Four years ago, Lauren came home from college for the weekend with an excruciating announcement to tell her parents. By the time she was packing up to head back to her dorm room, though, the right moment still hadn’t presented itself.
Time was running out, and Lauren wasn’t going to be able to hide the truth much longer.
With a four-hour drive ahead of her and short on daylight, Lauren’s mother urged her to get on the road. Finally, Lauren sat down on the floor, took a deep breath, and broke the news.
Midway through her second year of college, Lauren was pregnant. With twins.
“I felt like when I was little, you know, when you lied about something and they know you’ve lied, so you’ve eventually got to admit it,” Lauren said. “All I could hear was my heart beat at that point. So I finally blurted it out and she just looked at me and hugged me. And then she said, ‘Okay, you’ve got to tell your dad.’”
Adjusting to a New Reality
Growing up in a prominent family of a large church in the Bible Belt, Lauren had never pictured herself having that conversation with her parents. What started out with a feeling of dread, however, turned to relief over time as the family began to process their new reality together.
On her drive back to school, Lauren made two phone calls to tell her grandparents on both sides—both grandmothers had the same reaction: “Oh, Lauren”—so by the time she arrived back at campus, the major players were all in the know.
Now all she had left to do was follow through with a workload that included 18 units of undergraduate work, 25 hours a week on campus in the admissions department and 35 hours a week on her feet at Texas Roadhouse.
That, and adjust to life as a single mother with a high-risk pregnancy that would land her in the emergency room just a few weeks after she told her parents they were soon to become grandparents.
Tweet This: “We need to celebrate those girls who didn’t get an #abortion.” #prolife
“I just holed up the rest of that year,” Lauren said. “I told a couple of my really close friends, an I started showing way sooner than what a normal person would, so it became harder to hide. I never talked to people about it, and sort of made a wall, so nobody ever asked me or confronted me about it.”
After wrapping up her spring semester, Lauren—a straight-A student who started her collegiate career as a sophomore—transferred to a college in her hometown and moved in with her parents during last few weeks of her pregnancy.
By the time her two sons, Christian and Caden, arrived in mid-summer—a month ahead of schedule and both under five pounds—Lauren was so immersed in her studies that she brought her schoolwork with her to the hospital during the first month the boys were outside the womb, at the hospital NICU.
“They were there to basically try to learn how to eat,” Lauren said. “That was a brutal month, just going back and forth. Because of the pain medication I was on, I wasn’t allowed to drive yet, but I was there every day.”
Paying it Forward
When Lauren told them she was pregnant, one of the first calls her parents made was to her great uncle, David, who had been a key financial and visionary supporter of a pregnancy center in her hometown since 2000.
Today, when he’s not bragging up his status as the boys’ favorite uncle to the rest of the family, David relishes every moment with his 3-year-old nephews, driving them around his farm and introducing them to his stock of cattle.
“Our entire family loves these little boys are we are so grateful they received the gift of life,” David said. “We are so proud to be supporters of the pregnancy center and appreciate the way they helped Lauren through a difficult time. Our entire family has been blessed by the work of this organization and we look to the future as we watch the boys mature into great young men.”
Lauren knew her parents would be in her corner as a single mother, and they have been nothing but supportive of their daughter and grandsons, providing them a home for the first year-plus of the boys’ lives while Lauren finished school, began her career, and launched a floral business she has run out of her home ever since.
Moving back to her hometown, Lauren took advantage of the pregnancy center’s parenting classes, and the center’s executive director was one of the first visitors to come congratulate her while she was recovering in the hospital.
Though it wasn’t her first experience at a pregnancy center—she had gone to a location near campus to get a free ultrasound early in her pregnancy—the help Lauren found at the center her uncle had helped build has gone a long way toward her becoming the mom she is today.
“It was great just to have somewhere to go where other people were going through the same things that you were,” Lauren said. “They understood the emotional state I was in, and they always made a point to make me feel loved and not shameful or judged. They just always, genuinely, 100 percent meant what they said, and that was very rare for me at that point in my life.
“They just thoroughly radiated care for me and the love of Christ.”
Celebrating Life and Courage
Lauren’s journey to motherhood hasn’t been an easy one, particularly in a small town and home church where any glance can be interpreted in a negative light. Noticing a pattern of strangers peeking at her ring finger while she was pregnant, for instance, Lauren resorted to wearing a fake wedding ring out in public.
“It’s not so much the spoken word as the unspoken word—people’s body language and the way they look at you when they think you’re not looking,” Lauren said. “When you’re already so hyper-sensitive to that fact you’ve got a yoga ball sticking out in front of you with no wedding ring on, you notice the stares.”
Though she’s a natural optimist and was treated with love and acceptance by her family, as well as many in her church and community, Lauren said she wishes more of her peers and fellow church members would have been more vocal in their support of her during her pregnancy.
This side of her rather public unexpected pregnancy, Lauren has been contacted by friends and acquaintances looking for advice and help either for themselves or for the women in their lives who are battling through a similar situation.
In each of those encounters, Lauren is quick to point out the need to cherish the lives represented in each pregnancy—planned or unplanned, married or unmarried.
“There’s no way to train a congregation not to stare at someone,” Lauren said. “But we need to celebrate the fact that people are choosing life, and when they do, they’re sacrificing their pride and their ego, and choosing—ultimately, humiliation. Not that it’s humiliating to have a baby, but it’s humiliating to be like, ‘Look what I did wrong. Look at my sin.’
“We need to celebrate those girls who didn’t get an abortion. They didn’t choose to take the easy way out, the quick fix. They made that decision to follow through, whether that means adoption or to raise the child on their own.”
[Resource from: https://pregnancyhelpnews.com/proud-mom-of-twins-lauren-rejected-the-easy-way-out]
Finding Out I was Pregnant. To start off, I kind of figured out that I was pregnant before actually going to the doctors. My menstrual cycle is like clockwork (ALWAYS ON TIME) and I knew that I had had a few times of unprotected sex. So when I didn’t get my period the first month, I thought well it might be stress-induced because I was crammed with school work.
Then I started getting sick and becoming more fatigued, which was unusual because I never get sick to my stomach. So I got worried and I let my boyfriend know something may be going on. He was like your fine, you are just really stressed and need to relax and this was just a warning sign of my body telling me to rest. So I pushed it aside.
Month two came and still no period. So I went to my adviser. Well, I guess things aren’t kept confidential anymore because somehow my grandmother all of a sudden wants to take me to the doctors because my adviser called her. So the day came for the appointment and I was really nervous because my grandmother didn’t know that I started having sex again (previously celibate).
The doctor calls me back and ask for my last menstrual cycle which I don’t remember. Next, she asked for a sample of urine which I gave. Then she comes out and my grandmother says that I need to go on birth control, but the doctor stops her and says the test came back positive. And my face drops.
Next words that came out of my grandmother’s mouth which really hurt me were “So you’re going to terminate this baby”. I can’t believe she asked me that question. I literally wanted her to just leave.
I called my boyfriend and gave him the news. And at first, he was yelling, then came crying but after a hour, he calmed down. He asked so many question like he didn’t know how girls got pregnant. I am nervous and scared to the point I don’t know what to say or do, or even talk about.
Oh, where do I begin? The journey from three years ago to today is such a dramatic and life changing one that I can only barely remember where I started, but everyday I am reminded of God’s incredible grace. Before I begin, I should mention that, no… I did not have an abortion. However… “no one would blame me”… or so I kept being told.
Alright, I suppose my name is as good a starting point as any. My mom likes to call me Nutmeg. I am 23 and have a wonderful blonde-haired, blue-eyed wonder for a son, despite being dark-haired and brown-eyed myself. He’s 2 and a half and though some days do leave me sad over how he came to be, I’ve never regretted having him once, but I suppose I should elaborate a little…
Once upon a time, I had a boyfriend. Not a great one, but I loved him, despite all of our problems. However, eventually our differences came to a head as we finally agreed that we were not the coolest people when we were together. For the sake of our lease at our apartment, we decided to stay together until it expired in a few months. I realized soon how resentful it made me and how angry I was that our relationship wasn’t going to work out… We had been together a few years and had even discussed marriage a few times. As my bitterness grew, we fought more and more, and I started making poorer and poorer choices. Perhaps the poorest choice I made came just after midnight on May 18th. We had quarreled once again and I had gone out to drink away my problems. While out with some girl friends, we made fast friends with, seemingly, some sort of sports team from up north. They offered a dip in their hotel pool and we eagerly accepted. Perhaps if we’d been any more sober, we would have realized that hotel pools aren’t generally open at 1 am.
We went anyway and I immediately went to change in their room while my friends decided to check the pool out with them. When I had come out from the bathroom, my escort informed me that my friends had left because the pool was closed. I silently cursed myself for not thinking of this before. It wasn’t long, though, before he began to express exactly how my bathing suit made him feel. I was less than receptive to his advances, but sadly no was not an option with him. I’ll skip the gory details, but to put it briefly, my almost ex-boyfriend came to pick me up after the police called him to come. Initially he was condemning until he noticed the bruises up and down my arms, at which point he realized how my will had been completely broken. I cried hysterically before going into complete shock.
The next morning around 6:45, I insisted on going to work, despite my mentally unstable condition. I worked as a nanny and the mother easily recognized that I was not myself, but thought I was hungover and lectured me extensively for it. I said nothing to her as all I was really open to feeling was pain. She came home early that day to confront me with the truth. She worked as a medical resident and had overheard the police that had come to my rescue the night before. I live in a small town and things like this don’t happen often. By their description, she had pieced together what had really happened. She expressed her concern and asked why I hadn’t told her. I said that it hadn’t really processed and I didn’t know how to talk about it… which was true. Luckily, I had the rest of the week off as their family had to attend a wedding out of state.
For the next two days, I refused to get up from my bed. I had taken Plan B when my boyfriend picked me up, but I had this gnawing intuition that it was a futile attempt. Finally, after days of trying to comfort me and being by my side, my soon to be ex brought me back to the bed in which my soul felt like dying and knelt on one knee. After everything that had happened, he had realized that he would’ve rather died than let anything happen to me. I accepted and the next evening we celebrated our engagement with a few friends. Four weeks later, we had purchased a house, determined to move on with our lives. On our second to last night in our apartment, we finally became intimate again after a month of not allowing him to touch me. Unfortunately, a mere week later, I discovered I was pregnant.
I had previously rejected the idea of a pregnancy resulting from such a brutal and horrific rape. I felt as though my body had betrayed me in allowing this conception to take place. I felt as though God had abandoned me. Although I knew it was already a child (I have always been staunchly pro-life), I couldn’t help but contemplate the logistics of an abortion. Everyone I talked to came me the same sugar coated excuse… “No one would ever blame you”, “This wasn’t your fault, so you do not have to deal with it”, “You could never live with an everyday reminder like that”. I went to the doctor, where I received my first vaginal exam. They say your first is the worst, but then also that pregnancy makes it worse. It was unspeakable. Combined with the added inability to be touched without flashbacks and memories, I hurried everyone out as I was told to get dressed again and cried hysterically when it was all over. She had tried to get a heartbeat, but was unsuccessful. Later, my mom told she suspected I had already miscarried. I was scheduled for an ultrasound in three days.
I suddenly found myself praying for the life of my unborn child, realizing that I couldn’t let him go.
Okay, so here is my story. I need advice on what to do and if I’m making the right choices:
I am 17. I have been on the depo shot for 3 years. I have been off now 6 months or so and I had a one-day period on Aug 16th and that was all. Then on September 3rd, I had what some people told me was ovulation and had unprotected sex. Then the next day, I started spotting for 4 days off and on and the next week. Afterward, I started having real bad headaches and nausea. I still have those same symptoms. Please help !!! (:
Girl:
Things sure have changed fast! Just three weeks ago, I was wishing to be back with him… I trusted him! He betrayed me.
I’m negative; he’s positive. We broke up three weeks ago. On the 31st of August, I found out. I couldn’t keep it down. I started to tear up because I knew the truth…
Though he accused me of ‘overreacting’, “Are you serious!? So you actually think I cheated on you? Seriously though, you don’t care anymore either? What, no I did not cheat on you. But believe whatever you want. She’s whispering into your ear still. For one thing, those tests can be inaccurate. For another thing, this whole time, this stuff was going through your head and you didn’t think about talking about it with me, but whatever. You wanna be through with me, fine!” That hurt my feelings, it really did.
I never did anything besides love and respect you. Never once did I see another woman. So no, I can’t tell you the answers you’re looking for, but whatever we’re over, right?
You told me not to message you when I’m drinking. Why would you do that to me then? You may go to university, but that doesn’t mean I’m an idiot and don’t know what I’m talking about when it comes to this. You’re breaking my f-ckin heart when I did NOTHING.
Boy:
I’m not the type to cheat. I don’t care what she tells you or what you think you know cuz of some stupid test. You hurt me, you really did…
My mom’s family, all my friends, know that I would never do that to anyone, let alone you. And you haven’t figured that out yet? After how long?
Oh, and my mom’s boss just stopped by. She said it’s possible you could have had a falsified test. Thank you very much for jumping the Gun on me. STDs can stay in your system for up to six months which I’ve told you before and an STD test has about what was it a 78% chance of being correct … I can’t believe this. You get a negative and immediately assume I was cheating then dumped me.
I felt like I begged him to take me back, he said he needed time, the more time he took the more I let go.
I can’t do it anymore, I can’t trust him. I try, I’ve tried so much I have nothing left to give him!
I’m broken, yet I’m trying again to love… Can I? Or when I get back to Canada this Christmas, will he get to me again, confuse me, make me unsure?
All I know is the woman I talk to is sincere, she means something to me, and that something grows every week we talk…
Every week he fades away. Please don’t come back. Just stay away until we are able to just be friends again….
Please stop me from breaking. I don’t want to use her as a crutch, so I keep a distance, but every conversation we get closer!
I’m scared and excited…
So I pour everything I have into my work and my education, so pretty soon there will be nothing to give, no reason to either. Or is that mentality worse than hanging on?
Dear me,
It’s been a year since I miscarried. Wow, has a lot happened…
Let’s start with how messed up I have had to become to realize how hypocritical I’ve been, and how hypocritical I was. I’ve been intimate with 5 different guys, and it’s taken me being in 13 different relationships to realize this, as well as having met someone I truly feel is worth my time, attention, and whole-hearted affection.
I’m telling people not to smoke, either weed or cigarettes. I’m advising them against drinking. I’m telling them not to be me.
This whole time, I’ve been tainting myself, feeling more and more like I’m worthless. Why would God even have bothered to create a royal mess like me?
Let me bear it all on my sleeve. I was a spoiled child that made my mom’s PTSD worse when I was with her. While the rest of my family was in Germany. I wallowed in self-pity because I wasn’t strong enough to tell about when I was sexually assaulted twice. Though when I was strong enough, people rejected my pain and acted as though it didn’t exist.
After that, I went into relationships trying to feel, even if it was the cold touch of another. When that didn’t help I threw myself into smokes and pot, rebelling and getting worse. I was constantly taking one step forward, and two steps back.
It was two years ago when I went over the top. After he left, I went to three others’ touch. I started dating one and fell pregnant. I was only two months along. Most think that’s not enough.
It was enough for me. I looked at that little being that passed right through me, it had caused me so much pain. It was probably nothing compared to what I had done to it and I have never been able to forgive myself.
I kept what happened a secret for months, even from its father, because he had already had a child with another girl.
My friend told me she knew what happened, I looked at her shocked thinking ‘How? I never told anyone!’. I burst into tears and told my then boyfriend.
Fast forward to today, I’m talking to someone who’s actually worthy, but how? How do you mention something so tragic without them thinking something awful about you?
It’s bad enough I can’t forgive myself, and it’s even worse that it would have been 1 year this august. I try not to imagine what my child would have looked like.
Though how do you Not?
Dear me,
Why? Why was I so ignorant and stupid?
