Ann Friedman - It's Not Right, But It's Okay

I’m on leave until March and sending pre-written newsletters until then. This is Part 9 of a serialized essay. If you’re just jumping in now, I suggest you go back and catch up. Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, and Part 8.

Just when I am starting to tell more people I am pregnant, a car crashes into me while I'm walking across the street. 

A friend later tells me not to call it an “accident”—that term is auto industry propaganda, invented to recast preventable harm as unavoidable. But “accident” is the easiest word for what happened. “That time a car hit me, sent me head-first into the pavement, and just kept on driving” is too wordy. “My accident” becomes the shorthand.
 
The last thing I remember about my accident is stepping off the curb. One minute, Will is talking to me about a musician he knows who has a young kid. This musician friend says that the grief comes in waves. You have to mourn, again and again, the life you had before kids and will never have again. Even in parenthood’s greatest moments, this sadness is inextricable from the joy.
 
Next thing I know, I am being put into an ambulance. I feel a placid acceptance as the realization dawns: I am hurt. I am bleeding. An EMT is asking me what year it is. I am relieved that Will is here holding my hand. I throw up a few times. I think, huh, is this what it’s like to almost die? And, if so, is death itself actually pretty chill? I will learn later that traumatic brain injury can have a really calming effect. That if you weren’t scared, you were in real danger.
 
The accident seems so random, so unrelated to pregnancy. And yet.
 
My brain is a powerful narrative machine, one that is currently obsessed with the question of how to be at peace with my lack of control. With whether and how I really get to choose a life path for myself. With accepting the limitations and possibilities of my body. And so, before my bruises have even healed, the accident becomes part of how I understand pregnancy The little car—and thank god it was a little car, not a hulking SUV—that sent me flying headfirst into the cement? It’s part of my path to parenthood now.
 
In the ambulance, I am the nihilist cigarette-smoking baby from my dream. I am not happy about being here, but I am fully accepting. Hey, there’s nothing anyone could have done. I was crossing at a designated crosswalk, with the little walk sign aglow ahead of me. Not my fault I got hit. I’ll either be ok or I won’t, but I don’t have much control over that.
 
It’s not right, but it’s okay. Puff, puff, exhale.
 
Meanwhile, the real baby—the non-dream fetus in my abdomen—is totally unaffected. When the ER doctor does an ultrasound, it is revealed to be alive and, quite literally, kicking. A little more sureness settles in. I guess you really want to be here, I think, addressing this future kid directly for the first time. Maybe I haven’t chosen, but it seems like the baby has. I find some peace in this.
 
It’s not lost on me, the irony of spending a lifetime publicly shouting for the right to choose and then ultimately taking refuge in not choosing, in letting body and baby and circumstance decide. I’m not accustomed to my personal truth being so different from the political line I continue to fiercely defend: that we should all have as much agency as possible when it comes to deciding if we become parents. But my indecision rests on my agency. The fact is, I’ve only been able to come to a place of curiosity and acceptance because I know I could have opted to end things. I had to choose not to choose. I couldn’t have been forced; I had to walk here on my own.
 
Metaphorically, of course. Right now, I’m not walking anywhere without Will’s help—which is a gentle mirror of the caretaking I did for him earlier this year after his own accident. Friends drop off food and light candles, and send postcards and texts and books for me to flip through while I spend hours trying to avoid the temptation of screens, which are apparently quite bad for concussion recovery. I can feel how rich I am in community, how deep my support pillars run. And this, more than any fetal kicks, assures me things will be okay.
 
Maybe not right, but okay. I can live with that.
 
I’m on leave until early March, which means I will not be reading replies to this newsletter. However, it will continue to arrive every Friday. Next week, Part 10: I Shock Myself. It's the conclusion of this serialized essay.

“She’d made it out, intact, and in a self she can continue living with.” -Audre Lorde