by Naya Rivera
“Yeah?” he said. “It’s cool, we’re friends.” And after that, we were friends. For about five minutes.
Our first date was at the bowling alley Pinz on Ventura. Now, the way dates had always seemed to work for me was that I would meet some guy at a bar or a club or through friends and we’d make plans to hang out one-on-one. Then he’d show up and be nowhere near as hot as I remembered him (I guess this is what people call beer goggles, huh?). But with Ryan, it was the total opposite: he was even better looking than I had expected, wearing a tank top that showed off his wiry muscles, and another black bandanna tied around his head. We went bowling and played arcade games. It was that kind of date, and I laughed all night and had a really good time.
At the end of the night, I followed him back to his house. We hung out in his backyard, where he built a little bonfire in the grass. We were sitting there, him smoking a joint and me smoking a cigarette, when suddenly he leaned over and tried to kiss me.
“What are you doing?” I gasped, determined to now play hard to get with the guy I’d been pursuing. He apologized, and we sat there being friends for the next twenty minutes, before I thought, “What the hell,” and leaned over and kissed him. We made out that night, and then were inseparable for the next three months.
Because of his long hair, my friends and I called him Tarzan, and they all loved him. Telly had an annual “pink and cheap” party, where the gist of the evening was that everyone came wearing pink and looking cheap—duh. Ryan wore a pink suit, and I dressed like an angel, wearing cheap wings and a whore skirt to complement my hair extensions. I had no idea why Ryan liked me, because I might have had the wings on but he was the angel.
He would come over and cook me dinner, and whenever we were together, I always had the best time. I’d never been so comfortable with anyone, and he treated me so well. Once I was really sick with strep and missed a day and a half of work (you had to be practically on your deathbed to call in sick at Glee), and when I woke up, Ryan had somehow snuck past the gate of my apartment complex and left a bouquet of Winnie-the-Pooh balloons and a portable cooler full of popsicles on my front porch. He didn’t even wake me up.
So of course I had to break up with him. I’d never had a guy treat me so well, so I assumed there had to be something wrong with him, something major that would only come out later. Why else would he want to be with me? I was young and stupid at the time, and my role on Glee was just starting to take off. I needed to focus on my career and didn’t need any dream killer around to mess it up. I was going to keep it moving.
I told him all this one night over the phone, as I sat in my bathrobe in my apartment. I explained that no, I didn’t really have a good reason for breaking up with him, and no, we weren’t going to discuss it. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” I said, and then he said something that stuck in my head, verbatim, for years.
“Wow, Naya, you’re a fucked-up kid.” Then he hung up, and that was that.
The next day I went to work and told everyone, assuming they’d be excited, because everyone loved drama and a good breakup story. Instead, they were aghast.
“Why?! What’s wrong with you? He was really cool.” The consensus seemed to be that Ryan was right—I really was a fucked-up kid—but too late now. Tarzan was gone.
• • •
A few weeks later we were shooting the wedding episode of Glee, and when we wrapped, we went out to dinner as a cast. Everyone kept commenting on how great my tits had looked in my bridesmaid’s dress. No big deal, because, like I said, it was just that kind of work environment—i.e., an inappropriate one. I didn’t think much of it.
When I got back to my loft later, I randomly decided to piss on this stick—a.k.a. a pregnancy test. I don’t even remember why exactly I decided to do it, except for the fact that I did it all the time. I had been terrified of getting pregnant my whole life (probably that old dream-killer thing, and the fact that it had happened to my mom), and taking a pregnancy test was practically a weekly ritual for me, not really to see if I was pregnant but more to prove to myself that I wasn’t.
Except this time, holy fuck! It was eleven at night, and when I took the pregnancy test, it turned out positive. The last person I’d had sex with was Ryan, and we were always carefulish, and so this didn’t make any sense. Immediately, I jumped into my car and drove to a twenty-four-hour CVS, where I proceeded to buy one of every brand and type of pregnancy test they had available.
Back at my apartment, I just sat on the toilet, chugging water and peeing on all of them, then lining them up along the sink, one by one, as they all came out positive. Finally, after about six of them, I had no remaining doubt. I knew I was pregnant.
Hysterically crying, I called my mom and woke her up. It was now almost one in the morning. “I’m pregnant, and it’s Tarzan’s baby!”
“What?” she said, waking up. “What have you been doing?”
I had no idea; I hadn’t been doing anything out of the ordinary, and had even been extra responsible—I thought—by breaking off this relationship so I could put my career first. Plus, accidentally getting pregnant had always been a phobia of mine, and now it was coming true. It felt surreal, and I sobbed into the phone.
Finally, my mom told me to calm down, get some rest, and that she would make some calls the next day. I got in bed and cried myself to sleep, tossing fitfully for a few hours before my 7:00 a.m. call time. At work I put my cheerleading uniform on carefully, feeling like there was an alien taking over my body, and wondered what I was going to do. I couldn’t even get off work to go to the dentist.
From the minute I made that first phone call to my mom, it was never a question of whether I was going to have the baby. I just knew I couldn’t. And without even saying it, my mom knew it too. It made it easier, because I felt like I never had to question if I was making the right decision, but, still, nothing about the next few weeks was even remotely easy.
At the time, I didn’t even have a regular gynecologist, so step one was making a doctor’s appointment to confirm that I actually was pregnant, and if so, how far along. It turned out I was four weeks along. I had to start then and there going to my bosses and trying to get time off. I begged and begged Brad, who assured me that we were already behind on shooting and there was no way they could accommodate me being gone for even one day. There was nothing more stressful than working on Glee and having to deal with any kind of personal issue, because it was an extreme case of “the show must go on.” I finally told him I had a medical emergency of the female kind, which was the truth, and he agreed to let me have one day. One day, and that one day was still two weeks off.
Those two weeks were excruciating. I was so stressed out that I could barely eat, and smoking was the only thing that calmed me down, even though it also made me feel guilty, because I’d wonder if it was okay. Everything about it was fucked up. In retrospect, I think the fact that it was a logistical nightmare was actually something of a saving grace, as it kept me from having to deal with the emotional nightmare of it.
As you can probably imagine, whether to have an abortion is about the most personal, complicated decision a woman can ever have to make, and I was terrified that someone would see me, recognize me, or leak my story to the press.
Finally, my day off rolled around. My mom picked me up, and we drove to a Planned Parenthood center in Pasadena, figuring it was far enough away from Hollywood and our own community that the chances of seeing anyone we knew, or anyone who knew me, would be pretty low. Mom and I had gone wig shopping a few days before, and we drove to the appointment with me in a horrific black Florence Henderson wig with red tips, an oversize hoodie, sunglasses, and baggy jeans. We paid cash, leaving no paper trail, like it was a drug deal, and my mom waited in the lobby for me, for two hours, while I slept in the car outside. My mother is a saint, and the most badass woman I know.
After what felt like forever,
it was my turn. I had opted to take the abortion pill, as opposed to having a surgical procedure, which meant I took the first pill in the office and the second one at home several hours later. I took it at my mom’s house, lying on the couch, and it was the worst experience of my life. It was incredibly painful—your body is basically in labor with strong, frequent contractions. I was nauseated and kept going in and out of consciousness because of the pain.
After the worst of it was over, I continued to bleed for about two and a half weeks, which meant that when I got up to work the next day, a little more than twelve hours after having a medical abortion, I had to put my cheerleading uniform back on and hope that the skimpy bloomers covered the giant pad I was wearing.
I never told Ryan about any of this.
Over the years, he would e-mail me, and I didn’t write back. He’d get in touch with some of my friends here and there, and they’d always be like, “Why don’t you date Tarzan again? He was always so nice!” But they didn’t know and I couldn’t tell them. I was afraid to talk to Ryan again, because I didn’t know where to start.
Anyone who’s familiar with Los Angeles knows it’s hardly a place where you just run into people—you can go years without running into your next-door neighbor—and I’d never run into anyone I’d dated. Except for Ryan, more than two years after we’d last spoken, and at a car wash of all places. I gave him my e-mail, and we started hanging out again. Though tentatively, because he was soon moving to New York indefinitely. When we were together, I felt like I had no control over my mouth. I’d open it, and some pointed question would come falling out: “So, do you think you’ve ever gotten anyone pregnant? If you and I had a kid, what do you think it would look like?”
It was my subconscious taking control and trying to trick him into asking what I was talking about, but Ryan never took the bait. The night before he left for New York, we made out in the car, and I told him that if things were different I would marry him and have his babies. And before we said good-bye, I said, “Come back for me” as dramatically as if I were Kate Winslet going down with the ship. A year later, he did—he sent me an e-mail when he moved back to LA. I had just started dating someone else, and not knowing what to write back, I never responded.
Ironically enough, though I never told Ryan about the abortion, I told every other guy I dated after that. It became something I fixated on, and it snowballed inside me to the point where I felt that if someone was going to date me, he should understand what I was dealing with.
I’d think about it frequently, sometimes fixating on it so much that I’d give myself a near panic attack, and then call my mom, sobbing. I was so angry at myself, and I felt I should have weighed my options more. Why was I so career driven that I just automatically assumed I couldn’t have a kid at twenty-three? I started to resent work—I felt like they didn’t care about us and owed me for what I’d had to do, even though they’d had no idea.
• • •
Some of the triggers that got me thinking about my abortion were obvious things, like thinking about Ryan, but there were also triggers that seemed to come out of nowhere. I became addicted to Teen Mom, and it was my favorite show because I was so jealous that they got to keep their kids. Watching it over and over was a way of punishing myself. “What’s wrong with you?” I’d ask myself. “These people have no money and they kept their child. You could have supported a kid.”
I don’t think I ever emotionally healed from the abortion, which is why it is so mind-blowing that some people think having an abortion is the carefree girl’s number one choice to keep on partying. In reality, it is anything but an easy choice. In some ways, I think choosing to have an abortion is almost harder than choosing to have your child, because you make that choice knowing, or at least suspecting, that many moments of your life will now be tinged with regret. I don’t think I processed my abortion until I was pregnant with Ryan’s child again—this time when we were married and the baby was planned. This was when I finally felt like God’s plan for us had come full circle. Long before we were even together, Ryan had thought for years about what he’d want to name a kid, and when we talked about that name and looked into it more, one of its meanings was “God shall add a second son.” It seemed predestined. I don’t want it to seem like I “chose” this child over the other; it was just that this time I felt ready. That’s all I can say, and the only way I can explain it.
Abortion will always be a very controversial subject, and I thought a lot about whether I wanted to share my story in this book. I know that I’ll be judged for it, and that no matter how hard I try to explain how I felt and my reasons for doing it, a lot of people won’t understand. I ultimately decided I wanted to share it because I’m not the only one with this experience. Approximately three in ten women in the United States will have an abortion by the time they are forty-five. Yet a lot of those women will go through it alone, or at least thinking they’re alone.
About a week before I was supposed to give birth to my son, Ryan and I went out to dinner. I got up to go to the bathroom—as you do a lot when you’re nine months pregnant—and walked in on two girls in the restaurant’s tiny, one-stall bathroom. They were bad-girl clubbing it, totally drunk and smelling like cigarettes. They were taking selfies in the mirror, but when one of them saw me, she turned around and looked me up and down.
“I just had an abortion,” she slurred. “How sad is that?”
Her friend’s jaw dropped, but the girl continued, telling me her story and repeating over and over, “Isn’t that the saddest thing?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I kept nodding and finally said, “I totally get it. That is a really difficult thing to have to go through.” But I wanted to be like, “You’re not alone! Wait until my book comes out!” I also recognized a part of myself in her—in the way she almost couldn’t keep the story in, in how she opened her mouth and just poured out her heart to a complete stranger. That was how I had felt with all the guys I had dated after Ryan: telling them was almost a physical need, something I felt compelled to do. Having an abortion is a secret that gets bigger the longer you keep it in.
And excuse me for stepping into high school sex-ed teacher mode here for a minute, but I think it’s important—there’s no award for best effort when it comes to safe sex. If you practice safe sex 95 percent of the time, you don’t get an A—you get an F. All it takes is one time to get pregnant. I thought that as long as I was pretty cautious, I’d be fine, and that was wrong. A lot of times, the idea of practicing safe sex, and especially talking about it, seems completely unsexy. Understandable. But you know what’s really unsexy? An abortion. So while I make light about things like the whore years and gaining sexual experience, it’s incredibly important to be responsible while you’re exploring.
Had Ryan and I been as careful as we should have been, we could have saved ourselves a whole lot of hurt. Having an abortion was the most traumatic experience of my life, and I did it when I was an adult, and with my mom by my side as an incredible pillar of support. She held my hand, both literally and metaphorically, throughout the entire process and made sure I knew that I was unconditionally loved by her and by God. And it was still fucking hard. I can’t imagine how it feels to be a teenager who goes through something like that and then has to head back to the halls of high school, or to be a woman who feels she can’t even tell the people she’s closest to.
It’s just such a personal decision, based on so many factors, including where you are in your life at the time and how you feel about everything from parenting to finances and family. The sad thing is that many women who find themselves suddenly facing an unplanned pregnancy will be judged no matter what it is they decide to do. Young, single mom? Judged. Abortion? Judged. There’s no way to win, to make a decision that feels wholly right.
I think every woman should have the right to choose, and it scares me to think of a world where the decision of whethe
r to have a child is not her choice to make. I feel like I’ve found more ways to cope now, and I’m as at peace with my decision as I ever will be, but I still wouldn’t wish an abortion on anybody, ever.
When I finally told Ryan, more than four years after it had happened, I told him that I thought there was a reason he kept coming back into my life, and that I had something important I needed to tell him. But first—I made him sign a confidentiality agreement. This sounds like a dick move, but I was scared. I didn’t know how he would react, and if he was incredibly angry that I hadn’t told him before, I wouldn’t have blamed him.
He was obviously confused, but was like, “Fine, I’ll sign whatever you want.” When I’d finished telling him, he didn’t say anything, and just got up and walked away. We were at my house, and he went and stood outside on the balcony. I wanted to give him some time to process it, so I didn’t follow. A few minutes later, he came back in, and said the best thing anyone could have ever said in that situation.
“In the three short months that we dated,” he said, “I wish I would have done something better, to make you feel like you could have trusted me with that information, because I would have loved to be there for you.”
That night, Ryan stayed over, and we’ve been together ever since.
SORRY:
Deciding to have an abortion. This was the most painful experience of my life.
Not being more careful about safe sex in the first place. It only takes one instance of getting caught up in the moment to change your life forever.
Breaking up with Ryan, because I didn’t recognize a good thing when I saw it.
Trashing Mark Salling’s car. Not that he didn’t deserve it, but it wasn’t the classiest thing I’ve ever done.