Reality strikes.

In the final weeks before my due date, I was made to stay home with a tutor. She's been a substitute teacher at my school. She was encouraging. I worked hard. I was determined to do my best. I was bored and lonely though. I was beginning to feel the rift my pregnancy was spreading between myself and other kids my age. Not that my true friends weren't there for me because they were, but I was beginning to feel the slightest twinges of being left out.

Not because anyone wanted me to be, or because they didn't find ways to spend time with me but because physically I had to be. I certainly couldn't have endured going to an amusement park or a concert even. No ones world stopped because I couldn't go and I wouldn't have wanted it to but those were the first indications that I was going to miss out on somethings I otherwise would have enjoyed. I would be making memories of another kind than my friends would be.

It was hot...I was due in June. I was huge. I'd gained a ton, at least forty pounds and constantly craved water. I need water all the time. I remember the last few weeks as just being hugely uncomfortable and hot. My baby was an overly active baby. I wouldn't realize that until later pregnancies because I assumed it was normal. She moved all the time. If I dropped silverware into the sink, she would startle and kick around.

One night I just couldn't sleep. Maybe because I was constantly sweaty, or because she'd been moving non-stop, or that I felt like an alien in my own body. My body was this lumpy mass that didn't feel like mine anymore. My milk started leaking in my fifth month. Everything about my body was alien to me. I got up. I didn't want to read. My mind was just going, thinking. My legs ached, were swollen. I rocked in the rocking chair, it was the middle a sticky, muggy night. Normally I listened to music. I listened to a lot of music. I played music into my stomach whenever I thought to. I was too dreary but my head was racing.

I realized how terrified I was. In a matter of weeks, days even..I would be a mother. It hit me that I had no idea what I was going to do, or how I could handle it. I was fifteen, still a kid myself. I did what kids do. I woke up my mom. She wasn't mad, she reassured me this was normal. It would be okay. We would make it work. Reality had hit and when I woke up in the morning I knew I needed a plan.