The Saddest Decision

The Mistake That Lead to a Book

“I’d like to try abortion some day,” said no one ever.

Turning to abortion at the age of eighteen is the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my life. I truly wanted that baby, and I thought I’d never forgive myself for what I did. It destroyed me inside and somehow I thought I deserved to endure the pain of it for decades. I felt ashamed of my past. I didn’t believe I could talk freely about my abortion decision. I felt I must forever carry my burden alone. It required immense healing and yet I found very little guidance on how to heal. 

We all make mistakes. In fact, we’re supposed to make mistakes so we can learn through them. I think the hope is that we can learn enough from small mistakes that we don’t need to make big ones, but even so we sometimes still call impossibly big lessons to our experience.

I’m a smart person and I’m a good person who made ONE bad decision. Why the hell can’t I heal? What am I missing?

Those were the questions I asked myself twenty years after making the regrettable choice to terminate my first pregnancy. Okay, so I messed up. Feeling badly made sense on one level, but I couldn’t accept that I should remain stuck feeling miserably for the rest of my life. I refused to believe that it was my lot to heal only 90% of the way from a poor decision and live the rest of my life still suffering that final 10%. I know people who have healed from their abortion experiences. I was doing all the things they had done - journaling, individual therapy, group therapy, a weekend retreat, making a memorial quilt... I had come a long way, but I was stuck. I felt like my healing had plateaued. Feeling desperate, I started saying a daily prayer. “Help me to release that which no longer serves.” I needed help. I needed more than help. I needed a miracle.

Then one day I randomly saw an advertisement on Facebook for a program called Your Year of Miracles lead by Marci Shimoff, Dr. Sue Morter, and Lisa Garr. It grabbed my attention so I signed up for one of the free live masterclasses. On a December morning, between dropping my children off for school and grocery shopping, I listened intently as Marci and Dr. Sue explained that miracles are something we not only deserve, but which we should expect. Apparently, it was possible to create the right conditions for miracles to show up regularly. I needed to learn how to do this. There, in the parking lot outside Natural Grocers, I enrolled in the upcoming Your Year of Miracles program for 2019.

I had no idea what to expect, but on that December day I opened myself up to the possibility that the miracle of my total and complete healing was available to me. For perhaps the first time ever, I allowed myself to stop wanting to heal. Instead I started believing that healing was mine. I still had no idea how to heal fully, but somehow Marci and Dr. Sue helped instill within me a faith that I had previously lacked. I felt a spring of joy and inner peace welling up inside me. For the rest of that day I walked on clouds.

Then, before we even had our first live YYOM call for the year, my biggest miracle occurred. On the 12th of January, while attending a workshop, I fainted for no apparent reason. When I came to, I was a different person. I was at peace with my past. Something inside me had changed fundamentally. What exactly changed and how?

Through this experience I learned about forgiveness, self-love, and, of course, miracles. I stopped hating and judging myself for what I had done and started learning all the ways to love myself. My new perspective allowed me to see myself and others through a completely different lens. I learned how to tell a new story about an old event.

I did, in fact, learn how to create the right conditions for miracles to show up regularly in my life. The miracles, big and small, keep pouring in to this day. The writing of this book itself is nothing short of a miracle. I never wanted to stand out or be noticed in any big way. To broadcast something that I had kept secret for 20 years is disconcerting, to say the least… but then that’s something I learned about miracles. They don’t always show up how you hope or expect they will. When I started daily receiving an impulse to write a book my first reactions were, “I don’t want to write a book” and “I don’t know how.” Then I realized that the book was the final piece of the puzzle. Facing my fears and publicly sharing my mistake would set me down a path from which I can no longer hide - the path of complete healing.

My question today is does this sound like a book you might read? Why or why not? What specifically are you interested in knowing? Your comments below are invaluable and will help me shape the content of this book. Thank you in advance for any little (or big) answers to these questions. I look forward to reading them all!