Love in a chokehold

Chapter 13: December 13 The Choice That Changed Everything

December 13 is a date I will never forget.

It exists in my memory like a scar healed on the surface, but still burning underneath. That morning, when the doctor confirmed I was pregnant, my entire world shifted again. But this time, not with fear alone… with a painful clarity.

I knew what keeping the pregnancy meant.

It meant being tied to him forever.

It meant raising a child under a roof that had seen violence, manipulation, and moments that left emotional bruises deeper than the physical ones.

It meant building a family with someone I already knew was not safe for me — someone I could barely survive emotionally.

And so I made the decision.

A decision I still think about every single day.

I chose the abortion.

Not because I didn’t want the child.

Not because I lacked love.

But because I didn’t want to give life to suffering. I didn’t want to bring an innocent soul into a world where their father could easily break them the same way he broke me.

After the procedure, I felt empty literally and emotionally. There was a silence inside my body that I had never felt before. A hollow echo where something had lived only hours before.

But I told him, “I feel like eating.”

Maybe I was craving comfort. Maybe I was craving normalcy. Maybe I was trying to distract myself from the ache settling inside me.

He drove almost an hour to get the food I said I wanted. He treated me gently, almost tenderly the way he always did when he wanted to feel like the hero. To him, care was something he performed, not something he truly embodied.

And yet… I can’t lie:

His gentleness that day pulled me close again.

I felt connected to him, strangely and painfully.

Loss does that it makes you cling to whoever is nearest, even if they’re the reason you’re hurting.

I asked the doctor a question that still breaks my heart when I remember it:

“Is it possible to take out the embryo and help it grow somewhere else? Does it have to grow inside me?”

I didn’t want to let go.

I just didn’t want to bring the child into chaos.

It was the most desperate, vulnerable question I had ever asked.

But reality isn’t shaped by desperation. And so, I walked out of that clinic carrying a grief I would never fully put down.

And then, life continued as if nothing happened.

For a while, we stayed together. We tried to function. We tried to pretend like the world hadn’t shifted beneath our feet. But the cracks were already there.

Arguments started again, small at first, then sharp.

One day, during a heated moment, when I was overwhelmed and hurting, I said, “I just took out our baby. Can you stop for a second?”

And he looked at me, unbothered, cold, dismissive.

“Everything is always about you.”

That sentence cut deeper than any knife could.

He didn’t see the pain in my eyes.

He didn’t feel the weight of the choice we made.

He didn’t understand or maybe he did and simply didn’t care.

It was in that moment that something shifted again inside me.

A strange, heartbreaking relief.

Because when he said that, I realized I made the right choice.

If he could be that selfish, that detached, that cruel after something so life-altering… then he would have been a terrible father. And our child would have felt the cruelty I lived through.

Still knowing I made the right choice doesn’t erase the regret.

I regret it every day.

I regret the circumstances.

I regret the life I couldn’t bring into the world.

I regret that my financial instability forced me into a corner where I had to choose survival over motherhood.

I regret that I had to make a decision that aged my soul by decades.

It’s a regret I carry, but it’s also a regret I understand.

It saved me.

It saved the child from a lifetime of pain.

But saving doesn’t always feel like victory. Sometimes it feels like a wound that never closes.

We stayed together after that.

But something had changed in the air not just between us, but within me.

And slowly, painfully, the relationship began to unravel.

The fights intensified.

The emotional distance grew wider.

The mask he wore started slipping again.

And I began to see everything clearly in the manipulation, the anger, the blame, the suffocation all unfolding in front of me.

Everything was getting worse.

Everything was getting darker.

And soon, I would reach my breaking point.