years later, calm and settled and glad of my life, because when I was going through it I searched and searched for someone who had just said it plainly, without a sermon attached, and I could not find her. So I am going to be her, for whoever needs it.

I will not pretend the circumstances for you, because they are mine and private, but I will say this much. The relationship was ending. The work situation was precarious. I was living in a small flat with a roommate who was lovely but who I could not lean on. And I was very, very far from the version of my life in which this would have been joyful news. I sat on that bath edge and I felt the whole shape of my future bend in a direction I had not chosen, and I was more frightened than I have ever been before or since.

The noise of other people's opinions

The first thing that happens, if you make the mistake of telling the wrong person early, is that the opinions arrive. Everybody, it turns out, knows exactly what you should do, and they are all certain, and they are all louder than you are. I told one friend in a weak moment and within a day I felt like my private life had become a committee meeting. So I stopped telling people. I went very quiet and very inward, which is not healthy, but it was what I could manage.

What I actually needed, and could not find in all that noise, was information. Plain, calm, correct information from someone who did this for a living and who was not going to weep or lecture or tell me what their cousin had done. I needed to understand my options, all of them, honestly, and I needed to understand them from a place that would treat me as an adult capable of deciding the course of her own life.

Learning to sift the real from the frightening

If you have ever had to look something like this up, you will know that the internet is not kind to a frightened woman at two in the morning. For every piece of sober, factual guidance there are ten things designed to scare you, shame you, or sell you something. I spent nights wading through all of it, trying to work out which places were medical and reputable and which were fronts for someone's agenda dressed up in soft lighting and gentle fonts.

It took me a while to learn how to tell the difference. A proper women's clinic will give you facts, not pressure. It will talk about your health first. It will tell you what a consultation actually involves, what the law in South Africa actually says, and what support exists whatever you decide, including if you decide to continue. The places that frightened me were the ones that had already decided for me before I walked in the door. I learned to close those tabs quickly.

The appointment I nearly ran from

I made an appointment and then I sat in my car outside for a long time, long enough that a security guard came over to check I was all right. I told him I was fine. I was not fine, but it was not his to carry.

What I remember most about finally going inside was how ordinary and how gentle it was. I had built it up into something enormous and theatrical in my head, and the reality was a calm reception, a woman who did not make me feel like a case file, and a nurse who sat with me and asked me questions about my health and my circumstances in a voice with no judgement in it at all. She asked what I understood about my options. She corrected two things I had got frightened by online, calmly, without making me feel stupid. She told me I did not have to decide anything that day.

That sentence, you do not have to decide anything today, undid me completely. I cried, the ugly kind, and she handed me a tissue and waited and did not rush me. For the first time in weeks somebody had treated the decision as mine, genuinely mine, and had given me the dignity of time to make it.

What I want other women to know

I am deliberately not going to tell you what I chose. That is the one piece I keep for myself, not out of shame, but because the point of this story is not my particular path. The point is the manner in which I was allowed to walk it. The point is that I was met with care rather than condemnation, with facts rather than fear, and with the quiet assumption that I was a competent adult making a serious decision about my own body and my own life.

I have read since that many women put off getting proper guidance precisely because they are so afraid of how they will be treated, and I understand that fear in my bones, because I nearly let it keep me in that car park forever. But the right kind of care exists. Reputable abortion clinics in this country are staffed by people who understand that you did not arrive at their door lightly, and who are far more interested in your health and your wellbeing than in your reasons.

If you are the woman on the edge of the bath at two in the morning, holding a test you have taken too many times, I want to tell you a few things that I wish someone had told me. You are not a bad person. You are not alone, even though it feels like the loneliest room on earth. The opinions of people who are not living your life do not get a vote. And the shame you are feeling is not a fact about you, it is a weather system passing through, and it will move on.

The quiet after

My life afterwards did not fall apart, despite the catastrophes I had rehearsed in my head. It got slowly, steadily better, the way things do when the worst of the uncertainty is behind you and you are back in charge of your own days. The relationship that had been ending, ended, and that was for the best. The work steadied. I met, years later, the person I built an actual life with, and I have never once regretted the honesty I was given at the point when I needed it most.

I think about that nurse sometimes. I never got her name, or if I did I have lost it. She will never know that her calm, her tissue, her refusal to rush me, mattered so much that a stranger is writing about it years later. But that is the nature of real kindness. It does its work and asks for nothing back.

If you are searching the way I once searched, choose the door that gives you facts and gives you time. A good abortion clinic is not a place of judgement, whatever the frightening corners of the internet try to tell you. It is a place where a tired, scared woman can sit down, be treated like a whole human being, and be allowed, at last, to think. That is what I found when I finally stopped sitting in the car. I hope, if you need it, you find it too.