When Tracey Segarra tells her mother she had an abortion, she's shocked by the response.
Tracey Segarra launched her career in NYC as a reporter and editor for local newspapers and national wire services, interviewing assorted politicians, celebrities and criminals. But now all she wants to do is tell stories to strangers about her own life. She has appeared on the Story Collider and Risk! live shows and podcasts, the Moth Radio Hour on NPR and is the host of her own storytelling show based on Long Island, "Now You're Talking!" Find out more at traceysegarra.com.
This story originally aired on August 29, 2018 in an episode titled “Abortion: Stories from doctors and patients - Part 2.”
Story Transcript
I’m fifty-five years old and in my fifty-five years on this planet I have had exactly three conversations with my now eighty-five-year old mother about sex.
First conversation. I’m twelve years old; I get my period for the first time. I go to my mother looking for guidance, looking for advice. She says, “Tracey, this means you can get pregnant. Wait until you're married.”
That’s it. That is the entirety of my sex education. We do not talk about sex in my family. There are five kids so obviously there is some sex being had but we do not discuss it.
But this is the ‘70s and it’s sex, drugs and Rock and Roll and the sexual revolution and I see and hear this all around me. So for the next few years I’m like a sponge learning everything I possibly can about sex in a pre-internet era. I go to the library and I find a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, and I find these torrid romance novels in the drug store that I steal and read like Love’s Tender Fury. And so I learned.
My next conversation that I have with my mother about sex takes place when I’m seventeen. It’s the summer after high school and I've just become sexually active with my high school boyfriend. He and I are so excited that we are having sex that we buy this huge box of condoms, because we’re planning on having a lot of sex. I hide it in my closet, all the way in the back in a pocketbook and we go out on a date one night. When I come back home I go to lie down on my bed but I feel like there's something all over my bed. I don't know what it is.
I turn on the light. And when I turn on the light, I realize what has happened. My mother, my ‘50s housewife mother has discovered these condoms. Obviously, she went looking for them. They weren’t easy to find. And she has taken a scissor and she has cut every single one in half and thrown them all over my bed. I know. What the fuck, Ma? Like what is the message she's trying to send? Except that I know she's not happy I’m having sex. That message is clear. And I know that the next morning we are having our next conversation about sex.
The next morning comes around and she says, “Tracey, call Matt and have him come over because we’re having a discussion.” I’m like, “Oh, no, she's making my boyfriend come too.” Matt is a lovely guy but we are not in love. We’re like Bob Seger’s Night Moves just trying to lose these awkward teenage blues and just kind of figuring out what sex is all about and having fun. But we’re going to play the act for my mother because we’re having his conversation.
So he comes over. He's a nice guy. And my mother ushers us into the formal living room where nobody ever sits. So I’m like, “Oh, no. What are we in for?”
So we sit there and my mother starts talking about how sex is a very serious thing and you should only be doing it with somebody you truly love and we’re both saying, “Oh, yes, we truly love each other. We can maybe get married.” I mean, just crazy stuff.
Honestly, whatever she's telling me is going in one ear and out the other. I’m only seventeen but I already feel like I know a lot more about sex than my mother. I’m not taking advice about sex, in any event, from a deranged condom destroyer.
The conversation eventually ends and Matt and I continue to have sex but he keeps the condoms at his house from now on.
The third conversation that my mother and I have about sex takes place when I’m nineteen. I am home from college for the first time, the first time I've lived away from home. It’s the end of the summer and, like most college students, I’m broke.
So I go to my mother to beg her for money to go back to school. She says to me, “Tracey, what did you do with all the money you were supposed to be saving from your summer job?”
I don't know what came over me or what possessed me to say what I said next because I blurt out, “I had an abortion.” And I instantly regret it.
Her face crumples and I think in that moment my mother, you know, she was tough and she had this hold over me and I was nineteen years old and I was really trying to… I was caught in that time period between a girl and a woman. I just had an abortion and it was something that I knew I needed to do. The boy and I were barely more than friends. And I was trying to assert myself as an adult and as separate from my mother. I also think I just kind of wanted to hurt her because we couldn’t have these kind of conversations.
She looks at me and then what she does next is bizarre. She gets up and she walks over to the dining room and she opens up the china cabinet. She takes out this gold-rimmed glass that my father’s parents had given them for their wedding and she smashes it on the ground. Then she takes every single glass in that cabinet and she smashes it on the ground.
I’m hysterical, crying. I don't know what’s going on. I don't know why she has this response.
Then she says, “Come here and sit down because I’m going to tell you why I just smashed those glasses.” And my father who wasn’t allowed to be part of that conversation when I was seventeen with my boyfriend, it was just her. She shooed him out of the room. Now, she said, “Bob, you come over here and you sit down and you be part of this.”
And she says, “Tracey, after eight years and five pregnancies in 1966 I find out that I’m pregnant again. I tell your father that there is no way I’m going to be able to care for a sixth baby and I beg him to find me somebody to end the pregnancy. It’s 1966 and abortions are not legal. That easy abortion that you had was not something that was available to me.
And let me tell you about my experience. I walked up a rickety set of stairs to a dirty room and when it was over the doctor says to me, ‘It’s a boy.’”
I am just overcome. I don't know what to say. I don't know what to do. I can’t believe this is happening.
And she says, “You know, your father, he would wake me up in the middle of the night because he wanted to have sex and that is why there are so many of you children.”
I’m like, “Oh, my God. Do I have to also hear about your sex life?”
Then my next emotion is anger. At my mother. Because how dare she turn a story about me into something about her and all I can feel is just rage at her. And how dare she blame my father for all of this as if she had no judgment in the matter, as if she couldn’t make up her own mind, as if she had no choice.
That conversation eventually ends. When I go back to school I rarely come back home again. When I graduate I move out and my mother and I never do develop any kind of really close relationship.
Well, that was almost forty years ago. In that time, and when I look back at that experience, I look at it a lot differently today than I did back then. Now that I’m older and I have teenage daughters of my own, I see what’s going on in the world. What I realize now is that she did not have the option. She did not have the freedom to choose that I had back in the ‘80s when abortion was legal, when Planned Parenthood was in the phonebook, when access to birth control was easy and accepted.
And what she did, the choice she made at that time had to be one of the most difficult decisions that she ever made in her life, but she made it. After that and while still taking care of five kids, she went back to school and she got a master’s degree and by the time I was a toddler she was teaching full time.
When my parents’ marriage eventually, inevitably, broke up, my mother traveled the world instead of falling apart.
So yeah, she was a deranged condom destroyer and glass smasher who had no idea, who had no capacity to talk to her twelve-year-old or seventeen-year-old or nineteen-year-old daughter about sex. But she's still the most badass feminist I know and I’m proud to call my mom.