So I took a pregnancy test today. Negative, so you don't spend the whole time reading this wondering. It's just, we had an accident... the condom broke... and with all the babies in the air, I'm paranoid.

And here comes the complete honesty. I'm scared to write about this, because I guess I'm afraid of what people will think of me. I know some people have bad reactions to this, but it's my life and this is my diary and I think I owe it to myself to be completely honest, warts and all.

I've been dancing around the subject for a year now. June 26, 2002. That's the date it happened. And it was about this time last year that I found out I was pregnant. Ever since I started having sex, I'd had a plan of action. If I got pregnant, I would have an abortion. It would be the most sensible thing to do, right? One trip to the doctor and that would be it.

But it never is as easy as it seems. I was 6 days late and I needed to know to stop myself from having a nervous breakdown. So, I got T.T. to buy me a test and I went into the bathroom at work and took it. I read the directions, which said, "Wait one minute for a positive result and three minutes for a negative." And I just remember thinking, "Crap. I don't have a watch. How am I ever going to time three minutes?" It didn't even dawn on me that I was pregnant. These things don't happen to girls like me. I'm a good girl and I've never really done anything all that wrong in my life.

So I took the test and two lines showed up, which meant that I was. And I sat there. For about 5 seconds. And I thought, "Hmm. Okay. What now?" Then, I burst into tears, because this wasn't supposed to happen. T.T. knocked on the door, she came in and asked the result. I looked at her like she was crazy, because fuck, if I wasn't did she really think I'd be freaking out like that?

The rest of the day at work was spent talking about options with Tisha, because she'd gone through that two years before. She warned me to think long and hard about what I was going to do, because, after all, it was permanent.

And it was never supposed to be as hard as it was. The baby was never supposed to feel so real. I wasn't supposed to imagine what it would look like, how we'd be as parents, how much I would love a baby... it wasn't supposed to involve that.

June 26, I went to the doctors and got it done. I wasn't put to sleep, like that can do, because this was my mistake and I needed to feel the pain that went along with it. Then, I went back to the doctors for my two week checkup and found out that because I was only 6 weeks pregnant when I did it, the abortion wasn't completely sucessful. They missed some. This is something that happens to 1% of all abortions, and it was happening to me.

I had to go through all of that again. This time, however, they did a DNC, which involves scraping the uterus with a spoon-like instrument. You're supposed to get put to sleep when they do it, because it's incredibly painful, but no one told me that, and even if they had, I would've said no, because this was my problem and I deserved to deal with the pain that my mistake had caused.

I got out in the recovery room and I wanted to kill all the other girls there. Because they had all been put to sleep and were crying about how much pain they were in. I wanted to shake them and tell them, "Fuck you. I went through it twice, awake, and this time was more painful than anything I'd ever felt."

The next day, I went home and my mom gave me a card and a letter that Kristen had written me. She talked about her situation and I almost cried, because I felt like I was so alone in the whole thing, and there was this girl, who I wasn't that close to, pouring out her heart to me, telling me things she had told very few people before me.

A month after it was all over, Brian told me that sometimes he wished we'd kept the baby, because he thought we could've done it. My mom once told me, though, that sometimes she resented us kids from stopping her from doing things that she could've done without kids. I never wanted to tell my kids that. I just couldn't deal with them feeling like they were mistakes I had to deal with. Nobody should feel like that.

Sometimes, people on the outside think that abortion is the easy way out. But it's not. I think about it every day. It runs through my mind all the time and I just think, "God, I'd be a parent now." It's not the easy way out. I deal with the guilt, the regret, the sadness, every day of my life.

It was never supposed to be that hard.

And that's complete honesty. And whether or not I'm glad I shared this remains to be seen.