Pride Over Pity (2 page)

Every time my mom got help I secretly held onto a little bit of hope that she might look for a new job or change her way of life. But in the end nothing ever changed because it seemed like she never truly wanted to get better. I think that she was afraid of change because it would have meant struggling for a higher standard of living. It’s easier to crawl around on the ground than it is to stumble while trying to achieve full balance. I think my mom always chose crawling because she preferred comfort to working for a better life

I did too in a way. Without much adult supervision, I got away with anything I wanted to. I had too much pent up anger and too much freedom for a teenager. Smoking pot became the hobby I’d never had as a little girl. It made me feel like I was part of a group. But it didn’t take away the hurt or fury I was holding onto. If anything, it contributed to my self-destruction.

Meanwhile, I was getting into fights at my high school. At first my defiance was mostly verbal. Anyone I disagreed with would get attitude from me. I talked back to teachers, peers, anyone who rubbed me the wrong way. Occasionally, I got physical and would throw a punch at the person bothering me. The consequences for my aggressive behavior began with in-school suspensions, but eventually I landed a ten-day out of school suspension. In retrospect, this acting out was an outlet for my anger and frustration. It also placed in me a particular group of friends the way smoking pot did.

By the end of my freshman year, the trouble I was getting into escalated to the point that there was no way I could pull a solid four years at that school, so I moved back to Nazareth with my mom and her boyfriend to start anew as a sophomore. My life felt a bit like the movie,
Thirteen
. I had started out as a good kid, but just like Evan Rachel Wood’s character, I felt alone and angry and this led me to make very poor choices. Although I can’t deny I sometimes enjoyed the lack of parental supervision, it was hard to be left alone. Children and Youth services came and went. They tried intervening, but with no proof of neglect, they had no jurisdiction. I had all the basics: food, clothing, and shelter.

TOP: Me, 1 year old. BOTTOM: Me, 3 years old

It was hard for me feeling that my mother seemed to choose alcohol over me, but my sense has always been that she drank to mask the pain of losing her sister, Jodi, who was killed in a car accident when they were in high school. My mother has never really recovered from the loss.

She and Jodi were opposites. From what I can piece together, they had a sisterly rivalry. Representing the two spectrums as varsity cheerleaders, my mom was the partier and Jodi was the studious one who kept out of trouble. The night of my Aunt Jodi's death, they had gone out together, but eventually parted ways. At around round 11:00 p.m. word had begun to spread about a terrible car accident. My mom ran to the scene, fearing the worst.

Her memory of the event is slow, faded, and possibly factually incorrect. She remembers hundreds of bystanders looking on as her sister was placed in the ambulance. In reality, there weren’t many people present at the scene of the accident. Maybe my mom imagined a crowd to feel like she was surrounded and not alone watching her sister being pulled from the wreckage of the accident. She was the one who made the phone call to my grandparents, informing them that Jodi had been in a serious accident. At the hospital, they learned Jodi was brain dead. My mom told me that my grandparents made the painful decision to pull her off of life support.

My Uncle Jerry, my mom’s brother, believes that when someone dies all the bad is forgotten about that person. Maybe the large lurking shadow my mother seems to always be running from is Jodi’s memory. No matter what my mom does, she can never live up to the memory of the “good” sister who died so tragically.

The demons that had consumed my mother were now doing permanent damage to my well-being. As I settled into my new high school, our bad habits followed us. The freedom to go where I pleased resulted in me smoking constantly, more than ever before. Smoking weed had become my escape from loneliness.

Chapter 2

Sidewalk Sex

If I ever gaze at the past, I shudder. I shudder to count how many times I mistakenly thought I was loved. I quiver unpleasantly to recall the person I used to be and how I acted in some of my relationships. Looking back, it’s not surprising that I turned to boys for love so early. I needed appreciation. I needed to feel worthy. Most of all I needed support.

I had my first boyfriend in eighth grade, nothing serious but very exciting. He turned my cheeks red and made me giggle. I became a silly little girl around him. We were only dating for a few months, but because some of my girlfriends were sexually active I felt pressured into wanting to get rid of my virginity, too.

A year before that, I barely knew what sex was. Now, suddenly, here I was pushing my boyfriend to do what we had just learned not to do in sex education. If
Mean Girls
had come out a little earlier I would have learned, “Don’t have sex because you will get pregnant and die.” Honestly, that might have been enough to scare my naïve self. But as it was, the little knowledge I had just made me curious and experimental, not frightened.

My inexperience shone brighter than the sun that spring. The April weather was still a little shaky, just warm enough to allow teens and wildlife to come out from hibernation. There are very few stimulating events in rural Pennsylvania, so we did what most bored teenagers do—got into trouble in our pursuit of something remotely interesting to do.

As young kids, we had no cars or empty apartments to have privacy in, so we pretty much hung out on the streets of our neighborhood. One night, as my friends rounded the corner, my boyfriend and I hung back. The concrete sidewalk had no summer warmth. It was a cold reminder we were still a couple months shy of sun bathing. Suddenly, my pants and underwear were pulled down while my shirt stayed on. Our movements and his touch were unromantic. What should have been natural felt stiff. The instinctual was off. The worst part was my friends knew what we were up to.

The sun seemed to set and rise in my head, when in reality the big moment was over in a couple of minutes. Why does losing your virginity have to be so weird? I barely had any inclination then as to why, but in retrospect it is so obvious. I was too young to understand that I wasn’t ready—physically or emotionally—for sex. I believed then that I had to have sex to keep up with my friends, so I just wanted to get the embarrassing virgin sticker off my forehead. Now, I wish I hadn’t ripped it off so quickly. Virginity isn’t a band-aid. There’s no wound. In fact, as a virgin you’re unscathed in those terms.

Once it was over, I was relieved to cover myself up and run home, blood trickling down my leg. Sex education didn’t warn us girls about all the blood. They should have been clearer. I wasn’t expecting a second monthly gift from Mother Nature, yet it sure seemed like she was being extra generous. Either that or
Mean Girls
was right: I was dying.

I didn’t feel any humiliation because there was no one at home to question my appearance. The lights were out, so I changed out of the evidence in darkness. Now that it was over, I was relieved. I was actually comforted by the thought that I was somehow a “new” girl. In the end, my first boyfriend and I were together for a year, which is a lifetime if you’re in the eighth grade. The few more times we had sex, it was still awkward and strange. The extremely uncomfortable nature of these experiences convinced me that this kind of intimacy should be reserved for long-term relationships only. However, although I wish I had reserved my first time for someone very special, I refuse to regret something I can’t change now.

***

In ninth grade I started seeing Toby. Although I would definitely put him into the long-term boyfriend category, during the two years that we were on-again-off-again, sex wasn’t a part of our relationship. He was a typical popular guy who everyone wanted to be friends with, except that he also had whirlwind of issues because his mother and father had recently split up. The anger was justified in every way, but I was in no place to be someone else’s therapist—I needed one of my own.

Being asked to sleep over a guy’s house is usually unsubtle code for sleeping together, but Toby was usually more straightforward so I didn’t initially feel too pressured when he asked me to stay over his house one night. As soon as I arrived, his friend started making fun of him about us not having sex. The dumb peer pressure pissed me off and their typical boy banter made me feel less close to Toby as the night wore on. Still, I was thankful for his friend’s irritating presence because Toby’s parents were out and I didn’t want him to believe we’d take advantage of that to have sex. Unfortunately, his friend ended up leaving so we went to bed. He took me by the hand and led me up to a room upstairs. He pleaded his case and I quickly denied him.

“Let’s have a baby so we can stay together forever.”

The idea was absurd but Toby wouldn’t take no for an answer. Everything about that night is a haze besides his proposition. Mostly I remember the sensory details. It went from being a dark room to me feeling just as pitch black as the environment. I didn’t want to sleep with Toby, but he persisted. Denying him seemed fruitless. I believed Toby loved me so I decided I could give him this one thing as long as he wore a condom. He obliged my one request, yet something was off—literally.

“Where’s the condom?” I questioned him when it was over.

“I took it off.” The four words caused my heart to stop flittering for a moment. Off? He took it off?

“WHY did you take it off?”

Most guys would be freaking out, but his shrug was careless.

I should have been furious, but I was too terrified and consumed with worry. After that, Toby ignored all my attempts to communicate with him. I had never felt so down on myself, ever. Why was he shutting me out? I don’t know why he thought getting me pregnant would be the answer to his problems (especially since he wouldn’t talk to me) but to my dismay, his wish came true.

I took my first pregnancy test at fifteen in a Walmart bathroom. The little money scraped up from coins and random bills could have been enough to pay for a cute shirt I had been eyeing up at the mall, but instead it bought me a pregnancy test that offered a blurry picture of my future—a high school dropout, buried under piles of dirty diapers.

The only person I had to turn to was the one person I did not want to tell. My mom needed to know, though. Unfortunately, she seemed less concerned for my future than she was for her reputation. I think she felt that if became a knocked up teen, she’d be looked at as a failure. She was adamant that I would not be allowed to deliver this baby into the world, even though deep down that was what I wanted. I remember my mother was so proactive about preventing my pregnancy from going any further that she sought out Toby’s family to demand money to pay for the abortion. She threatened to press charges, which she knew meant he would lose his shot at a college scholarship. His family had no choice unless they wanted their son to be ruined.

Our parents made us attend abortion counseling sessions at a local clinic, where we were required to watch informative videos and to speak with a counselor. Between my mom and the counselor, my choices seemed limited. I remember my mom saying that I wouldn’t be able to live with her and asking where I was planning to live. Those words from my mom impacted me just as hard as the videos did. It made me feel like I would be kicked out of the house and that my family would turn against me. The counselors reminded me that I was sixteen and I didn’t have a car, a job, or even a license.

The next step proved to be as disturbing to me as the counseling sessions. Toby’s dad and my mom picked a discreet location. We met at a Wawa—one I can’t even drive by anymore without having an anxiety attack—to make the exchange. I had overheard my mom say to a friend that she might ask for more money than what the abortion cost. Was she trying to profit from the unfortunate situation? Watching through the window of my mom’s car, I witnessed their stoic expressions as they made the no nonsense handover. The exchange looked a bit like a poorly planned drug deal in broad daylight. That was it. The money would pay for the abortion to terminate my baby.

My mom tried to confuse the situation by telling me that I had been RAPED. Rape is such a scary subject. What exactly constitutes rape? It’s such a muddy word. Abortion is even darker, although less murky. The two together turned my heart to palpitations. These scary words belonged to an adult world that at the time meant little to me because I thought Toby loved me. How childish I was. I was so naïve that I had no idea how grave a situation I was in. I cared more about Toby loving me than my own well-being. But it was beginning to dawn on me that maybe his “love” wasn’t good for me.

***

On a birthday that should be remembered fondly, my happiness wasn’t the priority or theme of the day. The sixteenth birthday bash I threw in my head had cake, friends, and many jokes of how everyone should watch the road for my crazy driving. I wanted to be at the DMV getting the permit that would give me freedom from the hell I sometimes lived in. I wanted to be opening a few presents, hoping for clothing. But there was no joyful celebration for me that day. There were no gifts to receive, only one to be taken.