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A Memoir
by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman
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When you were a sophomore in high school, an older girl who already had her driver's license drove you to the county health department, which, unlike so many other places in America, offered free birth control to underage girls without parental notification. The health department nurses knew your parents, knew everyone's parents, knew that gossip is gold in a small town with more churches than stoplights. And yet, to your knowledge, they never revealed the names of the underage girls seeking their clandestine services. The entire visit, including the mandatory precounseling and pelvic exam, took less than an hour and you left the clinic with a year's supply of pills that didn't cost you a cent.
It's magical to think about it now, how an hour in a dingy, threeroom clinic determined the course of your life. But you didn't feel any magic at the time. What you felt was terrified. What if the pills didn't work? For the nurses— big- bosomed Southern women who called you "Honey" and told you to relax while they inserted a speculum into your vagina, women who gave birth control and STD tests, confidentially, to hundreds of underage girls in your small town so that you could all have a fighting chance— these women had been very clear on this point: Birth control pills could fail. Condoms could fail. It could all fail. And then you would fail. Everything— your years of hard work, the top grades, the good test scores, the violin concerts— everything would be fucked. You would be fucked. Doomed. There would be no college and no big city and no making a living. (No one ever mentioned abortion, perhaps because they were ideologically opposed to it, or perhaps because the money and transportation and logistical planning needed to travel hundreds of miles to the nearest abortion clinic, all without letting the adults in your life know, seemed impossible, probably was impossible.) You had already thought about it and decided that if you were to find yourself pregnant, you would climb the nearest mountain and jump off one of its many gorgeous cliffs. No reason for suicide seemed more compelling, no reason was more black- and- white, case- closed, than pregnancy. The ultimate curse of life in the body would be accidentally getting someone else's life literally inside your body.
But unlike many of the girls you grew up with, whose luck was worse, you never found yourself pregnant, so you were granted your life. And you are living it now at MTV, speaking on the phone with less-lucky girls all over America. These calls go on for hours. They tell you about their preeclampsia, their fear of the pain of labor, the logistics of renting a tub for water birth. They tell you about their tattoos, their favorite outfits, the new haircut they want to get. They tell you about their towns, how much they want to get out of them, how their parents are driving them nuts, how they envy you because you live in New York City and work at MTV. They tell you they want to become actresses, musicians, doctors, veterinarians. They tell you about their boyfriends' jobs, how sweet the boyfriend is, how terrible he is, or, most often, how the boyfriend's behavior, whether bad or good, has become overshadowed by the bigger picture that is taking shape in their bellies and their minds, the realization that there is (fuck!) another person growing inside of them, a person who will be here soon. The sudden, inescapable realness of that.
And so you begin to draft a report, a list of profiles of ten or so girls out of the hundreds of responses you've received. You choose the girls carefully, based on how interesting they are. The most interesting girls, to you, are the ones who have their shit together. The ones who had it all— grades, talent, ambition— but decided not to throw themselves over a cliff when they found themselves pregnant, instead resolving to work even harder. You choose the ones who, despite incredible odds of pregnancy and poverty and chaos, are taking AP courses and applying for college, the ones who run for student government while visibly pregnant, the ones who have already researched which colleges offer housing for families. The ones who are smart and capable and well- spoken and mature. The ones who will probably "make it." You find the determination of these girls nothing short of amazing, their will to live in a country that wants to shame them and shove them out of sight or off a cliff to be nothing short of miraculous.
Excerpted from Sounds Like Titanic by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman. Copyright © 2019 by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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