Eighteen years later, during an intermission at a play in Los Angeles, I mention my son to friends of a man I am dating. I am sitting with his friends, a man and a woman, because the man I’m seeing is acting in the play, and the three of us have his comp tickets; I haven’t met them before. They remark, as people often do, that I don’t look old enough to have a grown child. I am frank about the circumstances: I say sardonic things like shotgun wedding, child bride, religious family. The woman rushes to say, But you must love your son so much, as people often do. I have found myself in this play many times before, though I never say my lines. I’m being prompted to say, I wouldn’t have it any other way, or, I can’t imagine life without him. Instead I say, He’s amazing, which is true. But what I want to say is, Yes, I do love him so much that I wish he could have been born to someone who was ready and excited to be a mother.

It’s not that I would have it any other way. And I can’t imagine life without him because the counterfactual does not exist. The great gift my son gave me, that I have tried to give back to both of my children, was not the privilege of being his mother — a role I have never submitted to the way I would have wanted to, the way he deserved, if we’re talking woulds — but an exit from the pat.

But it’s not accurate to say my son gave me this, when what I mean is: Facing an unplanned pregnancy when I was 19 led to a grappling with identity that forced me to choose between acknowledging complexity, failure and systemic injustice or living inauthentically, turned away from truth. A paradox here is that much of what informed my parents’ conviction that I should not have an abortion — though we never even talked about it — was rooted in religion, and yet having a baby when I did, the way I did, led directly to my departure from religion, and far more swiftly than anything else could have.