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It would be so easy to lie and say that I didn’t mean to get pregnant. No one would challenge me and I’d be able to publically avoid taking responsibility for this situation, but that’s pure bullshit and doesn’t help anyone, least of all me. I got pregnant because I wanted him to stay. I got pregnant because I was 19 and had yet to feel unconditional love in my life. I had been abandoned so many times and in so many ways that the desire to be loved, for someone to please Jesus not leave, felt like a craving does for an addict after 24 hours without a hit. But so so much more intense. I thought I’d make the man I admired and thought I loved tethered to me and that we’d create a new, perfect person who’d also have no choice but to love me…and I’d love them both with a zeal that would rival any martyr. It wasn’t a conscious choice, but it’s something I now know and am as sure about as I am that the sky is blue.
That didn’t make the moment that I found out I was pregnant any less of a mind fuck. It’s one thing to be like, “Hmmm….let’s see what happens if we “forget” the condom…getting pregnant wouldn’t be the worst. It could be fun!” and totally different moment when you realize, “Holy shit. There’s a human growing inside of me that has to come out one way or another. This is happening.” Fucking terrifying.
But he stayed with me and I was happy. For a minute. He stayed with me, talking about apartments we could afford and how we would work together to finish our undergrad degrees while raising this little person that was part me and part the guy for whom I was over the moon. He stayed with me when we called his mom from his dorm room when I was 12 weeks along and we told her together on speaker that we had decided to have the baby. She cried. She was happy.
And then…he left.
A month later, 16 week pregnant, he ghosted me for almost three days. I sat in his hall for endless hours waiting by his door. I called cease-less-ly. Over and over and over until I got a busy signal because his roommates took the phone off of the hook. I waited for his friends to ask if they had seen him. They rolled their eyes and ignored my “clingy bitch ass” (that’s a quote) and walked on.
When he showed up at my door, I had been in my bed for 24 hours. I rushed into a hug that was one-sided and devoid of affection. I was wearing overalls because my baby bump had started to show and walking around one of the country’s most notorious party schools 19 years old and visibly pregnant was an invitation for shitty comments that I couldn’t endure without him by my side. And he wasn’t.
He walked me over to his dorm where he put me on the phone with his dad. The man was a well-respected attorney and dressing people down was one of his superpowers. He explained to me that his son had withdrawn from school and was getting on a plane the next day, that I would never see him again, that he would pay for the abortion, and that if I ever thought about contacting the family again I would regret it. He added some spice about how I was a little trollop and that I should be ashamed of myself for trying to trap his son. He wasn’t wrong. But his son was still a coward.
Then he was gone. Never saw him again. When it came time to consent to the adoption, we couldn’t find him so we published a notice in his local paper.
I tried to figure out how to make it work, raising a baby alone at 19 in a state I had moved to just 6 months prior, where the only support I had were my unsupportive parents. It’s not a shock that I couldn’t figure it out. My parents wouldn’t have allowed me to. They said that if I kept the baby, they would stop supporting me financially. They owned my condo, all of its contents, my car, paid my car insurance, and my undergrad tuition. They bought my groceries and my clothes. They said, “We have raised our kids. We aren’t raising another one.” Except I hadn’t asked them to. Everyone told me they would come around…that they loved me and would eventually get excited at the idea of their first grandchild. Um, no. Didn’t happen.
I waited until 35 weeks for them to change their minds and they never did. I had withdrawn from school and supplicated in front of some bureaucratic committee, bearing my soul and my loss and exposing my belly and my shame to strangers, in order to request that they refund my parents’ tuition money for the semester, and they did. My parents weren’t impressed. I had gotten a job working 30 plus hours per week, which was all my ever-growing pregnant ass could handle. My days consisted of sleeping and waiting for the next time I could sleep. My parents were unmoved. I researched resources and possibilities for my life as a 19 year old completely single mom, and they boiled down to this: I was going to lose this game of chicken with my parents because my options were to a.) be homeless and keep her or b.) finish my undergrad and live without her. I would’ve taken homeless just for me if it meant she could stay with me…but that would mean she’d be homeless too and I wasn’t that fucking selfish.
So I placed her in an adoption. I read book after book trying to figure out how to make this pill a little easier to swallow. I settled on open adoption figuring that if I was giving someone my firstborn child, they could at least give me their full names. There were no truly “open” adoption agencies in my metro area so I contacted the author of a book that really resonated with me who lived 5 states away. It turned out that she ran an open adoption agency and she was at my door in 2 days.
Two days to pick a couple. Another week to meet them. We stayed in touch the next three weeks and they were present for her birth. It was a consolation in every respect.
And then she was gone.
Things have been okay since then. Her parents and I have had some dust ups. I follow my birth daughter, who is now 18, on Instagram and so do my two oldest girls. She follows her sisters back, but she doesn’t follow me and that’s okay. According to her mom, she’s had some abandonment-type issues and struggles to figure out “who she is” in the context of her parentage, but the good thing is that when she has a question she can simply ask.
She has since reconnected with her birth father and has visited him several times in Hawaii with his wife and three children. At first, I really begrudged that, but quickly figured out that it was in her best interests, so I let it go.
The good parts are this: she changed me for the better. I was an emotionally friable, attention-seeking, confused, acting-out disaster before I had her. After her birth, I finished my undergrad in two years taking between 19–24 hours per semester to make up for the one in which I withdrew. I made Deans List each of those semesters, despite my overloaded course schedule. Whenever it became overwhelmed and wanted to give up, I told myself, “If you give up now, this was all for nothing. You gave away your baby for nothing. You will have failed her.” And so I kept going. I stopped acting out. I processed the grief in some less than healthy ways but, with the support of an amazing counselor whom I still see today (for other reasons) 19 years later, those issues resolved.
I still wanted a baby. I got one. I was married within 18 months after her birth and became a mom to my own beautiful daughter 8 months after that. I really really needed to be a mom and I found a way to get what I needed.
I don’t regret what I’ve been through. Looking at her IG brings me crazy joy. She looks just like her dad and my two oldest joke that my genes are “incredibly submissive”. As torturous as the pain caused by the loss of parenting my first child was, I know now that it had to happen. I’m convinced that I would’ve self-destructed right into the grave if I hadn’t had her. My body knew it. My subconscious knew it. I risked my life through childbirth to keep us both alive.
It sounds trite but my 4 girls for whom I am now a full-time, single mom are my reason for living. The life we share as a little squad is exactly what I had wanted growing up. I have a busy house perpetually full of neighbors and kids and friends and animals. We have each others’ backs in a way my sister and I never did. They know they can count on me and that their existence isn’t a burden. It’s a gift. I’m right where I need to be and everything that has led me to this moment has been worthwhile. Giving her life kept me on this earth and taught me some really essential lessons about the person I want to be. When I look at my girls, my birth daughter and my four daughters, I couldn’t be more grateful. And I wouldn’t change a goddamn thing.
Originally published on Medium
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