I Had An Abortion While Working A Full Day. My Co-Worker's 'Feedback' Nearly Made Me Unravel.

No one at my job knew I was pregnant. No one at my job knew when I wasn’t anymore.To be fair, very few people in my life knew I was pregnant because I very much did not want to be. The situation was incredibly complicated. How does someone pop up pregnant at 40 after barely being able to get pregnant in their 30s when they desperately wanted to have a baby? I was never one for tracking my cycle, but when I woke up one morning with sore breasts. I did some light math and realised I definitely should have had my period already. “There is no way. No fucking way,” I muttered to myself. One pregnancy test later and I guess there was a way. I spent a week hoping to see blood when I woke up every morning. Hoping that this was all a bad dream. That never happened. It was all very real. It took me what felt like an eternity to make a decision. It wasn’t like I was 20. I was a 40-year-old woman. I was already a mum. I mean, really, what’s one more child? But, I knew there was no way I could bring a baby into the world – not for me, and not for them. During those two gruelling weeks, I was having a conversation with one of my best friends when she said something I’ll never forget: “You know, it’s OK to choose yourself.”So, I made an appointment with my OB-GYN. Since I was really early on in my pregnancy, I was a candidate for a “medical abortion”: mifepristone followed by misoprostol. All I had to do was go home, pop some pills, wait a day, pop some more pills, expel tissue and stop being pregnant.I was moderately scared of the process. But what scared me the most was the idea of slowing down. I didn’t have the luxury of taking a day off; I barely had the luxury of a decision.And if I’m being honest, I didn’t think twice about taking those pills with a full workday ahead of me. After all, I had to get through the bulk of the bleeding in time to pick my kids up from school. So, on the day I had my abortion, I logged onto Zoom. I smiled. I nodded. I answered emails. I scheduled meetings. At some point, I said I might need to turn my camera off for a bit because I wasn’t feeling well.If you want to talk about an out-of-body experience, try managing a team while your uterus contracts, and you’re flushing your foetus down the toilet in between team calls and slide deck edits. For so much of my life, I’ve floated outside myself. As a biracial girl conceived by a white mother who was disowned for loving a Black man, my life has been a series of episodes where I felt like an outsider, looking in. It continued through years of being too white for the Black kids, too Black for the white ones. Too broke for the schools I attended. Too ambitious for the spaces I was in. So I masked. I performed. I achieved. And I ended up so dissociated from myself that I could abort a foetus and work through the entire thing – because that’s what I’d been trained to do. That’s what I’d had to do to survive. Prior to this abortion, I decided to leave my marriage. This meant leaving my dream home and single-parenting my two young girls. And if parenting isn’t hard enough, let’s throw in some complex medical situations. In a single calendar year, my girls had 40 doctor visits, two emergency room trips, one hospitalisation, and one outpatient procedure. I was a school board member, as well as a board member for a nonprofit I care about deeply. I was the co-chair of a preschool auction. And I was holding down a demanding full-time job where being a Black woman meant walking on the thinnest fucking tightrope that exists. In the midst of the dust storm around me, someone at work gave me feedback that I seemed “disengaged.” They said it with concern – you know, that performative brand of workplace empathy that attempts to cover up surveillance. I nodded, while the bile rose in my throat.I wasn’t smiling enough? I was on your stupid Zoom call while my daughter slept on my chest with pneumonia, pink eye and an ear infection – all at once. I just pulled myself out of a marriage that left me raw. I just flushed blood down the toilet in between meetings.And I was still here. Still showing up. Still clocking in. Still paying for someone else to watch my kids so I could be at a meeting no one will remember months from now. How is it possible to be so invisible in plain sight? Black women are expected to absorb trauma, metabolise it and still make it to the 6:30am call with steady voices and a smile on their faces.I can’t think of a Black friend who doesn’t have some version of the same story. A 2020 study commissioned by Essence in partnership with Added Value Cheskin found that 80% of Black women felt they needed to adjust their personalities to succeed at work. A 2023 report by LeanIn.org and McKinseyfound Black women are underrepresented, feel under-supported, and are often over-surveilled – creating a culture where it feels like one mistake could cost them everything. We self-silence as a coping strategy, according to a 2023 study, but that makes us more depressed. Truly – it feels like we can’t win. The thing that haunts me most is how normal it all felt. That I had been conditioned to file my pain away so efficiently that I almost didn’t notice it myself. Until now. Now I say it out loud: I had an abortion. I worked through it. I smiled. I was dying inside. And I am never doing that shit again.The reality is, we don’t owe our jobs our silence. We don’t owe the world our pain as performance. And Black women? We don’t owe anyone our likability.I was unravelling, and somewhere in me I knew I had to go to a place where I could breathe. I left my job and moved to Los Angeles, where I began the slow process of radical reclamation. I started finding myself again, or maybe for the first time. I took my best friend’s advice. I chose me.My driving reason for growth is giving my girls a different life than I had. To give them space to feel. To speak up for themselves. To walk away when something doesn’t feel right. To say it out loud. To live fully. To be seen. I write this because someone is reading it right now while holding a heating pad to her belly and a baby on her hip. Because someone else is reading this while questioning whether the latest microaggression they experienced is real. Because someone is deciding whether they have the strength to leave. Because someone is wondering if they are allowed to feel what they feel.You are. I am. We are.Shara Watkins is a mother, writer, strategist, and former elected official who has spent her career at the intersection of equity, education and public sector leadership. A biracial Black woman raised in Wisconsin and educated on the East Coast, her life reflects the complexity of navigating multiple identities across race, class, gender and geography.Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at [email protected] Campaigners Condemn 'Shocking' Police Abortion Guidance, Here's What They Want To Happen NextPeriod Apps Are Being Linked To Rising Abortions — This Expert Says There's More To The StoryA Letter To My 1-Year-Old Son About His Abortion

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