teen mom 2016

so here it goes...

I guess you could say I was popular in high school-it was fun because I fitted in. I was a cheerleader and I did color guarding. I was very outgoing, not shy at all. I mean, I lived in a town called Telford, but there wasn't much to do other than go window shopping at my age, but I also went to concerts all the time. I'm a big machine head fan and when I went to one concert with my friends I got to meet them.
I literally ended up crying, I was always that weird emotional girl. I've never been the type to party, and I never drank or did drugs or any of that. I was pretty much always at school every day until about 6PM for cheer practice, and then every Saturday until noon for color guard. School was so important to me.

However, I did have a boyfriend. It was the classic high school romance: I was the cheerleader, and he played football and basketball. He was the total cool kid.
In the yearbook, he won "Most Popular" and "Most Handsome." And yeah, he was handsome! He was 6'1",and very muscular, and worked out all the time, and had curly, strawberry-blonde hair. I remember we met at a McDonald's. He just walked right up to my car, looking all cocky, and asked right away if I wanted his number. (And I did.)

We spent a lot of time together-he used to either come watch me during cheerleading or call me right after practice. I watched him, too. He was No:1 in football, and that number was everywhere, even on his white pickup truck. We rode around on his lime kawasaki motorbike and his four-wheeler a lot, or just went to the movies. We lived in Telford That's the kind of thing you do, the only thing thing you do in fact unless you can ice skate which i can't. Neither of us worked, but we had each other. We were in our senior year, and our relationship was great.

One Friday night over Christmas break, he got me some chicken for dinner, and it made me throw up. I told him that I was supposed to be on my period over a month ago, so we thought we should take a test. Finally, four positive results later, I realized that I was pregnant, and I just cried. And he cried.

That night, I looked him in the eyes and made him promise me that, no matter what, he'd stay with me and we'd get through it together. He was all for it.

I decided to tell my mom three or four days later. I was on my way to my besties Christmas party, and I just sent her a text that said, "I'm late." She responded, "Is there any way you could be pregnant?" And then, I said, "I don't know." Finally, she told me she wasn't going to discuss anything more via text message, but I was too scared to face her alone, so I waited for my boyfriend to meet up with me. Then, she made me take another test, I cried a little, and asked to be alone. After that, though, she was so supportive, and I'm lucky for that.

My dad, though, was a different story. My mom asked me not to tell him until after Christmas so I wouldn't ruin the holiday. It was just so hard. When he first found out, he was in shock. We had a lot of hard conversations and played out a lot of scenarios. He kept telling me that I was giving up my college experience, that I would have to go to community college, and I'd never finish, so I should wait to have kids later in life when I could support them.

I don't know what was going on with me, but at that point, I kind of felt like I was in love and I was going to have my happy family. It was naive, obviously, and I wasn't thinking clearly about how hard it was going to be. But I couldn't bring myself to ever think about having an abortion.

The thing was, I wasn't on birth control and we weren't using condoms. We actually had this crazy thought that one of us was probably infertile because I never got pregnant. We were teenagers and we didn't know any better. We lived in the Bible Belt, so sexual education was completely optional in high school, and almost nobody took it. They just thought we should know better. We didn't.

Before break was over, I told my two "best friends" that I was pregnant. One of them told her boyfriend who ended up telling his sister, and just like that, it spread everywhere. When I got back to school, the teachers looked down on me. It's a small town, so when one person found out, everyone did.