You often dream about how your life is going to turn out. At least I did. I had made plans to go to high school and I dreamt of becoming a hairdresser. But first I was going to just live life and be young. Then suddenly everything got turned upside–down – I was 15 years old and pregnant!
I had always been like everyone else. My friends and I did a lot of fun stuff, we partied and enjoyed being in the 10th grade. Spring–break was coming up, and we were all looking forward to a relaxing summer. But it didn’t turn out to be that easy.
I had a boyfriend who was 18 at the time, and we had been together a while. Sex was part of our relationship, so I begun taking the pill. Before starting on it I was always very irregular, but with the pill it was never a problem. So the day I missed my period I got nervous.
After five days I decided to take a pregnancy test. I was with my boyfriend and I was so nervous my stomach hurt. He looked at the result first, then smiled and told me I was pregnant. I don’t quite understand why he smiled. I was thunderstruck. What was I going to do? The smile on my boyfriend’s face faded quickly as well. When he finally realized what had happened he was shocked. He took off – saying he needed some time alone to think.
The next few days I thought a lot. How could this happen to me? I knew I’d sometimes been sloppy about taking the pill, but I kept thinking that this sort of thing just doesn’t happen to me! I needed to talk to someone. The first person I told was my brother’s wife. I felt like I could tell her anything, and she understood and supported me. With my brother, on the other hand, it was completely different.
He got really mad and told me straight out that having a baby would ruin my life and mess up all my opportunities. I didn’t like hearing this because I knew that a lot of what he was saying was true. But at the same time I felt this spitefulness inside me, and I got annoyed with him trying to preach to me about what I should do.
My father was one of the last to find out about it. I was so scared of telling him. But eventually I toughened up. He didn’t quite know how to react, so he started to pace back and forth in the living room. I knew he was disappointed. But he didn’t get as angry as I had feared. And after we had talked a while he told me he would support me no matter what I chose to do.
My boyfriend and I talked a lot about what we should do: Neither of us had planned on becoming parents. He wanted me to have an abortion and said that he absolutely wasn’t ready to become a father. I thought a bit about adoption and felt like that was a better solution. But adoption wasn’t an option for him. How typical! He didn’t want to become a father himself, but didn’t want anybody else to have the opportunity either. We talked a lot about it, and in the end I was the one to make a decision – my decision.
With regards,
Cecilie,
Amathea client