Personal Narrative: My Childhood Abortion

It was May 29, 1997 when a bald little creature was born; her name is Theresa Buenrostro. Indeed, that was me. My mother who is a small Latina woman had 3 boys already. Just 1 year and 5 days before I was born she had my brother. According to her though I was the most difficult one during pregnancy and labor. Let’s backtrack to the 1st trimester of my mom’s pregnancy of me. When that dire ultrasound came in and revealed that half my head was missing. What does this mean? Is my child going to be born with serious health issues? These are the kinds of thoughts that ran though my mother’s head. Ultimately, she knew that she would have to get an abortion if things didn’t look up because she didn’t want me to live a miserable life as a vegetable. However, in her next

We lived on the first floor and had tenants living on the second. It was a small apartment but it was big in the standards of other places in the area. I’ve been living there for the past 18 years in the city of East Boston here in Massachusetts. My community is largely Hispanic with some Italians which were mostly on my street. I was largely unaware that there was violence when I grew up. There were many street gangs which made up a lot of the violence. My side of the city was the “good area” which is why I never witnessed what surrounded me. Although just a few blocks away people were getting beat up, stabbed, shot, killed, raped, and murdered. It was very rampant when I was younger although it has definitely dimmed down significantly since then. My parents were strict in order to shelter me from that and made sure my environment at home was healthy. They made sure we always had food in the fridge, discouraged violence when my brothers and I would fight, made sure we respected those with authority, and we ate family dinners together every day. My home environment was safer and healthier than that of the