a planned teen pregnancy

It started out because of a conversation I had with my mother.  A little seed of fear and dispair was planted that day.  I was 13.  I was in pain, I was quite litterally a drowning rat in a sinking ship.  I started to share my story of sexual abuse with a few of my friends.  After finally shaking off my relationship with a monster I had another demon on my back.  The sexual abuse that began when I was 6.  I was in the 8th grade and it began to consume me.  Something that had never truely affected my day to day life untill that time.  I didn't have trouble in school before, but in the 8th grade it changed.  I was flailing around.  Trying very hard to go back to being the normal me.  I couldn't.  I was consumed with guilt.  The fear that because I had never said a word about it, I allowed those men to continue seeking out new victims.  That there were little girls out there whose lives were being shattered and I had a responsibility to do something about it.

I decided it was time to tell my mom.  I wanted her to swoop me into her arms and do the right thing.  To stand up for me and do what I couldn't do on my own.  I needed her to be the strong one.  The one who would hold my hand and tell me it was going to be o.k.  She would hold my hand while the police questioned me and tell me to just tell them the truth about all of it, and justice will be done.  I expected her to do what a mother, any mother would do.

What I got instead was a rude awakening.  I went to her bed and lied down with her.  I told her I needed to tell her something.  She held me and asked me what it was.  Through tears and knots in my stomach and throat I was able to croak it out.  To tell her who, and when, and what.  She said nothing, while I told her what I had been through.  When i was done, I looked up into her face willing her to say the words I thought she'd say.  She sighed, and said "Angel, just don't think about it."

I was shocked.  Not just shocked but enraged!  "HOW CAN YOU TELL ME THAT!!!" I screamed pushing her away.  "How can I just not think about it?  When all I want to do is blow my brains out?  (here tears finally filled her eyes) The only way I can not think about it anymore is if I kill myself!" 

"Do you know what it's like?" I demanded, and to my shock she said, "Yes, I just don't think about it."

In that moment I knew she wouldn't do what I needed her to do.  She wouldn't stand up and fight for me, or what was more important to me at that moment, the girls that hadn't yet been touched by this ugliness.  "How could you forget?  How could you forget what it's like?"  I murmered.

After that I began to worry that some day I, too, would forget.  That I would leave my child in the care of monsters.  That I would push them away, sending them to watch t.v. with a man just so I could have some peace and quiet.  That I wouldn't see that my child was sad, and lonely, and in need.

I had a very deep need in me to love someone the way I wanted to be loved.  That in giving to someone else all the things I needed I could satisfy the hole I had in me.  Two years later my mom kicked me out of the house.  I wasn't a problem child.  I had never ever been to the principles office, never been in trouble.  But I certainly had lost all respect for her as a mother.  We didn't ever see each other, but one day we got into an argument.  She tried to tell me who I couldn't talk to anymore.  I replied, very honestly,  "Maria has done more for me that you ever did! I'm not going to stop being her friend!"  She kicked me out.  A few weeks later a pregnancy test confirmed what I already knew.  I was pregnant.

When I became a mother I found it even harder to put myself in my mothers shoes.  It's not so hard to love a child.  It's not so hard to ask them how their day at school was, or how their friends are.  It's not so hard to help out in the classroom, to be involved, to be there, to give love, to protect.

I wasn't going to go this far.  But I'll share this one last thing.

Two years ago when I finally put the monster in jail, my cousin in jail for what he did to me, I called my mother the day of the arrest.  I knew the family would be in an uproar, and I wanted her to know before they called her.  She said she was glad I did it, because she didn't have the strength to hurt her sister by putting her son in jail.  The next day she called me to let me know my cousin's brother had called her with death threats against me, and telling her off.  To which my mother replied, "Hey I had nothing to do with what Angel did."  She wouldn't call the cops to report the threat, and I couldn't do it because he didn't actually say it to me.  (WTF is up with that??)

She couldn't see how those words were like a slap in my face.  Even then my mother couldn't defend me?  Even then my mother couldn't stand up for me?  She couldn't say that I had done the right thing?  She just washed her hands of it, saying it was all on me.

Argh, I'm all angry now, but when I think about it, it reminds me of what kind of mother I want to be.