Without Exception: Excerpts

12 Brief Excerpts from Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood, and Freedom
 

Lifespan of a Human Right

For 49 years, five months, and two days, the United States Supreme Court protected a woman’s right to have an abortion. In other words, it protected a woman’s right to determine what happens inside her own body, and in the long winding road of her future, and in the shape of her one precious life, in the case of unwanted pregnancy. It protected this right whether she was 12 years old and had been raped by her father or another male relative, whether she was 22 and date-raped after she’d had her cocktail drugged in a bar the first time she spent a summer interning at a nonprofit in a big city, whether she was 42 and happily married and already had four children and the family budget was stretched beyond manageability, whether she was dedicatedly single and entirely career-focused and had thrilling unprotected sex with strangers every chance she got.      

For my entire reproductive life, the government of the country of which I am a citizen, supported by the highest court in the land, protected my body sovereignty, which is more than they did for my mother. And which is more than they would do for my daughter, if I had one, which I do not, nor a son, because I did not want children, I never wanted children, and I was free to have an abortion. More than one. I was free to have the three abortions I needed over the course of my reproductive life, and did so: one in my 20s, one in my 30s, one at 41.

Me and the Wild World

I love the wild world with all of my being. I love galloping a horse up the damp bed of Medano Creek in September, just after the aquifer has sucked the water back down into itself, creating perfect footing for the horse, a flea-bitten grey draft cross/warm blood named Big Lil’. I love the 700-foot blonde dunes that rise on my left as we move along, the grey granite Sangre de Christos rising on my right, the willows in the creek bed, just on the verge of changing from green to gold, and the sky a sort of stupefying blue that seems to grow deepest twice a year, once now and again in January.

I love when it rains on the homestead I have lived on for 30 years, soaking the ground parched from this 20-year-and-counting drought we continue to endure, love the smell of wet blue sage, love how the birds sing so happily when the rain passes, how it quenches the thirst of every plant and animal for miles. Even my parched, aging skin, lips and hair soak up a little of the moisture.

 I love the Sandhills of Nebraska, with their never-ending sunflowers and blue stem and gamma grasses, every farm road beckoning me to go deeper and deeper into the meadows exploring, never getting to wherever I am supposed to be on the other side of the state.

I love the twisted red rock canyons of the Escalante in Utah, every color of the sunset, and the paintbrush and globe mallow that burst from between the sandstone’s cracks. I love hiking into Calf Creek Falls early on a winter morning, arriving just at the moment the low sun hits the waterfall, turning the beauty up one more notch into sublime, into fairytale, into a place where no matter how many times I see it, I can’t quite believe it is real.

I love soaking in a hot pool at the very end of the last road on Hornstrandir, the northern-most fjord of the Westfjords in Iceland, staring out over the blue-on-silver-on-blue tapestry before me where the Greenland Sea meets the Arctic sky.

I love hiking on the Grand Balcon in Chamonix, France, from the Mer de Glace to the Aiguille du Midi just above tree line, watching the north face of Mont Blanc get closer and closer, knowing when I get to the refuge at the foot of the Aiguille I am going to have a salad of endive and avocado and cantaloupe and salmon, the salade du refuge, my favorite lunch in all of France.

I love stand-up paddling the coast of Maine near Brooksville as the extreme tide rushes in like a river, knowing the consequences of falling into that clear, cold water but secretly hoping it happens anyway, because that plunge will reinvigorate all of my organs, make my cells feel better for the rest of the day.

I love opening my arms to the sky in Namibia, trying to collect all that color and light and dust and strife and resilience into my own body. Listening so hard as a woman named Angelica tries to teach me a song in her Khosian language of Damara/Nama, her laughter as I try and fail again and again at the clicks. I love watching the awkward lunge of a giraffe as it gallops across the sand dunes, seeing a herd of ibex grazing in the pink light of dawn.

All of these places, with the exception of Namibia, I get to visit each year because my working life takes me there, the working life I chose over a life of raising children. All of these places are also currently threatened, by climate collapse, by oil extraction and fracking, by water bottling plants and overuse by four wheelers and side-by-sides, by politicians who are on the payroll of the extractive industries, by second-and third-and seventh-home ownership, by corruption and land grabs and greed.

Here is a thing I have always understood. The same machine that wants wolf puppies to be shot in their dens and rivers to be dammed at their sources and pipelines to be constructed across land that has been sacred to humans for 20,000 years and methane regulations to be loosened and Brazil to be entirely deforested in our lifetime and coal plants to continue making our air unbreathable and mining companies responsible for toxic spills that poison the soil of the Navajo Nation for generations to come to suffer no consequences, that is the same machine that wants control over women’s bodies, the same machine that wants women pregnant and without resources and too overwhelmed to fight for a world in which we all can thrive.  

Here She Is Again

(Every time I begin a new book, I swear to myself that this time, my mother won’t make an appearance. But here she is again.)

My mother ran away to Broadway at the age of 13 to find her fortune, fleeing the oppression and anger of her aunt and uncle’s home in Spiceland, Indiana, the home in which she was raised. Her mother died from complications of childbirth with my mother, and on the day her mother died, my mother’s father fled the scene. That was the end of that, until 60 some years later when he was on his deathbed and my mother got a call from her estranged older sister that their father wanted to shake her hand. She took a plane to Florida, shook his hand and came back in 24 hours, and that was the end of that for real.

My mother was a wild child, far wilder than I ever was, and I have grown to respect that about her. She had ongoing problems, with alcohol and violent men, even before she met my violent father. 

By her own account and bad men and booze aside, my mother loved the life she had before she married. For nearly three decades she was a singing, dancing, acrobat: flying and cartwheeling all over Europe with Bob Hope and a team of talented women, coming back to New York in between wars and sharing the stage with the likes of Nancy Walker, Walter Pigeon, and Hermione Gingold. Stills from all of those performances covered the walls of my childhood home.

My mother told me she had more than one back-alley abortion in her pre-Roe v. Wade  showgirl and USO days. She did not tell me whether that number was two or 21. While she had many talents, she would be the first to admit, should she return from the dead and be questioned, that mothering was not one of them. She knew it and I knew it and we spoke about it often. Even before I was old enough for us to have those conversations, I turned to the Earth for my mothering.

Unlike my mother, the Earth has always been there for me, never drunk, never selling me out to my father or some other man. From the time I knew how to open doors without help, the Earth began laying her beauty and tenderness at my feet, and I understood it immediately as solace, as offering, as a thing I could understand as love. Even today, a walk in any meadow or woods or along any shoreline is my unfailing cure for everything. When I become very sad, I curl up under a tree, or against a canyon wall, or in a bed of my own making in the sand, or in a sandstone pothole. This is why I cannot write a book about how we treat mothers, that does not also consider how we treat the Earth.

I have written other places about how my mother’s refrain all through my childhood was “I gave up everything I loved for you,” by which she meant, to give birth to me, very late in life, probably 43 (though she consistently lied about her age) to become a mom.

If there is one thing I wish I had asked my mother before she died, more than 30 years ago now, it is: Why on Earth did you do that? I am not sure she would be able to give me an answer.

It’s hard for me to imagine either of my parents having a conversation in which they talked about wanting a baby. Even in my best imaginative writer’s mind, I cannot conceive of any words they might have said. He had been a tennis-playing, convertible-driving bachelor into his 50s. She kept actor’s hours, never getting up before noon. I was born a year and two months after the wedding, so there was nothing remotely shot gun about it.

I gave up everything I ever loved for you and so you must part your hair on the side, or not eat dessert, or get straight A’s or not become a fat girl or never date a boy who wears a hat or try out for this part in a Cap’n Crunch commercial, or wear lipstick every day of your life—

that nearly daily refrain that has in many ways defined my life isn’t even true. Not exactly. My mother loved acting, singing, dancing, theater, tennis, sewing, violent men, vodka, tequila, gin, and wine of all colors and she gave up not one of those things to have me or to raise me. She partook often of every single one of them right up until she died.

What she did give up was the condition of childlessness, and life before my father, which however good or bad it really was, it had the advantage of being before my father.

What she gave up was her freedom, which I see now is everything, and the thing I myself have refused to give up, again and again and again. 

My Father

And then there was my father, the abuser, also long dead now; the other character in my life story who just won’t go away. He taught me about baseball, football, basketball, hockey, drove me into competitive tennis, broke my femur and my hymen much too much too much too young.

I didn’t want either of them in these pages because to put them here makes the abortion equation far too simple. It gives you, the reader, a way to say, well of course she didn’t want to have children after all the ways he tortured her, of course she is too damaged to ever think of raising a child. As if I am some kind of unique case in the history of children in America, as if all I would have to do, should I find myself pregnant in Mississippi, is explain to the nice doctor that I am too damaged for motherhood, as if all my reasons for wanting to control my body autonomy boil down to just this one.

They don’t.

They don’t.

But even if they did, (and they don’t) so many girls and women were/are tortured just as I was. Worse than I was. Every race, every class, every neighborhood, every state; if there is one thing America still agrees upon it’s that it is okay to torture its little girls.

Fun Fact

The ratification of Roe v. Wade back in 1971 had very little impact on the number of abortions performed each year, which sat at that time very close to one million and continued to hover right around that number for almost a decade after. Abortions simply went from being illegal to legal, and as a result, the number of abortion-related deaths dropped dramatically.

Excuse Me, Sir?

The first time I used the term gender fluid about myself, my friend Sam asked exactly what those words meant to me. I knew what she was getting at. I have passed, all of my life, as a woman, which is traditionally aligned with the sex I was assigned at birth. I am currently married to a man, and the vast majority of my relationships have been heterosexual (I understand this is evidence of nothing), I have always used she/her pronouns, and have therefore never had to suffer the violence or fear or insult my Queer friends have had to suffer as they have moved through the modern world.

But this too is true: I do not and have never felt particularly like a man and I do not and have never felt particularly like a woman. Now, only because so many other people told the truth about themselves at their own peril, there is a word for this gender ambivalence in common usage that feels like it belongs to me.

I have two very good friends who have told me they know for certain they were born into the wrong body, one was born into the body of a man, the other into the body of a woman. It is not like that for me. When I dig down to the bottom of my self-knowledge, I do not feel like I was born into the wrong body. In some ways, I feel like I was born into exactly the right body, with my broad shoulders, small breasts, no hips to speak of, huge and shapely calves (handed down to me from my acrobat mother and kept strong with horseback riding and hiking) and a beer belly, even though I don’t drink beer.

These days, more and more often, especially when I am wearing a hoodie and/or an N95 mask, I get called sir. The truth is, I kind of like it.

In addition to the physical features mentioned above, I’m edging into that time of life where almost everyone, regardless of gender, looks a little bit like Keith Richards’s grandmother, especially Keith Richards himself. When I inevitably take off my mask, or speak aloud, the person who has called me sir, usually a United gate agent or a restaurant hostess, falls all over themselves apologizing. But there is no need for remorse. At this age (62) and this weight (185) I seem to have finally found a level of comfort with my appearance I wouldn’t have expected, along with a genderless quality I hadn’t exactly realized I was going for all along.

If someone had told me (or more to the point, told my mother) when I was a child that I didn’t have to be a girl or a boy, it would have felt entirely relieving. I still would have spent all my time outside getting dirtier by the minute, I still would have rolled around with dogs and horses, still would have never played with a doll house or an Easy-Bake Oven or a princess cape and ballet shoes, still would have swum the butterfly in the relay, still would have rowed a 16-foot oar-frame boat through class five rapids, still would have refused to wear lipstick even when my mother called my best friend in graduate school (graduate school!) begging her to let me try her shades.

I was and have always been called a tomboy, a term first coined in 1550 to mean “wild romping girl,” or “girl who acts like a spirited boy.” Both definitions make me grin.

My mother tried to talk that same grad school friend into taking me with her to Weight Watchers, a sentence I would not have written before now because of shame. But the great gift of making it to my 60s is realizing that shame, along with several other self-flagellating behaviors, is highly overrated. Now, and maybe even back in the days of endless dieting, some part of me secretly liked my size.

I like being big enough not to be fucked with in a dark alley. I like being big enough that I can wrestle with a runaway horse and win. I like being big enough to lift a saddle over that same horse’s back, six times a day, without tiring, as we do on the treks I love so much in Iceland. I like that I can fall from that horse at a full gallop and have enough padding to bounce.

I still work on staying fit(ish) and losing weight (another 15 pounds would always be awesome) to go easier on the backs of the horses I ride and because it would likely help my heart beat for a few years longer, which is a thing I am hoping for.

I can’t care about clothes or shoes or makeup. I have tried but it all seems too ridiculous. I don’t aim to look slovenly or disrespectful, but sometimes I do, and it is hard for me to care about that either. Once a year or so I am asked to attend a function where I have to at least consider my clothes and the possibility of a little makeup, and I do consider those things without resentment, and sometimes even acquiesce.

Maybe the fact that I never wished to be a boy and I never wished to be a girl is one more reason I never wanted to have a baby. Perhaps my gender fluidity is just another manifestation of how I wanted to be free.

Gertrude Stein

“A very important thing,” Gertrude Stein once said, “is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.”

Some Sick Shit

A couple hundred years from now, after the climate has collapsed and what remains of the continents that is still above sea level has all turned to desert, after the plagues have come and gone, after the fossil fuels have run out and only tiny pockets of the Earth are inhabitable, after people have died in great waves from climate driven wars and poisoned air and water, there will be a few survivors left to watch the Earth recuperate, after she has finally shaken most of us, her most persistent parasites, off of her miraculous back.

I imagine a woman, curly grey hair, strong arms and thighs, mild but determined expression, pawing through the rubble of all that was, bits of paper scattered on the wind. She finds an intact paper with the words Dobbs v. Jackson Woman’s Health Organization at the top.

I imagine her leaning over, showing it to her friend, another woman, this one younger, black hair and dark eyes, lanky, beautiful, who is pawing through a neighboring rubble pile,

“Hey, check this out,” the first woman says, “They were so low on resources, running out of food and air and water, of habitable land, and the government forced all the women to have babies they didn’t even want.”

The other woman, clear-eyed, takes the paper, gives it a once over, wipes sweat from her brow that leaves a streak of dirt and ash. “Wow man,” she says, “That is some sick shit.” 

Mother of the Forest

There is a redwood tree in California, in Calaveras Big Trees State Park. Her name is Mother of the Forest. She was named for her extreme beauty and her extreme size, an Amazon of a tree standing above so many other Amazons.

When one walks on the guided nature trail through the North Grove in Big Trees State Park, the numbered trail guide informs the visitor: “The tree that stands before you is a symbol of greed and thoughtlessness.”

In 1854, Mother of the Forest was stripped of her bark by promoters who schemed to ship the bark in long strips they would reassemble in New York and London, to the delight and fascination of high paying crowds that numbered in the thousands.

The naked tree was left to die, which she began to do almost immediately, because she was mortally wounded. Her bark was no longer there to protect her from bugs and fire, nor to carry sugars and nutrients from the soil up through her trunk and out to the ends of her branches. Weak and malnourished and unprotected, she was scorched further by the fire of 1908.

More than a century later, she still stands in that grove, gutted, hollowed out, ghostlike. If you look close, you can see where eight-foot sections were peeled away from the living tree. An entire crew of men worked for 90 days at her destruction.

Even though in the 19th century most people still thought of nature as limitless and renewable, the murder of the mother tree alerted John Muir and others to the need to protect the trees for the future. He said, “Skinning this tree alive is as sensible a scheme as skinning our great men would be to prove their greatness.”

But they didn’t skin a great man, or even a tree named after one, did they, Mr. Muir? There are plenty of trees still alive, still intact in that grove bearing the names Abraham Lincoln, Hercules, and the Old Bachelor. Why not skin the Old Bachelor, and leave Mother of the Forest to nurture all the other trees? We know why, don’t we?

White Women of Privilege

Here are some annoying things about white women of privilege. They begin too many sentences with “I deserve.” They confuse talk about whether they are hot or cold or hungry or thirsty or have too many layers on or too few with actual conversation. They understand they are oppressed by systemic misogyny, but they fail to understand there are other people who are oppressed by systemic misogyny, and systemic racism, and systemic homophobia, and systemic ableism all at the same time, and that is exponentially harder.

White women who are also activists sometimes get their feelings hurt when they are not congratulated for trying to take action, even when their efforts have been careless and self-serving. They have been told to speak up for themselves so many times they sometimes don’t realize that in some rooms, their only job is to keep their mouths shut.

Perhaps the single most annoying thing about white women is that 51 percent of them voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 55 percent of them voted for Donald Trump in 2020. A fact that makes me want to slam my head into a wall again and again and again.

I am a white woman of privilege. How do I know? I have been guilty at one time or another of every single annoyance lined out in the paragraphs above—with the exception of voting for Donald Trump. Also, I write books like this one for a living. I live on a 120-acre homestead I bought with my own money, which I earned from writing books and teaching other people how to write books. I paid for my own education with work study and scholarships, and I have had at least two jobs simultaneously since I was 11 years old (often it is more like five), but I was able to get those jobs because I am a white woman of privilege and the conditions in my life have been such that I am able to hold on to them. Money, it turns out, is only one small part of privilege. It really has to do with moving through the world freely, speaking without fear of dire consequences, not being an automatic recipient of a supremacist’s unrelenting hate.

The last thing I will say about white women of privilege is that we need to get off our assess. Even if we get embarrassed, even if we get shamed by Black Twitter, even if we get threatened by the skinheads, even when we inevitably get it wrong.

Neighbors

Every time I drive past my neighbor’s house, lit up in its red, white, and blue display in an otherwise (but unofficial) dark skies community, I imagine coming back some night at about 3:30 in the morning and ripping those little lights off the logs with my bare hands, and then making a run for it. I imagine getting to hear the red, white, and blue bulbs pop and explode.

I am not a violent person. I am not an anti-American person or a communist. I don’t even really hate the flag, only the way it is being used at this time as an object of terror.

Many of the people in my town identify as conservative Christians. I am certainly no expert on the subject, but I don’t believe Jesus would have wanted a ten-year-old to be forced into having her father’s baby. I don’t believe Jesus would have wanted children to die of dysentery in holding pens, blanketless, on the southern border. I don’t think Jesus would have been into banning books that tell the truth about the horrors of slavery or the Holocaust. I don’t think Jesus would have instructed us to do everything in our power to forget we, the colonizers, live on stolen land. I don’t think Jesus ever said all the resources on the planet are here for us to own and consume and get rich off of. I am virtually certain Jesus would have loved Transgender teens and Queers, gay weddings, and anyone who attempts to save the perfect wild beauty of the Earth. I am pretty sure Jesus loved artists and hated mad and jealous kings. 

Mercy

Mercy is defined as compassion or forgiveness shown towards someone whom it is in one’s power to punish or harm.

Imagine what it would be like to live in a country where the candidate we voted for was the one we thought most likely to show people who are suffering compassion and forgiveness. Imagine a government who held mercy as its highest goal. Imagine living within a system who supported people in loving whom they loved, in dressing how they liked, in being who they were. Imagine what that kind of mercy would look like.

Now imagine how your life would change if you showered that much mercy on yourself.

Pam Houston is the author of the memoir Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, as well as two novels, Contents May Have Shifted and Sight Hound, two collections of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me, as well as a book of essays between Pam and environmental activist Amy Irvine: Airmail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics and Place. She teaches in the Low Rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, is professor of English at UC Davis, and is co-founder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers. Her new book is Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood and Freedom (Torrey House Press, 2024). Find her at pamhouston.net.

Read more by and about Pam Houston in Terrain.org: “Place of Solace,” Melissa L. Sevigny Interviews Pam Houston, the Twenty Words During Lockdown series, and Pam Houston’s Letter to America.

Header photo by Pam Houston.