How driving my ex-wife to the abortion clinic helped me finally learn what it means to love unconditionally

I was just twenty years old when I met the woman who would become my wife. I grew up in a conservative Evangelical church where I was taught to wait until marriage and that the Harry Potter books were dangerous portals into the world of witchcraft. Tashina was wildly different from the type of woman I thought I would end up with; she was a pagan, bisexual, and already a single mom at nineteen. From the very beginning, she stretched my limited worldview. 

When we married a few years later, we were an instant family as I took on the role of stepdad to her daughter. We waited until marriage as I had always promised I would. Our honeymoon was brief but beautiful, as we couldn’t afford much. We still joke to this day about how the woman who ran the Bed and Breakfast where we stayed in the Garden District of New Orleans gave us quite an extensive tour, showing us in obnoxious detail how everything in the room worked, from the coffee machine to the showers until I finally blurted out, “We waited until marriage!”

Eventually, I adopted our daughter, and we started discussing expanding our family. After years of trying, we experienced a number of pregnancy losses. Then, we welcomed our second daughter into the world. 

Our life together was simple. I served as an Orthodox priest at a small parish, and she attended to very traditional duties as a mother and wife, homeschooling our two daughters. I remained a registered Republican until Obama’s second term. The vitriol became too much for me to bear, and I couldn’t in good conscience continue to vote for a party that seemed more concerned with being right than doing what was right. I remember being lectured repeatedly about voting for a “baby killer.” But there was so much more on the ballot that election than just abortion.

I eventually left the priesthood in support of marriage equality, amongst a myriad of other issues, in the summer of 2013.

We had always hoped for a big family, but those hopes kept resulting in heartbreak. After a very traumatic loss, we decided that it was time to accept that we were blessed with two incredible daughters and begin planning for a different type of future. 

Then we found out we were pregnant again.

For months, we were on edge, constantly afraid that at any moment, we might lose him too, but we eventually arrived at the hospital to deliver our third child. When the midwife arrived, she was concerned. The baby seemed to be in severe distress. He was born with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck twice and tied in a tight knot. After he was delivered, Tashina started to hemorrhage.

I had always promised her that no matter what happened, I would stay with the baby. But now, as I was standing in this room, with them applying breathing machines to our blue child and the nurses and doctors surrounding my fading wife, I was in a panic. 

Then I heard him cry.

I ran over to him and felt his little fingers wrap around mine. I could only be in one place at a time, and they were taking him away. So I kept my promise and left with him. He and I sat in a room getting to know each other while I was panicked, not knowing if I was now a single father or not. The thought kept running through my head, “Am I a widower?” After what felt like decades, the doctor arrived to tell me she had made it and wanted to see the baby.

I promised myself never to let her be in this kind of danger again. After a long series of conversations, we made the decision together that I would get a vasectomy. After eight miscarriages and almost losing her and the baby, this was the only way I knew to keep her safe.

Life doesn’t always go as planned; eventually, we both lost ourselves. Over the years, I had become increasingly hardened, and leaving the priesthood seemed to make me even more stoic. I used to laugh and sing Broadway songs in the streets; now, I was angry, bitter, and unwilling to face the traumas I had collected over the course of my life. For Tashina, years of living under a misogynistic religious institution and my own unresolved internal misogyny, she had been suppressing her true self. Neither of us looked like the people we fell in love with anymore. 

After nine years of marriage, we decided to separate. 

We worked well together as co-parents and learned to navigate this new normal. I would take the kids on the weekends; this was what life was like now. We both met other people. I adapted to life as best I could and built a good relationship with her boyfriend. But there were troubles behind the scenes that I couldn’t see.

Tashina found her independence again. She was no longer trapped by my lingering religious ideologies. I watched from afar as she blossomed and found freedom, forcing me to reckon with myself. I was both a prisoner and prison guard of these ideologies that had been enforced by my trauma and hurts. I needed to be free, too. I began going to therapy and had to look deep inside at the muck and hurt that existed inside me. It took years but I started to laugh and sing and play again.

Little did I know that this same system of misogyny was about to try and trap her again in a wholly different way.

One day, I got a call from Tashina, “my boyfriend and I just broke up this afternoon. This evening, I found out I’m pregnant.” 

My line of vision began to sink in and go black. I felt sick. We talked for hours over those next couple of days. She shared with me how unsupportive he had been and that she had attempted to repeatedly get out of the relationship. She was afraid of what he might do. When she expressed to him that she wasn’t sure if she wanted to go forward with the pregnancy, he made a social post stating, “I’m going to be a dad!” in some attempt to trap her and publicly shame her. I will not go into detail about all that she endured because that is her story to tell if and when she ever chooses to. What I will say is that what she experienced forced a loving and kind mother to make the most difficult choice of her life. 

I told her I was there for her no matter what she wanted to do. After all the torment she was put through, she told me that she had decided to terminate the pregnancy.

So many nights, I had held her as she cried from the losses we had experienced. I had wiped away her tears as she mourned the large family she had hoped to have. Now, she felt this was the best choice for her to survive and be there for the children already in her care.

Tashina made plans for a friend to take her a couple of hours away to the closest clinic. Living in Florida, she already had limited options. The clinic in her hometown had been burned down by protestors years before and never rebuilt. Instead, she would have to drive a few hours east. She asked if I would watch the kids, and, of course, I agreed. At the last minute, the ex-boyfriend asked if he could take her instead as a way to make amends. 

It was a lie, and he never showed up, presumably in an attempt to take her choice away from her. 

I received a panicked call from Tashina, who said she needed someone to drive her and asked if I would do it. 

I had evolved extensively on the issue of choice, but somewhere deep inside my head still lived the version of me that served as a priest. This was antithetical to everything I had been taught. Could I do this? And then I remembered my promise always to keep her safe, did that expire now just because we were no longer married?

I picked her up that morning before sunrise. A few hours later, when we arrived at the clinic, I drove past the picket line of protestors with their rosaries. What would they think to know that a fallen, now divorced ex-priest was driving his former wife to get an abortion? I didn’t have to really wonder; I knew what they would say.

We sat together in the waiting room with other scared people making difficult choices for all their individual reasons. I put a TV show on my phone to help distract her. We sat there with one earbud in her ear and another in mine, waiting for her turn.

Eventually, we were called back. This felt so familiar and yet very different.

She slept most of the ride home, her head leaning against the window with her pillow protecting her. So many vacations we had taken together over the years, always remembering to bring her pillow because she couldn’t sleep without it. This was very unlike our road trips, and as I drove into the rising sun, I couldn’t help but think how beautiful she looked. I thought at that moment, “If this isn’t what they meant by ‘for better or worse, I don’t really know what is.”

When we arrived back at her house, she waited to miscarry again, this time by choice. How different our lives had turned out from what we promised on our wedding day. Back then, we were young, had it all figured out, and the world was an untouched pallet. Now, life had been both cruel and kind. We had learned a lot, experienced grief and loss, rebuilding and finding ourselves again. Yet, when it was all said and done, we were still who we wanted to call on our worst days, the one we knew we could trust with the scariest moments life had to offer.

After this experience together, we were both forever changed. Slowly, over time, we began to see each other again. I was falling in love with her but afraid to fall back into old familiar patterns. Had I healed enough to be worthy of her love again? Little did I know, she also fell in love with this reborn version of myself. Over time, we saw why we trusted one another so deeply to begin with. We realized what it really means to be someone’s person. What it truly means to be family. This is what it means when you say you would do anything to keep someone safe.

A year or so later, blissfully unaware that social isolation was just on the horizon, we surrounded ourselves with our close family and friends and recommitted ourselves to one another. In our time apart, we realized that when life got scary, when things didn’t make sense, when the storms rolled in, who we wanted to reach out to was each other. 

Life and love doesn’t fit into a perfect little heart-shaped chocolate box. Flowers can’t cover the stench of disappointment. Love can be raw and visceral.

As we head into the final stretch of this year's election cycle, abortion is on the ballot in many states. That includes Amendment 4 in Florida. As you step into the ballot box, I hope that you will remember our story and the stories of countless others who have shared with you their story of choice. Like you, I grew up believing that this was a singular issue to vote on, that nothing else mattered. Even as I drove to that clinic that day, I wasn’t so sure of where I stood. At the end of it all, it wasn’t my choice to make, but hers. I am glad that she was able to make the choice that was right for her. As I look now, all these years later, at everything she has accomplished because of that choice, I am so glad that she had options. Everyone should.

That is what freedom truly is: choice.

The other day, my wife looked at me and said, “I’m enjoying being married to you the second time around much more than the first try.” I am, too, mostly because I think our time apart allowed us to learn who we really are. The events that led to our coming back together allowed me to learn what it truly means to love someone completely and unconditionally.

I’m not sure what the future holds, but I am so glad to be given the chance to no longer worry about all that anymore. I am content instead to know that I am fully loved by her and that I fully love her, too. 

Because love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. Love never fails.