One woman's journey: following my own unguided will

Commonweal, May 3, 1996 by Heather King

The Latino kids live in the buildings south of ours. They patrol on bikes, brandish guns fashioned from scrap wood, and throw their ice cream wrappers in the street. Juan and Fidel help me carry groceries. Tito sells chocolate bars to raise money for his school band. When our cat disappeared, Carlos presented us with a scrawny black kitten he found rooting in the garbage. I walk by their apartments at night and see whole families sprawled on the floor, bathed in the blue light of TV screens.

I come from a white working-class family in which I was the first ever to complete college. Coming of age in the '60s, I believed passionately in sexual freedom and the concomitant right to choose abortion. Also a staunch supporter of drinking and drugs, I became deeply alcoholic and sobered up in my mid-thirties to discover that I had somehow graduated from law school. I have now been married for six years, and, at forty-three, am childless. It is difficult to admit that two of the babies I aborted were conceived with married men, one of whom was a one-night stand, and that the third abortion was performed during the course of a long-term relationship. I would like to be able to say that I agonized over the decisions, but the fact is that they were based on expedience and fear. Motherhood would have disrupted my life in every conceivable way. It would call upon resources I was not at all certain I possessed--patience, selflessness, the ability to go without sleep--and I viewed it, frankly, as a kind of prison sentence. It seemed inconceivable that a woman would actually invite the upheaval that a baby entails. I don't care how much joy they say it brings, I said to myself, no way am I getting sucked into that trap.

When we arrived in Koreatown, I was working as a litigation attorney in a Beverly Hills office. I could scarcely have been more temperamentally ill-suited for the job, but it was the first time in my life I had made decent money and I was desperately afraid to give it up. My eyes, red-rimmed with fatigue, fell upon the bimonthly paycheck with the same grim relish a buzzard displays for carrion; I dragged through each day consumed by anxiety and the hideous fear that I would contract some stress-based disease and keel over dead at my desk. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but there was something fundamentally artificial and dishonest and life-diminishing about the lawyering I was doing. Part of it was the fact that the basic object of litigation is to manipulate the truth, rather than bring it to light; but it also had something to do with the stomach-turning arrogance that prevailed among my colleagues, a presumption of entitlement and innate merit that was doubly repulsive because of the lack of even a rudimentary moral compass.

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During those four years my life felt, oddly enough, like a prison sentence--the sentence I had hoped to avoid by exercising intelligence backed by the unfettered exercise of free will. As a matter of fact, although I had enjoyed virtually every purported freedom that modern life has to offer, I realized that in one way, my life had always felt like a sentence. I had drunk and smoked and slept around to my heart's content, yet the apotheosis of my personal freedom had consisted of servitude to a bottle of booze and getting pregnant by someone whose name I barely knew. My expensive legal education had bought me a different kind of bondage: in the name of what was supposed to be truth, I took advantage, at least vicariously through my employer, of the opportunity to lie, cheat, steal, bully, lord it over the rest of the peons, and rake in the cash.