Self Portrait in the Prison Parking Lot with Planned Parenthood

I am idling in the prison parking lot, waiting on a phone call from Planned Parenthood, radio on scan, trying to land a song. The creative writing class I teach each week at the prison begins at 6:00. I try to be ready at the metal detectors by 5:15 or 5:30, in case anything goes wrong. There are always things that go wrong.

The State of Pennsylvania requires women to go through two screenings to receive a medication abortion. My first screening is at 5:00. The nurse explained last week that the call will take forty minutes—which theoretically allows me enough time to pass through security and still make it to class, as long as this phone call is the wrong-thing tonight. 

I put my phone on speaker and listen as a doctor reads a script detailing the number of state benefits I will qualify for if I decide to carry the pregnancy to term—which, of course, means if I decide to have a baby. If I become a mother. It is difficult to concentrate on the long monologue the doctor delivers with a rote obligation. Surely, she does not want to be delivering this monologue. There are two other women, also pregnant, on the call. At various times, the doctor pauses and we’re all required to give verbal acknowledgment and consent about various statutes and risk factors. We are a trio: I understand, I understand, I understand.

•

I was born in 1982, and my name is Jenny. Jennifer was the most popular name from 1970-1984, including every single year of the ’80s.

Having the most popular name of a generation is an exercise in solidarity. You have a name, but it doesn’t belong to you. I am always a plural. In a graduating high school class of two hundred kids, there were twelve Jennies. My best friend’s name is Jenny. My college roommate’s name was Jenny. At last count, I have sixteen Jennies saved in my phone. When women named Jennifer meet, we simply nod our heads. We are legion. 

I imagine all the other women on the call are also named Jennifer, Kali heads springing from a shared body politic. 

We want a way to name the pain and be acknowledged. We want a way to dignify our love with a name.

In the parking lot of the prison, I am wondering where these other phone-Jennies are. In kitchens, preparing dinner for their other born children? In the break rooms at their retail jobs? In empty hotel conference rooms? Locked in bathrooms with the shower running, trying to hide? I wonder where they live—this is one of the only clinics in the county, so they might be two blocks away or two hours away.

•

I am thirty-three years old. This is my second abortion. Fourteen years ago, at nineteen, I had the first abortion. I was a sophomore in college with a terrible on-again-off-again boyfriend, a super fun cocaine problem, and a part-time waitressing gig at a fish place where customers were encouraged to throw their peanut shells on the ground. Every night I would come home covered in peanut shell dust, the smell of which never seemed to wash out of my hair. That abortion seemed obvious, if not easy. It was clear that having a child would be an outlandish and life-altering decision. After that abortion, I bought an 8-ball and a bottle of wine and hung out with my girlfriends all night long, blowing rails and sobering up on gulps of cheap pinot noir. The next day, I showed up for a shift at the fish shack.

Fourteen years later and here I am, in a parking lot, a stone-cold sober adjunct professor with a fifteen-year-old Chevy pickup on its last leg and a bronze-level Obamacare plan. I teach five or six creative classes a day, moving between several universities, an arts magnet high school, this prison, and a few drug treatment centers. Most days, I fall into bed without changing into pajamas. I am not a strung-out nineteen-year-old covered in peanut dust. If I wanted to have a baby, I could make it work, mostly because I have a rock-solid group of bad ass women in town. I love the person who I am dating, and even though our relationship is new, I know he would be a supportive co-parent at the very least.

Every external and circumstantial detail is different, and yet, here I am in the parking lot, making the second same choice. 

What about the other Jennies? What fish shacks do they waitress in? What bridges are they building and burning? We are giving up our rights to WIC and Medicaid. We are answering, a chorus, in the affirmative, after each statement the doctor on the speakerphone declares: I understand, I understand, I understand. Here in the prison parking lot, I am becoming a we: we understand, we understand, we understand. I can almost hear the long-I sound drag into a deep-E.

•

Disenfranchised grief is the therapeutic term for mourning an unacknowledged loss. The death of a mistress or an estranged parent. The IVF treatment that never works, the adoption that never comes through. Disenfranchised grief could refer to bankruptcy, or gradual hearing loss, or retirement from a job you spent forty years complaining about. Disenfranchised grief also involves stigma and acknowledgment. When someone shoots themselves in the head, or drinks themselves to a drowned liver, or is sentenced to death by the state: stigmatized, disenfranchised grief. 

Abortions, too, are disenfranchised grief.

One of the challenges therapists grapple with when working with clients who are experiencing disenfranchised grief is the struggle to explain the meaningfulness of a relationship without having a name that encapsulates its importance. When people deal with disenfranchised grief, they deal not only with loss, but with language. We want a way to name the pain and be acknowledged. We want a way to dignify our love with a name.

•

I want to tell the men in my class what is happening in the parking lot. The theme of our class this semester is masculinity, and I am the only woman in the room. Each week, they write about their fathers—the things they were taught and the things that they should have been taught. The heavenly and earthly fathers, the ways in which they can and cannot perform their own responsibilities as dads from inside prison walls. The ways in which the culture has encouraged their self-destruction, their community destruction, in many ways through an idealized version of masculinity that teaches men to conquer, destroy, fight, and earn. This is why they are here—because they have excelled—they are overachievers in the subject of making themselves men. They write about their failures as fathers, and I want to tell them about my failure to even become a mother. 

We meet in the middle space between the parking lot and the cell blocks—in the classrooms, where we show each other the weight of our choices in a thousand different poems.

I am usually at the metal detector by now. I am usually being searched and waiting for my administrative escort to ferry me across the prison yard. 

I don’t want to tell my students at the university that I’m having an abortion at thirty-three. I don’t have any desire at all to tell a co-worker or member of my writing group. I’m obviously not going to bring this up with the fourteen-year-olds during our Harlem Renaissance unit. In every other place in my life, the boundaries seem so clear and defined—this might be called healthy. 

But at the prison, I want to be known and seen and vulnerable and I want the approval of these men. I want them to let me face them. 

Do I want to tell them I am having an abortion because somewhere, deep inside, I believe it is a crime? Do I want to tell them about this because I think they are the people in my life who most understand impossible choices? That they have all the wisdom when it comes to choosing between options that are all undesirable, harmful, wrong? They are the people in my life who know the most about consequences, and the ways those consequences come to rest in the base of your neck, how to spit out consequences, how to metabolize or metastasize, how to keep it moving. Do I want to tell them about my abortion because I want their advice on how to survive my own violence?

•

I will not tell the men in my class about the realities of the parking lot. They are not meant to comfort or care for me. After all, they do not tell me about what happens in their cells. Instead, we meet in the middle space between the parking lot and the cell blocks—in the classrooms, where we show each other the weight of our choices in a thousand different poems. We explain to each other, without saying it plain, what the choices really were, what the consequences really smell like.

Instead, I will hang up the phone with the other Jennies. I will quickly move into a new name, Professor Miller. Before I button her up and put Professor Miller on, for a quick slip of a second, I feel the slide into a different Jenny—she is seven, on the side of the Houston freeway, Texas heat reflecting off the road, standing by a sign as tall as my small body that reads “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart,” my father beaming as the trucks honk. She is there in a flash, then gone, Professor Miller shooing her away, clearing her throat, looking for another name.