Bulletproof (4 page)

Ryan and I had never talked about pregnancy, birth control, STDs, or anything like that. We’d spent a lot of time talking about sex before we had it, but mainly we just talked about my virginity and whether it was a good idea for us to take that next step. When we finally slept together, protection never factored in. I have no idea why we thought that was okay.

I was aware of the risk, but it didn’t seem as big, serious or real as it should have. On some irrational level, I felt disconnected from the idea of pregnancy. Part of it had to do with my own stereotypes about teen moms. It wasn’t something I thought consciously about, but part of my carelessness was based on the feeling that I wasn’t that type of girl. I wasn’t a wild child. I didn’t get into trouble. I’d waited to have sex, and I owned the decision. I wasn’t a slut. Slacking off on condoms just didn’t seem like a big deal.

And on a simpler level, I had no idea how to get condoms or birth control if I wanted them. In a way, maybe I just thought I could put off dealing with it. Breaking the rules for awhile in the meantime wouldn’t be that big of a deal. How easy could it be to get pregnant?

Well, it turns out it was really easy to get pregnant. When I went to the doctor for the final pregnancy test, I’d been having sex for eight weeks. The test told us the pregnancy was eight weeks along. Later, we joked that we must have had a really good first night.

I hadn’t been trying to hide anything from my parents. I could have been honest with my mom about losing my virginity to Ryan. I trusted her not to judge me. If I’d told her I was having sex, I’m sure she would have helped me figure out birth control. But she just never had a chance. My pregnancy would shock her, and I didn’t know how to soften the blow. I had a horrible feeling there was nothing to do but get it over with.

The day after I saw the doctor, I came home from school determined to break the news. After she’d come home from work and gone into her office, I went in and made small talk about her day and mine. But whenever I saw a chance to come out and tell her I was pregnant, I just couldn’t do it. I could feel the words in my mouth, and my lips just wouldn’t let them out. Every time I tried, it was just silence. I couldn’t do it.

At school the next day, it was hanging over me. Finally, while I was sitting in class completely unable to focus, I pulled my phone into my lap and wrote her a text.

“Mom?” I wrote.

“What?”

“I need to tell you something.”

“I hate it when you do this,” she replied immediately.

I couldn’t remember ever having done that before, so I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. It caught me off guard, and I didn’t answer. After a few minutes I typed the words “I’m pregnant,” but I didn’t send the text. I just stared at it for about twenty minutes.

“Well?” my mom wrote.

I sent the text.

“What am I supposed to say to that?” she wrote back. “Oh shit, or haha?”

“I wasn’t expecting either,” I replied.

“If this is a joke, it isn’t funny,” she said. “If it’s real, we’ll talk when we get home.”

“OK,” I wrote, and got up from my desk. I didn’t even ask the teacher for permission. I went into the bathroom and lost my mind, locking myself in a stall and bursting into tears. I wanted to look up the earliest flight to China, hop on, and never go home. I was freaking out. But then the bell rang, and I had to pull my shit together. My friends asked me if I was okay, and I told them I had something in my contacts.

As I was walking to my next class, I got a text from my dad asking, “Hey baby, are you okay?” I lost it again and ducked out of sight to write him back. I told him I was fine, and asked if he was okay. And he wrote, “Yes, I love you, and I’ll talk to you later when you get home.”

With that, I felt the first flicker of hope that it was going to be okay.

When I went home, my mom and dad were both waiting at the kitchen table. When I walked in, I just stood at the counter and said nothing at all. I didn’t know what to do. But then my mom asked me to come and sit down. And as soon as I did, they both stood up and wrapped their arms around me, crying. I’d only seen my mom cry a few times in my whole life, and I’d never seen my dad shed a tear. It was a big deal for my family to have such an emotional moment. And while it was awful to see the concern in their eyes and not be in a position to reassure them, it was a huge relief to feel how much they loved me, and know that wasn’t going to change.

Once we’d gotten hold of ourselves, we sat down and talked about everything that was going on. I told them about the past couple of weeks and my visit to the doctor. And I was surprised when my mom asked, “You’re going to keep it, right?”

The question caught me off guard. “Of course,” I told her, feeling almost offended. The way she’d asked made me feel like she was expecting me to say something else, and was all set to argue with me about it. But no other option had ever entered my mind. I told them Ryan knew and that he was as shocked as I was, but we were staying together.

My dad took a no-nonsense approach, as usual. He didn’t sugarcoat anything. “This is your responsibility,” he said. “We’ll be here to help you and support you in any way that we can, but this is your child, and this is your job.”

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

It was a little hard to be blown away by the message when I’d already had three weeks to think it over on my own. But then my dad said something I’d never forget. “You’re going to be okay,” he told me. “You’ll be fine. You’ll be able to do this. But it’s going to be the hardest thing you’ve ever done, and the hardest thing you ever will do in your life.”

“I know,” I said again.

My father looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, “No, you don’t.” The look on his face was straightforward and dead serious, and he didn’t have to tell me he was speaking from experience.

“Well,” I said. “I don’t know. But I’m just trying not to freak out and lose my mind.”

With that, my dad had to go back to work. And that was kind of it. The cat was out of the bag, and it was full speed ahead.

Once that hard part was over, I shifted from shock to acceptance faster than I expected.

I’ve always been a “handle it” type of person. I try not to dwell on the negative or obsess over things I can’t control. When a problem comes up, I try to solve it or deal with it. I don’t like to complain or kick up a fuss when I run into an obstacle. If you sit around and think about how shitty things are, all that happens is that things stay shitty. I didn’t have time for that. Why waste that energy? When life throws something unexpected in your path, the only useful thing to do is figure out how to get over, under, around or through it the best way you can.

All of this is easier said than done, of course, and I’d never been in a situation half as serious as the one I was in now. Even so, I only knew one way to handle it, and that was just to handle it. I didn’t have time or energy to sit around feeling scared and sorry for myself. I was sixteen and I was going to have a baby. It wasn’t what I’d planned, but that was the deal. I wasn’t the first teenager to end up in this situation, and if anyone else could make it work, I could damn well do the same.

Even more importantly, as overwhelming as the situation was, I knew things could have been a lot worse. I had a caring family, a strong support system, good healthcare, and access to the resources I needed. I still had my relationship with Ryan, who had a steady job and a good family. I had a healthy environment and an army at my back, and these were privileges I quickly learned not to take for granted. I saw what it was like for teen moms who didn’t have those basic advantages on their side, and the view was chilling. What would it be like to be sixteen and pregnant with no parental support, no stable housing, and no trustworthy adults to turn to for advice? That’s exactly how it’s been, and continues to be, for countless young women. But I was lucky. I didn’t have any dark forces conspiring against me.

With my family on my side, it was time to step up to the plate. My situation was scary, but it wasn’t more than I could handle. It couldn’t be. No matter how scared or overwhelmed I felt, I knew I was capable of figuring it out. It was going to be a long, hard, rocky road, but I was on it, and it only led one way. So I just had to take the wheel.

CHAPTER 6:

SINK OR SWIM

You never understand how fast life can change until yours does. That spring, I might as well have gone to a different planet. That’s how completely everything turned upside down. It had started without my knowledge the moment Ryan and I conceived a child, and by the time I started getting my ducks in a row, I was already on a one-way train racing toward a place I wasn’t even remotely prepared to be in. I was going to be a damn mom!

I found out I was pregnant just in time for spring. Everyone was getting ready for summer, the last one before my senior year. When softball season kicked off, I got one of my first big reality checks. Senior year was going to be my last chance to really give softball my all, since I’d already decided I wouldn’t be playing in college. But now that I was pregnant, there would be no more of that for me. It couldn’t be helped, but by the same token, I couldn’t help being disappointed. It was difficult not to say a real goodbye to the sport that had taken up half my life since I was four years old. All that year, whenever I heard any of the girls who were still on the team complaining about practice or not taking things seriously, it secretly drove me crazy. I would have given it my all until the last minute before I had to give it up. And to make it even more painful, the team went on to win state that year! That was a huge “damn it” moment.

My friends must have known I was upset, but they didn’t get much out of me on the subject. Spring came and went before I made any sort of public announcement about my pregnancy. I even went to prom with all of my close friends and their boyfriends without giving it away. It wasn’t until the last week of school that I started opening up about it. It wasn’t that I was afraid of their reactions. I just didn’t want to answer all of the questions. I was overwhelmed enough as it was without becoming an object of curiosity for the rest of the school year.

I told my best friend Sway first. We met in the parking lot after school so we could talk in private, and when she got there, I told her Ryan and I were going to have a baby. As I said it, I started to laugh a little, trying to cover up how nervous I was. Sway started to laugh, too, but her eyes filled up with tears at the same time. She didn’t know how she was supposed to react, and I understood completely. There was a little bit of every emotion flying around. But later that night, she showed up with a stack of baby books she’d gone out and picked up.

After that, I went on to tell each of my closest friends, and everyone found out from there. Without fail, once the shock wore off, they were all supportive and showed tons of excitement. That’s the thing about unplanned pregnancies. On one hand it can feel like a nightmare, especially for a teen with no concept of what’s about to happen. But to conceive a child is such an awe-inspiring thing, and it’s hard to be completely doom-and-gloom when you know there’s a baby on the way. For me it was never as simple as just being scared, or just being excited. It was everything all at once.

And sometimes it was even nothing. The fact is, I don’t remember much anxiety during my pregnancy. I don’t remember being consumed by fear or nervousness. Not because I’d managed to achieve nirvana in my early teens, but because the best coping mechanism I could come up with was tunnel vision. Fear and uncertainty were always in the margins of my mind, darting around in my peripheral vision. But I knew that if I paid them any attention, they’d swarm in and take over. If I let those feelings in, I wouldn’t be able to make things happen. In my mind, the only chance I had of getting my shit together was if I made myself bulletproof. I couldn’t let fear get to me, or I’d fall apart.

So instead of focusing on fear, I focused on finishing the school year. My mom was a lifesaver. She was a big help in figuring out how to deal with the rest of my life. She took charge of my school arrangements, setting me up to graduate early through an accelerated program so I could finish up before my delivery date. And once that path was clear, she started in on preparing for the baby. I had no idea where to start, so she was the engine to my train. She guided me along with the doctors, the nursery, and everything along the way. By the time summer was in swing, my dad and brother had started to get excited, too. Especially once we found out the baby was a boy.

***

Ryan and I were doing fine. He proposed to me, and of course, I said yes. We made plans to move into an apartment together. Somehow my dad refrained from killing Ryan, and we started spending much more time with both of our parents. His family was great, although it was hard to wrap my head around having any kind of in-laws at the age of sixteen. But they stepped up right away to help us get ready for the baby. I spent a lot of time with his mom and my mom, working out all the details.

It didn’t feel like my relationship with Ryan was in trouble. But it definitely wasn’t the honeymoon phase anymore, either. There was a strange new distance between us as we both separately did what we had to do on the deadline we were on. Ryan got busy working and trying to save money, while I worked part-time for my dad and went to summer school so I could graduate early. Our schedules were suddenly very full, and they didn’t include much time for each other. But that seemed like it was to be expected. If anything bugged me, it was that our attitudes about the whole thing didn’t always seem to line up.

Sometimes when I brought up something about the baby, I got the feeling Ryan’s brain just went somewhere else. And when it came to making actual plans for after the baby, whether it was work schedules or daycare, he was never in the mood to deal with it. It was all awkward silences, one-word answers, and impatient grunts whenever I tried to work out a vision of how we’d actually live once the baby arrived. And it was a good thing I wasn’t expecting any special treatment while I was pregnant, because that wasn’t happening. Sometimes I got the feeling he wanted to pretend there was no pregnancy, and we could go on acting like nothing had changed at all.