When I Was Garbage

Last year, when I was in 10th grade, I skipped a week of school. I was too scared, too humiliated, too sick and weak to leave my house. A week away from school earned me two weeks of "in-school suspension." Ten full school days I had to sit in a boxed-in desk, in a 6-by-20-foot room. Yellowing posters of needles and bottles of beer proclaiming "JUST SAY NO!" hung crookedly on the walls. I was allowed to go to the bathroom only twice daily, for 15 minutes. When you are five weeks pregnant, 30 minutes a day is hardly adequate for throwing up.

I sat at my desk, 15 years old, failing in school, pregnant, sick and terrified. I sat at my desk, rubbing my still-flat stomach and clenching my jaw tightly to hold down my vomit. "Two more hours and I can throw up," I reassured myself. I replayed the moment of truth in my mind millions of times during those two weeks. The moment I saw the second line appear on the pregnancy test stick. POSITIVE. POSITIVE. POSITIVE. But from that moment on, I wasn't positive about anything. Except the fact that I needed desperately to vomit. I wrote furiously in my blue velvet covered journal, tearing the pages with my Hello Kitty pen and smearing the ink with my tears. Fantasies of virgin-white wedding dresses and sponge painted nurseries unfolded on those blank pages, in the brief moments after bathroom breaks, when my fears were purged and flushed away. Incoherent poems and pessimistic single line entries poured out during the rest of the long days. Many pages read only "NO!" in bold letters, traced over and over, the impressions appearing on the next several pages.

I remembered facts I had learned as a freshman in "sex-education" about teenage pregnancy. Teenage mothers are a burden to society. The children of teenage mothers inevitably become crack-addicted gang members. Teenage mothers never successfully complete high school, let alone attend college. These weren't just statistics, I was led to believe, but invariable truths. I had become garbage, worthy only to sit in my isolated desk and cry to myself and throw up in a dirty bathroom stall. I was a pregnant teenage girl.

After my two weeks of suspension, I forced my pregnancy to hide in the depths of my mind. Thoughts of my future and of becoming a mother all but disappeared, forced to linger with memories of childhood and homework assignments. It was forgotten. My boyfriend and three friends who knew of my pregnancy assumed I would abort. I was not the type of girl who becomes a mother. Months began to pass, and the only sign of pregnancy were my swollen breasts and an infrequent fluttering in my belly. These signs, undetectable to anyone but myself, dredged up the fears that I thought I had buried so well. I was actually pregnant, I began to realize again, more clearly than I had since those two weeks I had spent in isolation, with only my thoughts and my morning sickness. I continued to hide my pregnancy, even as it became more and more obvious.

School was dismissed during my sixteenth week of pregnancy. My boyfriend and I were engaged in another vicious, mud-slinging fight. He threw the lowest blow. At the time I was so enraged and angry that I could not imagine a more evil act being committed. He told my parents I was pregnant. I realize now what an amazing thing he did for me, although his intent at the time was only to cause me pain. My pregnancy was real. Not only to me, but also to my parents, to my sister, to my relatives, to my newly appointed obstetrician. I was having a baby. There was no turning back. I watched a fuzzy little worm of a baby dance across a television screen, as I lay on a long sheet of wax paper, my stomach exposed and covered in chilled jelly. This was what had been causing me to vomit. This was what had been causing me to outgrow every bra I owned. This was what had caused me so much heartbreak and pain those first few weeks. What appeared to be a hand raised up, next to what appeared to be a head. "Hello mommy!" my 60-something year old OB said in a squeaky voice that I assumed was supposed to be a baby's. "I'm a baby boy." I realized then that this little worm that had caused my life to turn upside down in a matter of weeks was no worm at all. He was my son.