When I have nightmares, my subconscious doesn't like to get imaginative. There are no weird surrealist scenes. There are no horror movie serial killers. There are no dank and mouldering castles. It likes to stick with what it knows: my children in danger or my husband having an affair. And it depicts both of these themes with vivid, lifelike realism. So much so that I'll wake up the next morning wanting to hug my kids or punch my husband or both.

A few nights ago I dreamt that Mark and I were trying to have a conversation, and (like so many of our conversations in real life) we were continually interrupted. We moved from room to room as he uneasily looked for a space in which he could evade my questions in privacy. In bits and pieces, trying to keep my calm in front of the people who passed in and out of the rooms, I learned that he had a child outside our marriage. The mothers name was Lorena and the child, Diego.

Upon waking, my mind wavered temporarily in a transitional state where the dream, and the knowledge that it had been a dream, were both simultaneously real. I calculated when the dream child would have conceived, and was upset to find that it would have been after he began recovery, around the time I ended my own pregnancy. I fretted over what it meant that the mother and child had names. Before Mark's disclosure of sex addiction, I so often had nightmares of his infidelity that I always fear my mind discovering a hidden truth in sleep.

I lay in bed tense and angry, until the dream slowly started to slip away and I realized I was getting upset at my husband for details my mind created. But then again, that probably happens more often than I'm willing to acknowledge.

I wish my subconscious would stick to making jokes.

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One evening four years ago, my husband headed out to attend one of his weekly Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings. What was unusual about this particular meeting was that I had begged him not to go.

Those meetings help him. They help me. They saved our marriage. And that generally makes me a big fan of his nights out 12 stepping. However, the day before this meeting, I had undergone an abortion to end my pregnancy with what would have been our third child. Exhausted and depressed by everything that had happened in the last few days, I didn't want him to leave me for several hours to care for the kids and get them off to bed.

But Mark was adamant about going. He was still fairly early in recovery and simply didn't trust himself. If he gave himself permission to skip just one meeting, he believed he would use that to let himself justify skipping other meetings for other reasons. It felt too dangerous to him, like standing at a cliff's edge where one wrong step would send him plunging back into active addiction. He called my friend Judy and asked her to stay with me and help with the kids while he went out. And off he went.

I was devastated. As much as I love Judy and was happy to have her help and company, the person I wanted with me right then was the person twined up in my sorrow, the father of the child I decided not to have: my husband. When Mark was active in his addiction, our family often came second to his sexual acting out. And now that he was in recovery, it felt like our family still came second to this new 12 step love affair of his.

"For once -- just this one time," I thought, "why can't holding my hand when I really need you there be first on the list?" I knew this was an exaggeration. I knew Mark had been there for me, and put me ahead of himself many times in our marriage. I knew that was why I was still there working. So, I tried to breathe and remember the big picture greater good of his recovery, but it still hurt like hell. And I kept holding on to those festering resentments, never fully forgiving him for doing what he felt he needed to do that night.

Two years later, Mark came home between 9 and 10 p.m. on a meeting night, just as he always did. There wasn't anything special about that night to me, and I can't call it out in my memory. It was just part of the routine. Mark goes to meetings and gets home late a few nights a week. I feed the kids dinner, put them to bed and give him a kiss when he gets home. But that night, whichever it was, was different for Mark, because he didn't go to a meeting.

A woman he works with, who works for him, had broken up (again) with her on again off again boyfriend. So Mark asked her out on a date. Knowing that I wouldn't expect him home until later that night, he took her out to dinner and then drove her back to her apartment. He shared his slip with his group shortly afterwards, but it took him a year to get himself to a place where he could share it with me. And it's taken me a year, likewise, to share anything beyond the fact that, on the day he told me, I put myself to bed to watch the rain with a pint of gourmet ice cream for comfort and didn't get up until the next day.

It's hard, at times like that, not to take sex addiction personally. It's hard not to see those actions as separate rather than inextricably connected. It's hard not to rage and say, "You couldn't skip a meeting to be with me the day after we aborted our baby, but you could skip a meeting to take another woman out on a date?!" It's hard not to feel that those actions reflect on his love for me and for our family. It's hard to see those actions as symptoms of a disease.

I could have (I have) worked through relapses on other occasions. But to relapse on a meeting night was the greatest breech of trust of all, because in my desire to bury my anger and pain and resentment, I had elevated meetings to a level of sacredness. I had made meetings a sign that he valued our family and our relationship enough to work hard on himself and his problems. Those meetings were the talisman that I thought was keeping us all safe.

But addiction doesn't respect the sacred: not meetings or family heirlooms or pets or family or friends. It will destroy anything, sell anything, steal anything, lie to and about anything and anyone to feed its hunger. Those meetings keep it at bay, one day at a time, but nothing ever keeps us completely safe. And however it feels to me, I know in my mind (if not my heart) that skipping a meeting to go on a date doesn't mean he doesn't love me, it just means he's still an addict.

Image credit: Photo by Bethany L. King on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

The day I had my abortion, or maybe the day after, I was lying in bed, resting. I'm an obsessive record keeper, and I know that I could go back and look up what day it actually was, but I'm finding that I don't want to revisit that time so closely just yet. (And I'm smiling to think that I'm not ready "just yet," when just yet has been four years already.)

As I lay in bed, I decided to distract myself by cleaning out my e-mail inbox and catching up on correspondence with friends. I opened my mail to find a message from my friend Jeremiah, an evangelical Christian who was looking to dissect the results of the previous day's 2004 presidential election. Jeremiah forwarded, for discussion, a piece on abortion written by a conservative Christian who believed that so called "values voters" had swung the election in Bush's favor.

Jeremiah knew nothing of what was going on in my personal life, but reached out to me because he liked and respected me and knew I was a committed feminist and progressive who was passionate about the election. Still, coming within hours of both the termination of my pregnancy and the end of a bitterly contested and emotional election, this seemed seemed cruelly ill-timed. My political pain was being laid at the feet of my personal pain and my personal pain was being politicized.

Also on the list of recipients were two other friends: a liberal academic and a libertarian businessman. I felt privileged to be part of this diverse little discussion group of highly intelligent and well-informed people, so in another spectacular example of my inability to take care of myself, I dove right in. I was consumed (as always) by a need to understand why and unable to acknowledge that engaging in an intellectual debate on this topic was not the most brilliant idea for me at that moment.

I felt... It's hard for me to say how I felt even now. I've struggled with writing this post and the tone is always more detached than what I want, because trying to capture that particular mix of thoughts and emotions feels like trying to grab mist with my hands only to watch it slip through my fingers...

What I felt most of all was Other. Separate. Alienated. Alone on one side of the world's balance.

I read the piece Jeremiah had sent me, which posited that the morally questionable nature of the war in Iraq, in fact all questions of morality, paled in comparison with the world's greatest wrong: the taking of an innocent life in abortion. I looked at myself -- one woman, making one decision about one family -- balanced against an entire war and somehow coming out (in one man's view of God's eyes) more weighted down with the chains of evil than any who led us down the road to Abu Ghraib. I saw George W. Bush standing with me before the Catholic God of my youth, on clouds in the cold white sky, waiting to be judged for our crimes. And in the balance against me was one small soul. And in the balance against George W. Bush were the thousands and thousands of souls sent to their death in Iraq. Yet those souls were lighter.

I discussed abortion in the abstract with three (wonderful) men. I was the only woman. The only one who could bear children. The only one who had borne children. The only one who had had an abortion. The only one who could. I watched these intelligent men assume (as is so common, I've noticed) that abortion is something that happens to young, poor, unmarried women who either lack access to birth control or choose not to use it. Married, middle class, well educated, white mothers in their late 30's with good health care and reliable birth control aren't the demographic people are talking about when they talk about abortion. And maybe, I thought, I'm worse: worse than those other women who had better reasons than I did because they have less than I do.

I know I flew off the handle and ranted and cursed at my friends and cried as I typed, but I never told them why. That's me. Passionate on the issues.

And when the discussion died down, I found I still wanted to know why: why my experiences as a woman made me so separate from these three wonderful male friends of mine and why the God of my youth and the people who followed Him thought my sins alone were greater than an entire war.

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Four years ago, I was horrified by where we in the United States were as a country. I was sickened and disgusted by our (in my mind, then as now) morally inexcusable invasion of Iraq. I was frightened by the religious conservatives who were in power and whom I perceived as daily threatening the liberties that we as a nation hold so dear. And at the head of it all, hiding greed and lust for power behind a cloak of evangelism, I saw George W. Bush as the deceiver, the spin master, the trickster.

So, on November 2, 2004, after many donations and months of campaigning for what I saw as the side of right and good and intelligence, I went out -- with hope, fear and desperation mixed -- and cast my vote for "Not Bush" (as my husband and I referred to John Kerry). When I went to bed that night, the results of the election were not yet clear, but I laid down with the fervent hope that Ohio would swing for Kerry, that Bush would be out of the White House and all would be right with the world. I slept restlessly and dreamed that Kerry lost.

When I woke up in the morning, I took a deep breath before I turned on my computer to check the results. I hoped that dream was meaningless, just a dream. But there was Ohio, shining red on my screen. Kerry lost. Bush won.

Deeply saddened, I threw on some comfortable clothes and heard the doorbell ring. I let in the friend who was there to take care of the kids for the morning, and we commiserated on the election. Then my husband and I got in the car and drove to the hospital.

I was about eight weeks pregnant, and I had an appointment for a D&C, a procedure to remove the contents of my uterus and terminate my pregnancy. I thought it was nice of the hospital staff to call it a D&C and not an abortion, as if maybe I had a miscarriage already and this was just to clean things up. But ultimately, it really was the same medical procedure. The difference was in the outcome.

My husband stayed with me and held my hand until the nurse wheeled me away into the bright lights of the operating room, where a friendly, gentle anesthesiologist talked to me, and my own beloved doctor met me. She was the one who saw me through my last pregnancy. She was the one I cried to when I learned my husband was a sex addict and who gently ordered a few additional STD tests as a result. She was the same woman who had delivered my daughter and brought life into this world. I wondered what she thought of now, after she and I had both seen that flickering heartbeat on the ultrasound monitor a few weeks earlier, when she had watched me collapse into hopeless tears. I wondered if she hated this part of her job, the one that prevented life from coming into this world.

The anesthesiologist told me to count backwards from 10, and I remember thinking I might never fall asleep, and then hearing a voice call my name out of the darkness. I felt sick and didn't want to wake up or open my eyes. The voice was very insistent. I tried. I remember people in blurred bits. I remember the nurse who called my name giving me something to help with the nausea. I remember my husband telling me he loved me. I remember that my doctor came to check on me and I felt an overpowering gratitude and love for her. I held her hand and cried and mumbled, "Thank you." Thank you for taking good care of me. Thank you for doing your job well. Thank you for keeping me safe. Thank you for not judging me. Thank you for helping me do what I think is right. Thank you for taking the life of my baby. A strange thing to thank someone for.

My husband drove me home, still groggy and bleeding. I had pills to help with the bleeding, and rest would help with the grogginess. My husband would watch the kids. I stayed in bed all day watching the wind and rain lash the trees outside the window. It stormed. Stormed like the end of days. There was rain and hail and lightning and thunder and falling branches. It seemed like Nature was really pissed off. George Bush had won the election and I had aborted my baby and everything was wrong with the world. At the time, it seemed like a sign that I had done the right thing, that somehow it would be wrong to bring a baby into this world, into the middle of this storm. Those two losses -- the child that wouldn't be and the country that I perceived as spinning into ruin -- seemed twined together for me, and processing their pain, figuring out what they meant to me, couldn't be done separately.

A wise therapist once told a friend of my husband's (yes, I'm getting this third hand) that whenever our emotional reaction to something (or someone) is above a seven on a scale of one to ten, the reaction is not really about that thing (or person) at all. When I react strongly, it's about me, about something that happened in my past.

So, I know that what's going on isn't really about the mental love triangle I've got going between Hillary Clinton (whose ghost remains in the election), Barack Obama and John McCain. It's not about politics or what's best for this country. It's about me. But to get at what it is, I'm going to have to go back in time: to the last election, to my abortion, to my husband's last relapse, to how in the national drama is reflecting my personal drama back at me. And since working my shit out is what I created this space for, I'm going to use it. So, there will be politics in posts over the next few days, but they won't be about politics.

I can't fully articulate why, but this day filled me with sadness. I was listening to Talk of the Nation on NPR today, and they were doing a piece on abortion and how closeted and secret it is. One of the guests pointed out that there is no open grieving for abortion. One is only supposed to feel shame or guilt, and one is supposed to deserve whatever one gets.

I don't feel shame or guilt over my own choice to terminate a pregnancy. I know I did the right thing for myself and my family. I know I didn't violate my own ethical or moral beliefs. But I do still feel loss and grief, and I grieve, for the most part, in silence. I wish my decision were simply personal. I wish I could share it honestly without fear of judgment or of politicization from either side. But I guess that's asking a lot of the human race, since I'm not always capable of those things myself.

If you are reading this, you have somehow found yourself at my blog. I always knew there was the potential for you to end up here, but I figured the odds were against it, and the work I've been doing is important enough that it seemed worth that small risk. Now that you are here, I'm going to have to come clean and tell you the things that have been going on in my life, things I haven't wanted to share. I can't hide them now: they're all over the blog; they're in my greatest hits; they're even right there in the header. I hope you're sitting down when you read this, and now is probably the time to look away, run away, if you need to. In a few sentences, it will be too late. It may be too late already if you're skimming ahead like I would.

I have not told you some very big things that have gone on or are going on in my life and in my mind. I have not told you that:

• My husband is a sex addict
• I had an abortion
• I have had serious financial trouble
• I've had some of my writing published

I've really wanted to share some of these things, especially about my writing being published, because I know you would be so proud of me and so happy for me. But all of these things are so intertwined in my mind right now that I felt I couldn't share any one of them without sharing all of them, and I haven't been in a place yet where I have felt able to deal with your emotions of confusion and grief and loss and anger and worry in addition to my own.

You're my mother. I know you love me more than your own life and always will, just the way I love my kids. I know that you want me to be happy, not to suffer; I know you want to spare me from pain, the way I want to spare my children. I know that what you will feel when you hear what I have been through will be as intense and powerful as a tidal wave. I've been struggling to keep my head above water and I fear that if that wave hits me, I'll drown in it. But that's the risk I've been willing to take in doing this writing. I don't want to feel that hurt coming down on me, but it's been important to me to write, just like it always has been, and it's important to me to share that writing.

Know that I love you very much. I'm sorry if I've hurt you by hiding things from you that I'm now sharing with some odd combinations of friends and strangers. It's what I have needed to do for myself. Know that I am building a life where I am genuinely happy. I know everything is going to be ok. I know it with a faith I've never felt before. I love my husband. I love doing this writing. And I do love you.

~Your daughter

I once had a co-worker who used to bitch about her pregnancy all the time: how tired she was and how huge she was and how in pain she was and blah blah blah blah blah. And I thought, "What a whiner. How hard can it be? You gain a little weight and then in nine months it's all over. And at the end of it, you have an adorable baby that grows up into a fun little kid."

I didn't count on that "little weight" shifting all of my internal organs out of the way to make room for itself: pressing on my bladder, so that I had to visit the bathroom every 30 minutes and pressing on my lungs, so that I was constantly out of breath. I didn't count on morning sickness that lasted all day, every day; or on being so exhausted I could barely function; or on paralyzing migraines; or on joints so painfully loose that I could barely dress and certainly couldn't walk up stairs; or on sugar in my urine, which meant gestational diabetes tests that involved ingesting huge quantities of disgustingly sweet medical orange drink and the removal of many, many vials of blood.

And after it was all over, and my son was born, I didn't count on being so physically beat up from a vaginal delivery that at the six week post-partum visit, I was screaming in pain when the doctor examined me. Before the delivery, I didn't think I'd be able to go two weeks without sex, so I didn't count on not being able to have sex at all for months and not being completely comfortable doing so for a year. I didn't count on post-partum depression in the form of massive anxiety attacks: anxiety attacks that sent me to the emergency room thinking I was having a heart attack. I didn't count on more migraines: migraines that made the left side of my face and arm feel numb, migraines that would take MRIs and ultrasounds and more vials and vials of blood to diagnose. I didn't count on a baby that cried all the time or a toddler that couldn't learn to talk and required evaluation after evaluation and hours and hours of therapy. I didn't count on a year without sleep. I didn't count on not even starting to feel like my non-anxious, non-depressed, non-aching, non-sick self again for such a very long time.

When my son was a year and a half, I began, just began, to start feeling normal again. He was finally sleeping, so I was finally sleeping; I had lost my pregnancy weight; my body had healed; I had weaned him, and the migraines and anxiety had disappeared with the breastfeeding hormones.

And then, before my son was two, I found I was unexpectedly pregnant with my daughter. I cried when I saw the pregnancy test results; it had all been so hard, so unbelievably unexpectedly hard, and I was so scared to face all that hell again so soon. But there was no question my husband and I wanted this second baby. It felt like destiny: not the timing I would have chosen, but she was meant to be. And if I had to go through hell again to have her, so be it.

After she was born, I knew I was through having children. Shortly after my daughter was born, my son was diagnosed autism, meaning the chances I would have another child with autism, another child who would need the level of energy and time and resources as my son, were between 1 in 10 and 1 in 20. I was over 35, which brought its own set of risks, both to me and the baby. Between my husband's job loss, my pregnancy and my son's needs, our finances were shaky enough that another child would cause us to lose our house. My husband's sex addiction had come to light during my pregnancy with my daughter and our relationship was still reeling from the consequences. And most of all, I was physically, mentally and emotionally at my limit with two. Nothing about us felt like it would survive a third child: not our marriage, not our finances, not our mental health, not the well-being of our two existing children.

So, I asked my doctor about birth control options; she recommended an IUD, which was as effective as surgery, but less invasive. A few months after I got the IUD, before my daughter's first birthday, I was feeling sick and exhausted. One day my back went into spasms that caused me so much pain that I just lay on the floor, unable to get up or move or take care of the kids. I'd been through this twice now, and I knew how I felt: I felt pregnant.

I took a home pregnancy test and sobbed. I was that one in a thousand statistical blip where the IUD failed. I called my husband at work, hysterical. Mark told me he would support me through whatever I decided and encouraged me to meditate on it. I searched my heart and found that the last two pregnancies felt meant to be, even though I was scared and overwhelmed when I got pregnant with my daughter, she felt like destiny. This didn't feel like destiny; it felt like another cheap shot from God. And He wasn't going to help me, and that voice inside me said only, "Know yourself."

I looked at my daughter and thought about how many special challenges she had growing up in her brother's shadow; he was older, but it will always be harder for him to navigate the world than it is for her, and already that dynamic was difficult for her, for us, to navigate. I thought about how much more she would need to take on her own care, as a toddler, and I wept. I thought about losing the house and making the kids, especially my son who is so sensitive to change, move. I thought about the stress the pregnancy and child would put on an already crumbling marriage. I thought of the kids without their father. And I thought about another daughter or son, one I knew I would love as much as the two I had, and one they would grow to love too.

I made an appointment with my OB and her ultrasound confirmed a pregnancy. I saw the little heartbeat flicker on the screen, and I ached. I had hoped there would be something wrong: that it was an ectopic pregnancy or a blighted ovum, that I felt pregnant but the baby was already too damaged to survive. The baby seemed healthy so far, but I also knew that getting pregnant with an IUD in meant I had a higher risk of miscarriage and birth defects (higher even than what I knew was an already high risk). As I slumped down, tears rolling into my lap, my OB gently asked what I wanted to do, and I told her I wanted to terminate the pregnancy.

We scheduled the surgery, and a few weeks later, I wasn't pregnant anymore. I still cry whenever I think of that little flickering heartbeat. I don't know what that flicker might have become. I didn't wait to find out if it would fade out itself in a miscarriage or be born disabled or typically developing or terminally ill or perfectly healthy. I didn't know if that child would grow up to be institutionalized or to cure cancer or if it would grow up at all. I only knew that, as much as I would, and did, love it, it would rip our lives apart. And I knew, at the time, I didn't have the strength or the faith to bear that burden on top of everything else. I knew that I chose to sacrifice what might have been to protect what already existed: my mental and physical health, a marriage being tenuously rebuilt and above all, the two children who needed me and a stable home. I did what I felt I had to, I did what I could, I did what I felt was right, and in the eyes of those outside my life, I'm sure I didn't do enough.