Right Where I Am: 8 years 5 months 3 weeks

I’m taking part with Angie at Still Life With Circles and other wonderful women in this community in writing a post about where we are at right now in our grief. Like my other post, I’m just gonna write what comes to my heart. I thought it would be good for me to write about where I am at with Jordan too.

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It has been 8 years 5 months and 3 weeks since I made a choice that forever changed my life-having an abortion. Writing that word still gets to me after all these years. It was December 19, 2002 and it was a gloomy, rainy day. It’s a day I tried to forget for 5 years after it happened. I tried to pretend it didn’t happen but stuff like that you push away in your mind and heart always resurfaces at some point.

After my daughter Kyndra was born I struggled a lot with what I had done. I sunk deeper and deeper into a hole that I didn’t know how to escape. My heart and my limbs felt heavy and I felt like there was a perpetual dark cloud over my head. Thanks to God and the bible study Forgiven & Set Free I was able to find healing.

Today, I’m in a really good place with my grief with Jordan. The regret, guilt, and shame are not heavy chains weighing me down anymore. It’s still there and always will be but I have hope and forgiveness through God. I have the hope of one day seeing Jordan in Heaven. I want to tell him as we embrace for the first time how much I do love him and how sorry I am that I made the choice that I did.

I may not think of Jordan as often as Carleigh but he is also in my heart and in my thoughts. I do believe that my grief and healing with Jordan helped me to cope better with my grief with Carleigh. It is because of Jordan that I made the decision before Carleigh to never terminate another pregnancy. It hurt me too much and I didn’t want the wounds to run that deep ever again.

One of the things that is harder with Jordan is that I don’t have anything tangible to remember him by. Nothing that was his. In Ohio, clinics must keep your records for 6 years before destroying them. I tried so desperately to find my records before my 6 years was up. I had hoped there was an ultrasound picture in my file. I called the clinic but it was closed and a new clinic had taken its place and said they couldn’t help me. I called the Department of Health but they said they couldn’t help me either. I even got in touch with Heartbeat International and they also said they couldn’t help. Finally, I gave up. No one seemed to know where the records went after the clinic closed. I still wonder to this day what happened to them.

Jordan does have a special place though. The National Memorial of the Unborn in Chattanooga is kinda the equivalent of the cemetery to us for him. We have a plaque placed on the wall there and a copy of it I have placed in his memory box that I recently received. I love visiting the memorial and we’ve gone there every year in October for the past 3 years. We had planned to again this year but I decided to go to the October 15 Memorial in Minnesota instead.

It still isn’t easy to share my story about Jordan. You never know how people will receive it but I do it because I know that it will help other people who have been through the same thing not feel so alone. Too many women stay silent and suffer alone. It is a very taboo subject.

It is because of Jordan that I have learned not to be so quick to judge others. I was the good Christian girl who was against abortion but yet I still had one partly because I was afraid of what people (especially my parents) would think when they found out I was pregnant at 19. Little did I know then that there are things worse than being unwed and pregnant. But when you’re in a place where fear has taken over your heart and clouded your mind you can’t make sound decisions. I just wish there would’ve been someone who had broken through the fog and made me realize what I was really doing.

I never would have understood a lot of things or helped other people in similar situations had I not walked this road and for that I am grateful for this broken road. If I could take it back I would to have Jordan here, but since I don’t have a time machine I am glad that God has brought good things out of something so terrible.