It seems appropriate for my first week of “whatever snazzy title fits a teen mom Friday”, that I start from the beginning. It’s always harder to understand the ending if you never learned the start, and I don’t think that the way this story starts is much different from the way any of these sorts of stories start. I’m sure the closure of that “my story isn’t unique” is something that would relieve both the reader trying to understand or currently in those shoes and myself as the writer of the story.

High school isn’t a fun place to be. We’d like to tell ourselves how fantastic it was to tell our children the lies of glory days that never really existed. Even the most perfect of the popular ones had a hard time, and I’m pretty sure they’d be lying if they denied it. Whether you put pressures on yourself or let people around you influence you, sometimes even the strongest seems to cower under the pressure. Even the most chaste of your classmates were giving in, and if you even made it to Senior year without giving in, it was a miracle. In looking back, this reinforces a belief that people are fools to think abstinence is the way to teach teenagers about sex, because the more informed they are the better off they are going to be. Teaching abstinence isn’t going to prevent teenagers having sex anymore than anti-drug “Just Say No” programs or anti-bullying programs prevent drug use and bullying. I think as adults, people forget these truths.

The worst part happens when you find yourself in a bathroom with a pee-stick in your hand and realizing that in 5 minutes, your life had completely changed. It’s not enough to walk the school halls with your secret nestled away in your brain while trying to forget it happened. It was a mistake, the test was wrong. I’d never had regular periods, that was what was affecting the test. 5 months wasn’t too excessive to be without, it will go away if I don’t think about it. It doesn’t go away though; eventually you need a plan.

My plan was simple, to just run away from the fact. I saved up my extra money from work, and worked more hours than I probably should as a high schooler. My graduation money had finally brought me to the amount I needed, and shortly after I had moved out. My parents couldn’t kick me out if I was already out when they found out, right? All the TV shows of that time with that situation had the parents kicking their stupid slut of a daughter out, while I didn’t really know anyone else in my shoes. If I had known then what I know now, things would’ve ended up completely different I imagine. It turns out, I didn’t give my parents enough credit and even today have a close bond with their little surprise child. I’m lucky though, not everyone is that lucky.

In this first part of the story, I hope people understand that sometimes things need to be talked about to your kids. I also hope teenagers realize that instead of running, they should try to talk it out with their parents. You never know how it’s going to turn out, and parents are never short of their surprises. Parents love their kids, good parents love them no matter what.