Barefoot, Pregnant and Loved

October 19, 2023

I am confident that I am loved by God and my parents.  I am also very confident that I am loved by my boyfriend, and the father of our child, because long before we decided it was time to start a family we’d had the conversation about our possible future, and even as younger teenagers we were starting the process of preparing for life together financially by working at lawn care and land scaping together, and babysitting, sometimes together, and looking for other ways to support ourselves in the event we decided to start a family while we were still in school.  Middle school taught us lots of lessons, and prepared us for a lot, probably mostly because our parents helped direct us and make us responsible teens who would become responsible adults.  They taught us about right and wrong and things that are true and things that are not true.  They taught us to discern and discriminate between things and people and situations that are right and wrong.  It’s not discrimination to look at and evaluate people based on their decisions and behaviors, it’s a prudent thing to do to help protect you and others.  We made some decisions that some people may think were wrong, but for us, the decision to have a child as teens came with the recognition and preparation for being responsible for that child and ourselves if we had to live on our own.  Before we finalized that decision, we knew if our parents asked us to leave the house that we could afford to live on our own.  Fortunately they do love us and while they were somewhat disappointed in our decision, they did support us and recognized that we could and would support ourselves if needed.  However, they wanted us to be taken care of while we were still younger and offered to work with us, and help us in other ways.  While we do not have to pay them rent or for food or insurance for ourselves, we are responsible for all of baby’s expenses.

The conversation between my boyfriend and I took place over Christmas Vacation of 2022.  He had just turned 16 and I would be turning 15 in a few months.  We were not having sex yet, and that was a conscious decision, because we wanted to for the prior several months.  We had decided that having sex, for us, was going to mean that we were ready for starting a family.  We had planned that long ago, that there would be no birth control used if we had sex because having sex meant, to us, that we were ready to be parents and ready to support ourselves financially, as I said earlier.  By that fall we were ready, as both our ‘businesses’ were growing and making more than enough monthly to support us if we had to do that.  We not only had customers, but we had grown to provide a service to both other teens (and older young adults) who wanted to work and to customers for those services mentioned earlier.  We hired our first two employees to manage the business part time, did all our own financial work, and hired a payroll company, and my Mom does our taxes (for free, thank you Mommy!)  Now we have two full time and one part time employee.  At this time we are not taking any money out of the business except enough payroll to me to pay for baby’s expenses.  Once we got to that point we knew it was time to make a decision.  We prayed about it, and made a commitment to each other that we would be together forever.  In mid February, having a snow day at school, and still doing schoolwork from home, we, for the first time, saw each other naked and made love for the first time.  It was kinda uncomfortable, we had no real experience in actually doing that, and it was sometimes funny and sometimes a little painful.  However, we were very patient and committed to each other, and after some adjustments we finally had a very intimate experience that I will never forget.  The feeling of intimacy and closeness that comes from love making was more than I had ever experienced, and it just makes me want to be with him all the time.

It was one time during the two weeks after that day that we got pregnant.  In retrospect I’ve since learned that it is not very common for girls to get pregnant during the first cycle.  Yes, it happens, but not as much as people think, I guess they say about 30%, so it was not as rare as I thought, and maybe younger girls are more likely?  I don’t know.  All I know now is that I’m still not ovulating, so it’s not time for me yet.