Protest

I always remember this movie I saw once where a girl broke down and said abortion hits everyone hard, eventually. In a park, at a parade, unaware, every woman will be struck with her choice. A whirling soft sided blow that shoves you beneath yourself, inside someone else.

At 19 I thought motherhood was in my grasp, but a man connected to it wasn't. My mother made the arrangements, no turning back she said.

But when the plane landed she did not get off. We ate hamburgers that night and my father and I went to sleep earlier than usual. I showered in the morning and allowed him to drive my car. Distant, unencumbered, we talked shop. Upon arrival we were side blinded. The protestors came hard and high. They blocked my little Honda Civic as we tried to park. They were practiced, perfected. Don't kill your baby, they called through the shatterproof glass.

My father was composed, he wrapped his arm around me as we entered the building. The smoke alarms in the waiting room blinked slow red. He saw me to admittance and was there when they brought me out, light in the head, lighter. When we left the rally was on, but still. Dully I watched them stand behind their crimson poster boards, fetuses in jam jars, but now they were quiet. Sympathetic, I thought.

My father was no stranger to protests. He'd gone along to several before 1967. His friends were mostly educated, all angry about something. The war was wrong in Berkeley, everywhere, there was no arguing that, he tells me. "Everyone was anti-war, anti-G.I. They saw the troops as being responsible for the war. If you didn't dodge the draft you were a babykiller anyway," he tells me. When he pocketed the government's letter, some friends fell away.

That child would've been riding a two-wheeler by the time my mother brought it up one day, like we'd been in the middle of a conversation. "So anyway, someone called security, the police," she laughed. "I'm sure they were scared shitless." Two floors up they lulled me to sleep by gas as my father raged below. The face he wore was one I'd only heard stories of. The protesters masked shame, horror, held tight to dreams of saving the unborn. Secretly he battled alongside them. He ordered them silent and still. Determined I would witness their humble silence, he told them that if I didn't, their families would pay.