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This election season has been my perfect storm. I came in emotionally raw, haunted by the ghosts of the last election. Four years ago, I was both seething with self-righteous liberal anger over Bush's 2004 election win and mourning the loss of the child that wouldn't be. I was depressed and alienated by political discussions with friends. And I was feeling hurt and abandoned by my husband.

This year, I found myself angry at and hurt by my husband-surrogate Barack Obama, who knocked the surrogate-me of Hillary out of the race. And I found myself personally (although not politically) sympathetic toward Sarah Palin and (for more reasons than I had time to write about) drawn to John McCain. (Question to you psychiatrists: Is it still transference if I know I'm doing it?)

And I came to see, as all these emotions crashed down upon me, that much of my past obsession with politics, much of my devotion to causes and candidates, is tied up in my own codependency.

So, where am I on the eve of elections? I'm starting to see how much my voting always has been based on my emotions, even though I fooled myself into thinking it was strictly rational. I'm beginning to realize that a lot of people (on both sides) are invested (as I have been) in hyping the importance of each election, and are driven by (and driving) feelings of desperation and fear. I am much more overwhelmed by the complexities of life and much less sure that what I, personally, believe will lead to the results I desire. I'm much less likely to see one side as "good" and the other as "bad." I am beginning to genuinely understand and accept different points of view and to see that I need to work toward understanding and compromise rather than trying to force change. I'm learning that I'm not sure anymore (if I ever was) which qualities in a leader are most important to me as a voter: experience? harmony with my own moral beliefs? ability to inspire? ability to administrate? ability to compromise?

And I'm finding that all of that, as everything else, requires that I continue to work on me: to gain clarity, to stay calm and centered, and to be able to live and model the acceptance and understanding and compromise I want to see in our public dialog and public policy.

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Recently, I've noticed a particular tense, worked up feeling I get about how wrong other people are. It's a kind of quivering moral outrage that makes me latch ferociously onto anyone who will listen and tell them how messed up the world is and what a better place it would be if only the target of my outrage would do things my way. The target could be anyone: my coworkers, my family, my neighbors, the American voting public or the television executives at CBS whose terrible decisions doomed American Gothic to failure 12 years ago (oh yes, believe me, what CBS executives did to that show does indeed constitute a crime against humanity). But it does tend to center on politics, and the presence of this pattern hit me at long last, with blinding clarity, in my anger in the wake of my beloved Hillary's loss in the presidential primaries this year.

The odd thing is that I never paid attention to this earlier. After all, this is not a new feeling or a new behavior; I've done it all my life. In fact, I remember being extremely outraged when I learned, back in the 1970's that I could not run for president at the advanced age of seven. The world was pretty messed up, and with all the moxie of a bright elementary school student, I was pretty sure I knew how to fix it. I actually spent several days (which is a long time in kiddom) stewing over the injustice our founding fathers had foisted upon us by setting a minimum age requirement for the office of president, and attempting to get a petition drive started to change that pesky Constitution of ours.

But now, more than thirty years later, I'm beginning to see that this insistent, stubborn need to raze other opinions and rebuild the world in a way that suits me isn't very productive. It may be ambitious for a seven-year-old to attempt to change the U.S. Constitution, but it's definitely not wise (which, by the way, is why seven-year-olds, even very smart ones, don't get to be President of the United States). And unfortunately, not much has changed in the intervening years. I've spent too much of my life trying to figure out how to convince Christians fundamentalists not to take the Bible so darn literally or libertarians to see the wisdom in a central government or my Fox News watching relatives that Obama isn't a Muslim and it wouldn't matter if he were.

I'm finally noticing that my discomfort doesn't go away, even if the object of my outrage complies with my plans. That feeling, like a leech that has sucked its host dry, just swims off to attach itself to some new warm body. It turns out that my outrage has much less to do with the world's problems than it does with my problems. And it's not when the world changes, but when I change -- when I'm in a place of mental, emotional and physical balance and health -- that my painful outrage disappears.

That rage, rage, rage against the imperfect world, the less than my ideal world, the messy, complicated, real world hasn't helped me. It hasn't made the world a better place. In fact, in many ways it has damaged me, gone against my professed ideals and deeply angered, hurt and alienated many people I professed to want to understand and win over. My personal obsession with politics, my passion for convincing the country embrace my opinions, isn't healthy for me or good for the nation. So, I may be exploring my feelings around the election this year, but for once, I'm trying not share my choice of candidate or urge anyone to vote in any particular way. It's a little experiment, to see how it feels. And so far -- it's been difficult; I haven't always succeeded -- but overall, letting go feels really, really good.

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A friend of Mark's and mine fell in love recently. You know that intoxicating feeling of new love: the one where you feel giddy and anxious and excited all at once. Everything in your life is bathed in the soft glow of hope. This relationship is going to be special. This person is different, not like the other people in your life who have broken your heart before.

This friend is so happy, while Mark and I, rather than being happy for him, admitted to each other that we are both wary and uncomfortable. This girlfriend of his may seem to be different from the last one, but the fact that our friend is not any different than he was in his previous relationships leads us to believe the same crazy dance is just going to be played out to different music this time. For both of Mark and me, that initial feeling of attraction has come to signal, not the happy match of two well-suited personalities, but the irresistible pull of complementary dysfunction: the north pole of the codependent magnet reaching out for the south pole of the addict magnet.

I love my husband. I am happy in my marriage. But it has taken an unimaginable amount of pain and a lot of work to get to this point. I fear (and believe) that if (through death or divorce) I lost Mark and found myself falling in love again, it would mean going through that same valley of shock and pain and deep, life-altering grief just to get back to this new normal in which I find myself now.

And as I am finally starting to find my bearings in my life and marriage, Barack Obama enters, with flowers, wooing America. Charismatic, charming, handsome, smart, with warm latte skin, he reminds me of someone... Someone charismatic and charming, handsome and smart, with warm chocolate skin. Who could it be? Oh, wait. My husband.

Everything about me wants to love Barack Obama. And everything in me screams that he is like all the other charming men I've loved. He's going to break my heart if I give it to him. He's going to lie to me. He's not going to do what he promises to do; he won't be able to. He's going to hurt me. He has hurt me (through my political alter-ego, Hillary Clinton.) My attraction to him must come from my own crazy messed uppedness. I can't trust him. I can't trust myself.

So, I've been clinging to suspicion, fear and distrust because to let myself go and follow the frenzy of Obama worship is to fall in love again, and I want no part of that giddy intoxication of newborn infatuation. I'm not ready for it yet; I'm still too raw to touch. I'm working on letting go of those emotions, but for now, I need to keep my distance from Obama and keep working on the hope and the change that come from inside myself before I'm ready to embrace new love (political or otherwise) without fear.

Sarah Palin and I have very different moral, political and spiritual beliefs. We have had very different experiences as women and mothers. I'm sure there are folks who would say that all we have in common is our gender and the fact we each have a special needs child.

After all, before Palin had her son Trig, she was aware that he would be born with Down Syndrome. She kept up a demanding job as governor of the state of Alaska throughout her entire pregnancy and was back to work within days of her son's birth. Now he's four months old and she's running for the second highest office in the nation.

When my son Austen was born, I didn't yet know he was autistic. I didn't even know that he was different; I hadn't spent much time around infants, so I assumed that his high pitched wailing, inability to sleep and need to have his environment just so were typical of all babies and that I had simply been woefully unprepared for parenting. His crying induced a kind of wild panic in me, and the mere thought of leaving him to go back to my job reduced me to tears of sheer terror. I quit my job at the end of my maternity leave, and my husband Mark and I agreed that we'd just have to do whatever it took (which included rapidly decimating our finances and credit rating) to make it happen.

Forget about working, let alone running a vice presidential campaign, between Austen's needs and my undiagnosed post-partum depression, I didn't even leave the house for three months. (Yes, literally, three months.) I had a friend who was out hiking and camping with her one-week-old around this time, and I was completely baffled. I remember hating women like her who were able to get back up and running so fast. What were they doing right that I was doing wrong?

Still, while I secretly envied them their seeming strength, I was the one being applauded by a society that recognized my post-partum depression as brave decision making. People praised me for doing the right thing in forgoing money and career interests in order to say home with my son. And as they did it, they'd quietly tsk-tsk the moms who made the opposite choice, just as I've heard Sarah Palin tsk-tsked. As a friend said to me, "Palin went back to work when her son was just a few days old! If she makes those kinds of bad and irresponsible decisions about her son's wellbeing, what kinds of decisions would she make for the country?"

The problem was, that while I was lauded for my admirable decision to quit my paying job, now that it was my job to care for my son and home, and it rapidly became clear that I wasn't doing it right. All that babies are supposed to do in the beginning is sleep, eat and eliminate the digested remains of their meals, yet my son had a terrible time with two of the three of those. (Yes, he can pee and poop with the best of them, but eating and sleeping? Sigh!) And as time went on he wasn't doing some of the other things he was supposed to on time: things like waving and talking. I was told that I wasn't sleep training him properly, wasn't feeding him properly, wasn't talking to him enough and correctly. And a part of me believed it. It was my fault. I wasn't working hard enough.

I was criticized by many of the people who tore through our lives in those early years: doctors, therapists, teachers, other parents. They told me that -- while I'd certainly made the right choice to stay home -- I needed to work harder and sacrifice still more. I needed to learn educational law, occupational therapy, organizational skills, nutrition, speech therapy, and if I wasn't good at it or didn't enjoy it, I'd better try harder.

An advocate I tried to hire to help me navigate complex educational law and negotiations with the school district lambasted me for not being able to do (or even being interested in) the job I was going to hire her to do. "You have to learn to do this yourself! If you're not good at it, you'd better work to get good at it! Your son needs you to do this!" Then, when my son was having trouble in school last year, the school's solution wasn't to train the teachers properly or hire an aide; it was to have me come in and act as free support.

After all, if I really loved my son, wouldn't I do anything for him? Wouldn't I go to any lengths to give him what he needed? Shouldn't I? Moms are supposed to do anything for their children, and special needs moms? Why, we're supposed to be superstars. We're not supposed to have jobs or other priorities or needs of our own to balance. We're not supposed to admit that there's anything we can't or won't or don't want to do. We are supposed to live, eat and breathe our single minded dedication to our children.

And when I say moms, I do mean moms, not parents. Because you see, Sarah Palin is supposed to do all that too. Yet, other than gender (and that's a big other!), she has more in common with my husband than she does with me; she makes a good salary working long hours in a high demands career, and she has a spouse who, while not a stay-at-home parent, has taken several months off of work and cut back on his own career as the demands of hers have increased. Her son Trig (like my son) has parental care equal to other working families and his family (even more than ours) has financial resources that allow access to quality medical care and therapy.

In his seven years of parenting, Mark has gotten a series of cheerful "good jobs" for doing his satisfactory and expected job as Daddy. No one said Mark should quit his job or even cut back on his hours at work to help at care for Austen. No one criticized him for going back to work exhausted and sleep deprived days after our son's birth. No one said Austen was suffering because Daddy was working long hours and traveling frequently. No one said Daddy should have done a better job with the sleep training or feeding. No one suggested Daddy learn educational law or teach himself to be an occupational therapist when he made a good enough living to pay an expert to help. No one expected Daddy to leave his other responsibilities to come act as a free aide at school. And no one suggested he didn't really care about his son if he didn't do all this.

I love my son. I'd give my life for him. But he is not -- and I think shouldn't be -- my entire life. And I always feel a pang of guilt for that. I feel guilty for having no interest or aptitude at educational law. I feel guilty for not having any interest in or energy for spending each waking minute of my day on his development and improvement. I feel guilty for wanting to (and enjoying doing) work on things that have nothing to do with him.

So now when I hear these whispers around Sarah Palin about what she "should" be doing for her children, especially her special needs child, I get angry. I get throw-a-flaming-dagger-into-the-heart-of-the-next-person-who-brings-it-up angry. Sarah Palin and I share more than "just" our gender and a special needs child. We share the ways in which we are perceived by society. We share the burden of that special needs supermom myth. We share the weight of society's expectation that we should express our love for, and dedication to, our children in a particular way and that it's our job to do it all, not Daddy's.

Whatever you think of her politics or her qualifications, Sarah Palin has become a mirror for ourselves. She's a Rorschach test for the American psyche. And when I tease apart the personal from the political, what I see in that ink blot is another special needs mom who, however different from me, still can't manage to do anything right enough for anyone.

I fell in love with Hillary Clinton during the 1992 presidential election. I hadn't been out of college long and was just starting my career, as well as a serious romantic relationship with my now husband. Although I could tell Hillary and I had our differences (I've always wanted to stay home and bake cookies more than be a partner at a law firm), we were both highly-educated, intelligent, strong, fiercely competitive and extremely ambitious women. Hillary was not only like me, she was like the female friends I surrounded myself with as a young adult: doctors, lawyers and businesswomen who were smart, driven, practical and not to be trifled with. When Hillary got crap for saying she wasn't some Tammy Wynette standing by her man, I thought, "You go, girl! I can tell you're not, and you tell the media to get out of your face."

Years later, during the scandalous days when the details of Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky were published in the government-funded porn of Kenneth Starr's Whitewater Report, I was horrified and angry on a number of fronts. I had no idea at the time that my husband was a sex addict, but like so many people, I reacted to the story at a very visceral level.

I was angry that Bill Clinton would waste his time on Monica Lewinsky when he had an intelligent, beautiful life partner like Hillary beside him. I was furious because he represented all my fears about men: that the most important thing to all of them was a cheap thrill, that they'd act nonsensically stupid and risk everything over anyone who was willing and eager enough for sex, that they were all sexist jerks at heart, that none of them could be trusted.

I was angry at Monica Lewinsky for being a silly, selfish little girl. Since, I believed, no (straight) man on the planet could keep it in his pants when a woman offered sex, it was the responsibility of women to protect each other by acting as moral gatekeepers and not to offering. And I saw Monica Lewinsky as too ridiculous and irresponsible to do this.

I was angry that our government spent money investigating the President's sex life and then gave the findings over to tabloids to splash across the headlines and to late night talk show hosts to mock. I was absolutely furious that anyone thought that Bill Clinton's personal life made him impeachment worthy. He may not have been justified in lying to his wife, but he damn sure was justified in lying to everyone else, because it was none of anyone else's damn business. I'd have lied too.

And above all, I was angry at Hillary. Fine, she had tried to make her marriage work before, but this? This was so degrading. For her own sake and the sake of all women, now was the time to take a stand, wasn't it? I wanted her to file for divorce. I wanted her to kick Bill out of the White House with nothing but his presidential briefs (or boxers) and make him sleep on the White House lawn. I wanted her to be (what I thought was) strong and humiliate the life out of him. I wanted to point to that and show my husband what would happen to him if he ever did the same. But she didn't. She stayed there bitter and angry and visibly hurting, but she stayed. Damn her.

Years later, I found out my husband was a sex addict, and the whole Clinton scandal appeared in a new light. I saw that things hadn't played out the way I thought they had, and people weren't who I thought they were. And gender roles and relationships weren't what I believed. I had a new image of their complexities and humanness. I had a new compassion for all of them. And a new feeling of connection.

During those early days, when I felt so very, very alone, the person I felt closest to on this planet was Hillary Clinton. My husband's personality and the ways in which he acts out are very similar to Bill Clinton. He's charismatic and charming and has a deep, endless, aching need to be loved by everyone. It was a kind of acting out, a sex and love addict's acting out, that the women in my S-Anon group (who were primarily partnered with strict sex addicts) didn't understand. And when the time came -- the time that I always swore I'd kick him out the door -- like Hillary, I stayed too.

When I felt at my darkest, ready to give up and plunge off a bridge, I'd think of three people: my two kids who needed me and Hillary Clinton. I knew I could make it through this pain to some better place, because I knew she had. I knew that, like me, she was smart and strong and driven. I knew that she had been hurt just like I had (God! There was someone else on this planet who had been hurt like I had!), and more than that. She had to go through it all under the bright spotlight of public scrutiny. She had to go through the humiliation and the questions and the pain and the uncertainty about what to do and where to go, all with the world watching and judging.

I used my image of Hillary in those early days to believe in and tap into my own strength. I saw her as water in the desert. I saw her as the beacon leading me toward my God. I saw her as my future, the me I would become: stronger and wiser and better than ever. I saw my strengths reflected in her, and I see my weaknesses. So, when people judge her, it feels like they are judging me. When people criticize her, it feels like they are criticizing me. When people hate her, it feels like they are hating me. (I had to stop listening to election coverage months before she left the race because it was too personally painful.)

But when I heard her speak, she was speaking not just to me, but for me. And when I voted for her, it was like voting for me: not just for the ideals I cherish or the policies I support, but for my own triumph over pain, my own hope and my own gratitude for what her existence gave me in my despair.

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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.

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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.