Craigslist Confessional

by Helena Dea Bala

  That same detective was the one who convinced the coroner to change his findings on my son’s death from SIDS to asphyxiation. The firefighters told me that it was SIDS, but the coroner’s report stated that the baby was alive when the firefighters arrived. That really changes things. It puts the blame on me.

  A bunch of judges wouldn’t take my case. They watched after their own political aspirations and played hot potato with my life. But the DA was tenacious: a case like mine had never been tried in my state, so it set a precedent. I guess that’s another reason that he pushed so hard. The judge kept throwing the cases out, and I kept getting recharged, each time with a different crime. What finally stuck was one count of child abuse and endangerment.

  The judge said to the DA, “If you’re charging her with abuse, show me the abuse.” The DA argued that sitting on the bed with my baby, in light of what had happened to my son, was the act of child abuse. Had she been there in the room with me that day, she argued, she would have had me arrested.

  The process of being charged with a crime, and the legal counsel I received throughout, was very confusing to me. I grew up in a hardworking, low-income American family. My brothers and I would glean fields for change and get penny candies, and we thought life was good. Before my first child died, I was making $25,000 a year and I was happy—I thought I was rich.

  My family, you know, we’ve always had this deep, unshakable belief in fairness and justice. When I was diagnosed with narcolepsy, everyone was relieved, myself included. I remember my brother hugging me and saying, “I knew you were innocent,” over and over again. So when I got charged with child abuse and endangerment, I guess we were all just confused. If I am innocent, then why am I being treated like a criminal? Why am I still facing prison time?

  My lawyer urged me to plead “no contest” to one count of child abuse and endangerment. He kept saying—Don’t you want to go back home, to your old life, to your kid?—and I kept thinking, Yes, of course, I do. But why can’t I just plead not guilty?

  He told me, “If you plead not guilty, we take the case to a jury trial, and if you’re found guilty, you’ll get fifteen years in prison. So just plead no contest and the judge can make the decision.” A couple of times throughout the process, he told me to cry so that I came off more sympathetic. I guess he thought I wasn’t emotional enough. The detective who was in charge of my case came to the hearings, too—he wanted to make sure he followed through, saw me put away.

  Everyone around me seemed to be more involved in my case—seemed to care more than I did. I was numb. I had no fight left in me. So it seemed like a good idea to just take the plea deal, serve the time, and not make any more trouble for myself. I ended up serving two and a half years of a ten-year sentence in prison. Six years were suspended, but I was still on probation. I took the plea because it meant seeing Jamie on her fourth birthday, instead of her sixteenth.

  The whole thing is a blur. I don’t think I was given bad counsel, but I just had no idea what I was doing, what my rights were, or the implications of the charges on my future. I didn’t know that pleading no contest is basically like saying, Yeah, the DA has the facts right, I’m just not going to admit I’m guilty. I was in a haze; I trusted my lawyer too much. It’s like the first time you play a game: you obviously lose because you don’t know what you’re doing. But how many times does your life actually hang in the balance?

  I look back on this now and all I can think is: If they truly thought that I abused and killed my babies, then shouldn’t I be getting the death penalty? Shouldn’t I rot away in prison for the rest of my life? How could I be charged with doing something so heinous, so evil, and only get a slap on the wrist? That’s getting away with murder. Twice.

  I grew up believing in America, believing in our justice system. Maybe that was naive; I don’t know. After what I went through, I don’t think our justice system is just racist. I think it’s classist. If you’re not educated, if you don’t know your rights, if you’re poor and can’t afford to pay for your representation, then your life can be taken away from you in a heartbeat.

  My mother permanently adopted Jamie. She never let her move back in with me. I have two other kids now. Because of my narcolepsy, I can’t work. I can’t drive. I’m on a bunch of medication: Adderall, Lyrica, Baclofen, and the list goes on. I don’t have the mental ability to do very much because I’m broken.

  Every mom imagines, when she’s pregnant, What will my baby look like? What will they accomplish? You daydream all kinds of things. In my head, my kids had lived full and perfect lives. I’d seen them graduate from high school, go to college, and meet the loves of their lives. I had hopes for them, and I loved them.

  If I talk about my children, I’ll always have a broken heart. If I talk about the justice system, I get angry. I live a life that’s filled with pain, not guilt.

  Leila, early thirties

  Ever since I was a little girl, I knew that I wanted to become a mother one day. A couple of years after my husband and I got married, we decided to start trying for a baby. We had dated for over fifteen years, so we never felt like, Oh, we need us time. We’d held off for a little while for logistical and financial reasons, so I knew that because I was already in my early thirties, it might be a little difficult for us to conceive. I’m very much a realist and a type A control freak, so from the very first month that we were trying, I had a thermometer and I’d check my temperature every morning to see when I was ovulating. It made my husband crazy.

  “What is this, a science experiment?” he’d ask. “Why are you already acting like something is not working?”

  But I found it empowering and exciting to know about my body.

  We were really lucky. We conceived on the second month of trying. I’d been taking pregnancy tests early on because I knew exactly when I’d been ovulating. The night before I found out I was pregnant, my husband and I fought. I’d taken a test and the result was negative, so we argued because I wasn’t being “chill”—I’d made it into a whole hullabaloo. But the morning after, I decided to take another test. I saw that faint pink line, and I was overjoyed. I was crying tears of happiness in the shower, and I was just really at peace because the news was all mine for a little while. I managed to keep the secret all day and I stopped by Target on the way home from work and bought a onesie. That night, I gave it to my husband. And that’s where our story began.

  Now that I look back on it, there were definitely signs that didn’t seem normal, but it was my first time being pregnant, so I had nothing to compare it to. I remember going on a walk around my neighborhood and talking to my mom and telling her that I had really bad cramps. It was all on my left side. I tend to be so negative and anxious, so I made a concerted effort to not get sucked into Dr. Google. I tried to stay positive: Maybe my uterus is stretching or it’s implantation cramping, or…

  A few weeks later, I noticed that I was spotting, but I’d read that this was a common side effect of pregnancy, too. The next day at work, right after lunch, I went to the bathroom and I noticed some bright red blood on my underwear. I was scared, but I composed myself and texted my sister-in-law, who has two kids. I figured she would tell me that I was just being a worrywart, but she advised me to talk to my doctor. She didn’t dismiss the issue like I thought she would—she actually seemed concerned—and that’s when I really started worrying. I went home early from work and waited for my appointment the next day.

  That appointment was… oh boy… something else. I was still trying to be positive; I even said to my husband, “We’re going to see the baby today.”

  The ultrasound tech came in and she was very perfunctory—she told me to take off my underwear and cover myself with a sheet. I don’t remember if the lights were on or off at that point, but she didn’t give any indication that she planned on leaving the room to let me get undressed in privacy. I thought that was strange, but I wanted to get on with it, so I lay down and she started doing a vaginal ultrasound. She wasn�
��t saying much, just moving the wand around, so I asked, “Do you see anything?”

  She said, “Your uterus is empty.”

  And then she pulled the wand out of me and held it in plain sight as she removed the disposable sheath. It was covered in blood. There was no small talk, no comfort. She didn’t even give me a wipe. So I put my underwear back on and started crying. Without giving us a moment to process anything, she ushered us out to the lobby, where we waited for our doctor. A few minutes later, the doctor came out and told us that we should give it time, to go to lunch somewhere, and “see what happens,” but that it was most likely a miscarriage. She told me to come back the next day.

  I know that we all do our jobs, which are but a small portion of our lives. I know that it’s hard, we’re all human, and you can’t be your best self every minute of every day. But I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to forget how I was treated that day.

  Later that same night, I had a lot more cramping and bleeding and I felt in my gut, Okay, I’m having a miscarriage. I was on the toilet and at one point, I felt something pass. I remember feeling it physically coming out of me and it being really intense—I felt crazy. I wasn’t sure if that was my baby. I don’t remember if I flushed it or put it in the waste bin, but I remember that I started sobbing.

  At the doctor’s the next day, they told me that my uterine lining was thin and it looked like I was having a miscarriage. I had a journal with me, and in the waiting room at the doctor’s office while we waited to be checked out, I wrote a letter to our baby—I had a feeling that she was a girl—and said goodbye. I wrote, I can’t wait to meet you at the end of life, and I love you very much. Even though it was a small amount of time that she lived in me, I was trying to honor that momentary life.

  We went down to the beach a few days later and brought some flowers and put them in the ocean. Watching them float away was our way of saying goodbye and having some closure.

  I had already “classified” the event as a miscarriage, and I tried my best to process everything and move forward. But one afternoon, as I was driving home from work, I was in so much pain that I had to pull over. My husband picked me up because I was sobbing and physically couldn’t drive. My body was telling me, This is not normal, something else is going on.

  A few days later, I had another doctor’s appointment to check that my HCG levels had gone down. My doctor did another ultrasound, and told me there was nothing to worry about. She said there was a cyst in one of my ovaries but “maybe you’re about to get your period.” She seemed really dismissive, but at this point we felt like we had no option but to trust her.

  My husband asked, “Is there any way this could be an ectopic?” We had spent a couple of sleepless nights reading about research studies done on ectopic pregnancies and HCG levels by the NIH. We knew that it was a super rare and possibly dangerous (for the mother) case in which the egg implants outside the uterus, usually in the fallopian tube. The pregnancy would not be viable. Could we be one of the 2 percent? She said it was really unlikely. That was Friday.

  On Monday, she called me with my test results. She said, “I got your number. It looks good.” And when she told me what it was, I realized that my HCG levels were actually higher than they had been two weeks prior.

  And I said “What, how is that good? It’s higher. I had a miscarriage. How is that possible?”

  After a couple of confused seconds during which she probably looked up what my HCG levels had been before and realized her error, she said, “Well, maybe you should come in and we can give you methotrexate injections.”

  At this point, my mind is blown and I am angry. Our doctor was younger than most of the others in the practice, and she had always seemed flippant and dismissive, but this was above and beyond irresponsible. I probably prevented her from committing medical malpractice. If I hadn’t read up online and caught the rise in my HCG levels, I could have had a ruptured ectopic and bled to death. It could have left me unable to have children. Her lapse would have changed our lives forever.

  And she didn’t even seemed fazed. She basically said, In that case, okay, come in, get chemo, and kill your baby. I was so distraught—it finally being confirmed that it was an ectopic was not a shock because my husband and I had known it, somehow. But my doctor’s attitude, how casual it seemed to her to tell me to come in and terminate the pregnancy… it was baffling.

  She wanted me to make the decision to come in and terminate the pregnancy fairly quickly due to the risk of a ruptured fallopian. I’m actually very proud of how I handled the moments that followed. I was very conflicted because if it had just been a miscarriage, well, that’s fairly common and you don’t have to do anything—your body just spontaneously aborts the fetus. But ectopics are not common. And it almost got missed. And I had to go in and get the chemo shot to basically end it—dissolve it—whatever the word is. That was really difficult for me given how much I wanted this child, how much I wanted to be a mother. I have to live with that choice. The way that I rationalized it is that I knew this child would not survive. It was not a choice between me or the baby, because if it had been, I would have picked the baby. It was not me and not the baby.

  It was hard for my husband to try again. He knew that the odds of having another ectopic were pretty low since I don’t have any risk factors. It was just a fluke. Bad luck. The silver lining is that the experience solidified how lucky we are to have each other. My husband—as much as he is Mr. Positive and I am Negative Nelly—let me share whatever I was feeling whenever I was feeling it. And it was a lot, because I carried that pain for a long time. It was his pain, too, and for him to listen patiently as I brought it up whenever I needed to, it was crucial for me. That’s the only way I managed not to lose my mind from grief.

  I remember the day I found out we were pregnant again. I went in to the doctor’s—different doctor!—super early to see if they could see a sac because I was at higher risk due to the first ectopic. Before going into the office, I prayed to the first little one and told her to watch over her little brother or sister. And then I prayed to God and I said, “Okay, this is it, God. It’s going to be good. You’re not going to take this one away from me. I’m not asking you. I’m telling you.” And then afterward, when I knew everything was okay, I apologized. I said, “I know I’m not special, and I don’t command results, but thank you for letting me have this one.”

  I might be telling a different story if I wasn’t pregnant now. I’m really excited and happy, and it buffers the sadness we felt for so long. I don’t want to forget that this happened to me. I don’t want to erase it because no matter what, she will always be my first child.

  Selma, twenties

  I’m nervous. Every time I’ve told this story, no one has believed me.

  My brother had a best friend, Scott, who would always come over and hang out. One day, during the summer, he and my brother were playing video games in the living room. Scott got up to use the bathroom, and I was hanging out in the kitchen, alone. My older sister wasn’t around. When he was done in the bathroom, he closed the door really quietly and tiptoed into the kitchen. He reached out and touched my chest and then, really clumsily, he tried to kiss me. Then he went back to play video games. I didn’t really make a big deal out of it. I was ten or eleven. I liked Scott all right, and the girls in my class had already started talking about kissing boys.

  A few months went by with nothing to report, and then that fall, we had a guest speaker at school who came to talk to us about abstinence. Scott came over to our house after school, and I remember he made some comment about how he thought it was a good idea to be abstinent. While we were all hanging out, Scott kept messing with me, always reaching over and poking me or giving me a hug. My mom had a bunch of friends over; they were all downstairs playing cards while my brother, Scott, and I watched TV upstairs. Eventually, we all went to bed. Scott slept over in my brother’s room.

  I don’t know how he got my shorts and underwear down with
out me waking up, but the first thing I remember is him pushing, and then the pain. I could see part of his face. He had his hand over my mouth, and because he was using both arms to hold his weight up, the hand that was covering my mouth was actually pushing my head down into my mattress painfully. I hit him over and over and then he stopped for a second. I thought maybe he was finished, but I noticed he was searching for something in his pocket. Scott and my brother were outdoorsy boys, and I realized that he’d pulled out the pocketknife that he always carried around. I didn’t see it so much as I heard him open it, and then he put it on my neck.

  What I remember very clearly was that when he started there was some light in the room because I could see part of his face. But when he finished, the light was blocked. I looked over at the doorframe and I could make out my brother’s silhouette.

  I remember hearing my mom and her friends laughing downstairs. I was scared that Scott would hurt me again, so I didn’t move even after he left. When my parents came upstairs for the night, I made myself stop crying because I didn’t want them to ask me any questions. The next day, there was blood on my sheets, so I told my mom that I thought I’d gotten my period. She taught me how to use a pad and then, a few months later, I actually got my period.

  Six months after I was raped, I walked into my room to find my mother sobbing as she read my diary. I had written about what had happened but left out names. She asked me if it was true, and I told her it was. She asked me who it was, and I said it was Scott. She said she had figured. She called the police. They asked me questions and took my diary. My mom was in pieces. She asked me what she should do. She was too distraught to console me, so I got up, went to her, and I hugged her. And I told her I was okay.