After Cornell University arranged an abortion for me at Planned Parenthood when I was 19, I was pro-choice for many years.

In law school I developed a theory that abortion was akin to home self-defense after breaking and entering. The premise is psychotic, but that’s where the pro-choice position leads. I remember in law school after we read Scalia’s dissenting opinion that abortion be decided on a state-by-state referendum basis, I approached the professor, an Irish-American Columbia grad, and commented how much I liked Scalia’s approach.

“Well, sure,” he said, “you’d be fine because you’re in New York State.” I was briefly stunned trying to figure out how my opinion on Scalia’s dissent had elicited such sweeping presumptions. The answer is this guy was a total dipshit.

On another occasion a group of students were discussing affirmative action with him after class. I commented that Asians were a minority but had never received affirmative action. His answer to that was “I know you know my wife is Asian.” I’m serious. This guy thought that I had looked up his wife’s ethnicity and then composed some pertinent flattery to garner favor. He is now the head of some speciously-titled globalist endeavor at Fordham Law, so he’s probably on to something.

I went to a couple of pro-choice marches. In 2004 I went to the “March for Women’s Lives” in D.C. on a nihilistic lark. I tagged along with my Marxist college-friend who was going with a carload of people. She was very funny. I would meet her in Brooklyn for dinner, and she would say things like “I’m self-actualized, and I think you’re self-actualized too.” She worked at an anarchist bookstore in Brooklyn. She was in charge (although I’m not sure how that works in an anarchist system) of feminist stuff at the bookstore, and she would complain bitterly to me about the trannies, who were making all sorts of demands. When it was just the two of us she would sourly remark “They’re not women.” Apostasy.

With most of my friends, I was the square. People appreciated it. Everyone else was busy trying to one-up each other at virtue-signaling. I was their foil, their straight man. I was the Archie Bunker in every room.

So I crammed into a car with my friend, whom I will call Una, and her posse of dreadlocked, dumpster-diving friends (who literally stank) and went with them to D.C. to march for abortion rights. I can confidently say that I have never seen a more unhinged bunch of rabble close up and personal than I saw that day. Every other woman seemed to be carrying a sign that said “Bush out of my Bush.” I didn’t see as many giant vaginas as at the march last week, but it was much more than I had bargained for.

As soon as Una got there she banner-dropped. Una was always suggesting a banner-drop as the solution to pretty much everything. She was obsessed. We had a mutual friend who was having problems with her boyfriend and crashing on Una’s couch. Una’s idea was that she and I needed to orchestrate a banner-drop for our friend’s boyfriend. I do think the element of surprise would be tremendous. You and your girlfriend have a fight: suddenly anarchists are on your roof unfurling a sheet.

So when we got to D.C. for the rally, Una and her awful friends dropped a banner with a big anarchy symbol that said something about their anarchist bookstore in Brooklyn. One of the boys in our group had extra poster-board, so I took a sharpie and scrawled on a sheet “Roman Catholic Republican Pro-Choice.” Everyone walked by the anarchist bookstore banner without blinking an eye. Anarchists were a dime a dozen at the march. I got tons of attention for my sign- much of it negative. Una and her anarchists were jealous.

I also went to a pro-choice march in Manhattan with my friend I will call Olga. We basically just stood around amid a bunch of rabble. A creepy overweight woman with long greasy hair and coke-bottle lenses walked by us in a t-shirt that said “I Had 3 Abortions.” She stared at us to make sure we noticed her.

“I draw the line,” Olga announced indignantly after she had passed. “I mean, how commodifying is that? What is this- a competition? I’ve had three- well, I’ve had five?” That is how me and my Cornell friends talked. We would use terms like “commodifying.” I knew what she meant. In theory, it was about choice and freedom. In reality, the people showing up to these things were people you did not want to be around.

But I was still pro-choice. It would have been hard for me to be otherwise. Cornell and Planned Parenthood had seen to that. In practice, I was a nihilist, but in a tribal sense I was still Christian. I went to church, I carried a rosary everywhere I went. When I prayed- like when I was on an airplane- I prayed to Mary and only Mary. I considered myself an irredeemably damned soul. When I look back now, it seems to me like I was chronically ill and undiagnosed.

After graduation from law school, I made friends with an English guy who had just moved to Manhattan. We went to watch soccer games at Nevada Smith’s, a big soccer bar in the East Village. It was platonic. He was a good mate. He was fun.

One night we were out carousing, and, as we entered a bar, the bouncer, who was black, started mildly flirting with me. A clever flirt, he told me he could guess my weight. What young woman isn’t going to respond? I was like: Fine, then I’ll guess your weight too. So the bouncer and I are there guessing each other’s weights. Suddenly my fun goofy Englishman friend- in what was the only romantic gesture I ever saw him do, around me anyway, and was to drastically change the course of my life forever – clasps me around the waist, dips me- like that photo of the World War II navy guy dipping the nurse in Times Square- shouts at the bouncer, “She needs a white man!” and plants on me a huge kiss. We started making out. The bouncer looked on, bemused. And like a month later we were married.

Me and the Englishman, not me and the bouncer.

Unfortunately, albeit the promising beginning, it didn’t work out. We are both happy today. This is why the Orthodox Church does allow divorce I think: Mistakes happen, humans are fallible.

About a year and a half after the Englishman and I married, I had my daughter. I have heard that for some women the first sight of their newborn is alienating. I know a lot of women suffer from postpartum depression. Personally, nothing like that has ever happened to me. The second I laid eyes on my daughter, I was infused with a wild, fierce, single-minded passion that has never left me. I remember when she was a newborn, and I left her with my mother to do errands- her face was ever before me, her presence was ever with me. And that never goes away, in my experience. Their presence never leaves you

Suddenly, the comfortable lies that had vainly covered my wretchedness all those years were suddenly not even ostensibly up to the task. Ron Paul in one of his books describes how, as a resident obstetrician I believe, he was working in a hospital and witnessed the abortion of a 7-month-old fetus in one room and physicians fighting to save the life of a premature infant in the next. Intellectually impossible to justify.

My daughter was breastfed until she was three, she never got a diaper rash, she was never on antibiotics. She was born on the 15^th, and on the 15^th of every month for her first four years of life my parents and I baked a cake and celebrated her.

Suddenly when she was born every fiber of my being- fibers I did not know I had- was straining toward making this new life thrive. The full import of what I had done came in and perched above my chamber door. What had I done? This was the truth that I felt staring at me in my peripheral vision, like I imagine Jesus regarded Peter after the cock crowed three times: a not malevolent but implacable gaze. That too, is still there.

A word about my parents: My entire life they had been very ambitious for me, and I had tried to live up to what they wanted. They wanted me to get good grades, I got good grades. They wanted me to go to a good college, I went to a good college. They wanted me to go to law school, I went to law school. Now I was a failed, unemployed, single mother, and I had made my parents happier than I had ever made them before. All of a sudden the pressure was off, it didn’t matter what I did anymore. Nothing made my parents happier- no grade, no test score, no job offer, nothing- nothing made my parents happier than their grand-daughter.

As you might imagine, I was flooded with gratitude to God. I felt happy again for the first time since childhood. I began reading the Bible. I started with Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, searching for rules. I also turned to God with my anxiety about my daughter being “fatherless.”. I figured my daughter could turn to God as a father. Before I had worried about exams and boyfriends. Now I had real worries. At a certain point in worrying, you realize nothing is secure and the only answer is God. I began to pray to God, not just Mary.

The Ash Wednesday after Obama was elected, I went to mass and afterwards lit a candle in front of a statue of St. Patrick. I asked St. Patrick, the saint of my people, for a husband. I remember later at work that day my boss asking me “What’s that thing on your forehead?” When I lost that job a couple months later. I said: Fuck this shit, I’m going home. My parents had continued to rent an apartment in in the village where I grew up, so I moved into it with my daughter.

I grew up in a village of about 900 people. Here I was in shame moving back home an unemployed single mother. A stark admission of failure, and I did not care. One of my few talents is not to care what other people think when I’m doing the right thing.

To help St. Patrick along, I went on EHarmony. I met a self-styled paleoconservative with a PhD who lived across the country. He was Orthodox, and he told me about the monastery called Holy Trinity in Jordanville, NY- about 45 minutes away. When I attended liturgy there for the first time, it was a revelation. I started going with my daughter every week. I got an Orthodox prayer book and icons. I began praying in front of the icons every morning and every night. I got an Orthodox Study Bible and read the New Testament with the notes. I read prodigiously about Orthodox Christianity. The Orthodox prayers are very powerful.

It was not an easy time. I had no job, I was afraid I would never find a job again. I was very lonely, I was afraid I would never find love again. And once I started attending Orthodox services, shame and grief and remorse hit me like a body blow. I remember standing during liturgy feeling worse about myself than I ever had in my life. Deep spiritual pain.

During this period I reading something by a saint who described two types of error that bring you farther from God: when you think you’re so great you don’t need God’s help, and when you think you’re so flawed you’re not good enough for God’s help. I think this is a point that needs to hammered home with people: believing that you are such a sinner that you are beyond God’s redemption is egotism and inaccurate. No one is beyond the reach of God. Mary Magdalene was the first person to see Jesus resurrected.

My long-distance tortured affair of the neoreactionary heart fizzled out. I said to myself: Fuck this shit, and I went on Match dot com.

One day I noticed someone liking all my photos, so I checked him out. His profile was titled “Just looking.” Ah-ha. I took a look at Mr. “Just Looking.” There was a photo of blonde, blue-eyed, scrappy, beaky-nosed him in a ragged t-shirt posing with his ancient motorcycle in front of some Fishtown shack. I was blinded by a white-hot wave of lust looking at this photo, I don’t know how else to put it. He looked like homecoming and like freedom, like familiar and exotic- all at the same time.

Once when we were having a fight I told him, “When I saw you, all I thought of you was that you were a tasty bit of white trash I wanted to fuck.” I meant this as a crushing insult. I thought it would destroy him. He laughed, and he still uses it against me to this day.

We messaged. Everyone I had talked to on EHarmony and Match had been boring and intense, like a job interview. Where did you go to school? How often do you work out? This guy asked me what music I liked. He liked the Avett Brothers. For all his ragged t-shirt and his motorcycle, he was the only one who conformed to what I understood as polite introductory conversation.

One Saturday night we were messaging back and forth. He said he didn’t see how things could work out: I was a lawyer, he was a motorcycle guy. I insisted we meet, which I suspect now may have been the intended effect. We agreed to meet at the local bar. I warned him I was bringing pepper spray. He laughed.

He rode up on what I now know was a 1976 Honda CB750. We sat down at the bar. The bartender had graduated from the class below me, so we moved to a table in the back. We talked about soccer. He was very easy to talk to. I asked him why he wasn’t married. He had had a long-term girlfriend. They lived together, they got engaged, he got confirmed so they could have a church wedding, she shopped for wedding dresses… and then things petered out.

At a certain point in the conversation I told him I had forsworn all birth control. He was astonished. More surprisingly, he was intrigued. He was like “So if we start going out, we’re going to have a baby?” He didn’t sound averse. I answered somberly “It’s in God’s hands.” There was a pause. He asked me if I were vegan. I think he was trying to ascertain what genre of freak he was dealing with. I said, “This is the way Christians- your ancestors and mine- have been living since time immemorial.”

Today we’re married, and we have three children in addition to my daughter his step-daughter. We’re a family, which is all I ever wanted.

You guys, I am telling you that if you ask, God will answer. God loves you. It is real.