“I’m 16 and I think I’m pregnant”,

I said to the doctor I had found in the phone book.  He looked almost as young as me.  He had just started his medical practice.  I felt I could read his mind, “O God…why me?”

 

Of course he wanted to know if I had told my parents about my concern.  HA!  As I have said, our family went to church three times a week and there was no way I was going to admit anything unless I absolutely had to.

 

He recommended that I take a urine sample to a local lab and have it tested.  This was back in 1961 and it seems archaic to think of that method now, in the age of instant pregnancy tests that anyone can get at any drugstore.  Back then, a rabbit had to die which made me wish I could.  Not really though.

 

I remember going down to the car to tell my boyfriend (who was 6 months younger than me) the bad news.  For some reason, we laughed and laughed.  

 

Back then, abortions were unheard of, at least in my circle of friends.  I tried everything to make it go away.  We ran up and down a hill in 100 degree heat, I drank about a quart of Epsom salts (don’t ever do that), I prayed, etc.  Nothing worked.  My breasts just kept getting bigger and bigger.  

 

School had started and we were Seniors.  He was in the “Senior Mens Honor Society” and had the promise of a college degree and a career in Engineering.  He was such an enigma.  He was Mexican, rode a Harley Davidson motorcycle to school and had a brilliant mind.  Math and Science were his fields.  I was lucky to get through “C” math.  I hated math.

 

We finally had to tell our parents.  My dad was always a man of few words so I told him first.  He was stunned and said “This is going to just kill your mother”.  I thought he was wrong about that.  She was tough as nails and if anyone was going to get “killed” it was most likely me.  That was a dark period in my life.  I remember one night I was asleep and I was dreaming I could hear my mother talking.  I couldn’t understand her muffled words but I could tell she was highly agitated.  I was awakened by her sitting down on the bed and leaning over me and I woke up screaming because I thought she was going to kill me.

 

I quickly realized it was just a bad dream and that even though she was really mad and very disappointed in me, that was the extent of it.  I found out later that my sister Sandra had been the one she had been talking to and it was their voices that were muffled because they were in the living room and it was a small house.  My sister had been doing a good job of “guilt tripping” my mom about the way she had been treating me and that it wasn’t right no matter what I had done…and it worked.  My mom calmed down after that and accepted it.

 

We were married at the County Courthouse with just the lady Judge and her two assistants as our witness’s.  I was about five weeks pregnant when we got married.  If we were going to go through with getting married, I wanted to do it very quickly so that we could keep up the pretense that we had eloped over the summer and got pregnant immediately.  Then when the baby was born we could say it had come a little early.  It is amazing now to think of those old fears of “What will people think?” and what I was willing to do for the sake of appearances.

 

For some reason, his father would not let us live together for the first few months.  My young husband put his foot down at Christmas and told his parents that he was moving in with me and my family.  By this time my mom had just fallen in love with him.  He taught her how to heat up tortillas on an open flame by quickly grabbing them on the edge and flipping them over to heat on the other side.  She would always get distracted though and then the house would smell like burnt corn.  It always made her laugh when she did that.

 

I had figured that I should pro-act the situation at school, so I went in to see the Dean of Girls and told her that we had gotten married over the summer and that I was now pregnant.  What a wonderful woman she was not to say “What a load of horse manure that story is”.  What she said instead was “Sharon I want you to continue to go to school and as soon as you start to feel uncomfortable being here in your condition…you let me know and I will get you a Home Tutor so that you can graduate with your class”.  Jeeze Louise…what a blessing that was.

 

By January of ‘62 I was going to school in smocks and was miserable so I finally got the tutor and finished up my Senior year with “home studies”.  Our son was born on May 8th so we were free to go to the Senior Ball.  What a night that was.  I was breast feeding and my mom (who was a seamstress) had made me a spaghetti strap dress and as I was getting ready for the Ball, she took a whole roll of Saran Wrap and started wrapping it around me. She went around and around and around with that plastic wrap until she was convinced that no milk would seep out and spoil the dress.

 

We went to dinner with two other couples and it was so much fun.  We had just the best time pretending we were like all the other kids, but as the night wore on, my milk kept coming in and coming in and I started to look like Jane Mansfield on Steriods.  I won’t go into what happened when we got home and he cut me out of the cellophane wrap as I stood leaning over the bathtub, but it was another one of those situations where he and I laughed and laughed.  

 

A few weeks later came graduation.  We were both in Choir and I remember standing up there singing at the Graduation Ceremony and hearing our baby cry in the audience.  In a way, we were just babies ourselves but it was time to grow up and do it fast.

 

To be continued…

 

(Thanks for listening to this part of my story.  It is so wonderful to share it.  I know that things are very different now with many other choices for young women that find themselves in this situation.  But I believe the feelings of fear and uncertainty are the same.  It all does come out right in the end though.)

 

Sharon