My name is Brooklin, I’m 18 years old. I’m a senior in high school and I’m 4 months pregnant…. this is my story.
Let me tell you a little about myself, I had a very tough childhood growing up, I grew up without parents, I live with my grandparents instead. Growing up I loved art & anime but what I loved the most was drawing anime or painting anime…. it become my dearest passion. It was my favorite thing in the world. I even considered about going to art school, but all of that changed. in September of 2016.
I met a guy online named Brandon. He was very sweet and shy like me. We began chatting then he eventually met me on September 24th. I walked all the way to the mall just to meet him. We had a connection, it was nothing like I ever had with anyone else…I fell in love with him that night. In early October we had unprotected sex and later in October I started having all the pregnancy symptoms…..expect vomiting. But I would feel sick, but not like I would have to throw up, my period was also late. I was suppose to get it on the 26th, but it was a couple days late. I had a 28 day cycle and my periods were never irregular. I was really worried, but thought maybe it’s late this time. I was so WRONG!
Forward to November 11th, I took a pregnancy test and BOOM! Positive! Then I wanted to see a doctor just to make sure the test wasn’t inaccurate. I went to the doctor’s on the 16th of November and sure enough I was indeed pregnant. When the doctor told me I just froze, I was scared, anxious, worried, I wanted to give up and die that day. I felt so stupid and irresponsible. I didn’t know what to do…how can I take care of a baby? I’m too young for this! People are going to judge me! I kept getting all these thoughts in my head at once. How am I getting to tell Brandon? Or my grandparents?
My grandparents eventually find out on their own and they were supportive, but I had to tell Brandon. I had to tell him, I just didn’t know how! I sent him a text message a couple days after the appointment, then I waited for a response from him. He was pretty angry and scared. At first he ended up cutting off connections with me and deleting me off everything…. it broke my heart. He also refused to tell his parents or anyone about my pregnancy, which I ended up writing them a note when I was 3 months pregnant. They responded back and they were also supportive and they even said I could live with them when I’m finished with school or when I get my GED. Brandon also apologized and now we are back together.
At first this pregnancy was a nightmare! I hated being pregnant and I was considering abortion, but now I’m happy with my baby! I had my first ultrasound and I fell in love whether Brandon was there or not! I couldn’t get an abortion from that moment on. I’m happier than I ever was.
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]
So i decided that in order to get over the past maybe i should write about it, so this is my story.
I’m 16 years old and currently staying with my grandma as things at home deteriorated. I’m in a situation were i have to grow up fast and become an adult. I try and make myself believe that i am an adult but i’m really not, instead i feel like a helpless child whose scared of the dark and has been trapped in this never-ending tunnel with no light to be seen at the end of it. I want to curl up in a ball and stay there till it goes away but i cant, I am forced to stand up and face it head on and deal with any disaster life has thrown at me.
I am 3 Months pregnant and due in April, some say congratulations, some scream and shout and then there are those who say nothing at all. To be honest i much prefer nothing to be said at all then for a bit longer i can almost pretend its not happening, that it was all just a dream. Don’t get me wrong i’m excited and can’t wait to hold my baby, this little bundle of innocence that will have to deal with this god-forsaken place we call earth.
My partner lives half way down the country trying to save up money for the baby but i don’t think i can trust him. I love him so much and he does everything for me but lately whenever i ring he is usually high, out and about with his mates instead of job hunting. I’m scared that hes not going to pull through, that he doesn’t grow into the man he needs to be and support this baby the way it deserves. I guess i’ll find out sooner or later.
I’ve been through a lot in my life, not as much as others and probably not as bad as most but it still has affected me non the less. These past few months are what i’m going to be talking about in my story. My relationship with my mum, how i got kicked out before she even knew i was pregnant and how i have realized how hard life really is.
I don’t want people to feel sorry for me i just want to share my story and hopefully it will help others with some advice i gained along the way of this treacherous road. i Hope you enjoy reading this story i shall be writing and maybe have guidance to share with me.
When Lacey Dunkin first thought about becoming a mother, she saw one thing in her future: boys. “It wasn’t that I believed I could only bond with a son—when I was daydreaming about having a family, I just saw myself with a boy,” says Dunkin, 32, of Fresno, California. Then in her mid-20s and living with her parents, Dunkin longed for a child and didn’t view marriage as a prerequisite. At her mother’s suggestion…
Dunkin considered fostering a child first and found Aspiranet, a family-services agency with offices throughout California with a special focus on foster care and adoption. Dunkin applied to become a foster parent and was certified in June 2011, after completing multiple hours of training and passing a home study. She accepted a family friend’s gift of a race-car bed, and waited.
By late September, Dunkin started to worry that as a single woman, she might never be contacted. Then late one night, a social worker called: “She told me she had a foster-care emergency placement: four sisters ages 5, 2-year-old twins, and 1,” says Dunkin. (In the interest of privacy, Aspiranet chose not to reveal the particulars of the circumstances surrounding the girls’ story.) “I was barely awake, but I said yes.” Within a couple of hours, Dunkin had four confused little girls burning off nervous energy darting around her living room. “They were small and scared, and brought in the middle of the night to this stranger’s house,” says Dunkin, who along with her mother calmed the tired, crying girls and tucked them into bed and rocked the baby to sleep.
The next morning, Dunkin called in to work and prepared to take Sophia, the eldest, to her kindergarten class. “I was making her breakfast and she asked me if I had any daughters and if she could be my daughter, which broke my heart,” says Dunkin. “She asked what she could call me and I told her, ‘My name is Lacey, and you can call me whatever you want to call me.’ By the time I found her school and dropped her off, she was introducing me as her mom.”
Later that day, Dunkin learned the girls—Sophia; the twins, Natalie and Melanie; and the 1-year-old, Kaylee— had a sibling, Lea, born the night before. (Lea temporarily went to a foster couple with prior experience with newborns.) Nine months later, the older girls reunited with their birth mom. Says Dunkin: “I tried to keep faith that they would end up where they were supposed to, and in my heart, that was here.”
After about a month, the girls’ birth mother concluded it would be too difficult for her to care for them. “She called and asked if I would take all five,” says Dunkin. “I immediately said yes.” She formally adopted them in July 2013. “They asked me if I was sure they were staying. I reassured them, ‘You’re adopted. You’re home forever.’ ” (Dunkin has her parents’ help and financial assistance for the girls’ needs.) There was one more surprise: The children’s birth mother was expecting again: a girl, Cecily, born that September. Cecily eventually also came to live with Dunkin and has been adopted since.
“I want people to know that foster children are not bad, they’re not broken,” says Dunkin. “Children are resilient, and want and need a loving home.”
Read full article at: Gail O’Connor from Parents Magazine
Image courtesy of: Kimi-G Photography http://www.kimigphotography.com
When Nick Hagelin stepped onto the stage to audition for The Voice, he had a big fan backstage in his young son Bash. Bash, along with his mom Christina, joined Hagelin on stage after the audition and it was immediately visible that Bash has special needs. Hagelin explained that doctors told them Bash might never be able to walk, but there he was, walking out onto the stage to show support for his dad.
At just nine days old Bash was diagnosed with Arthrogryposis Multiplex Congenita (AMC), a condition in which joints are permanently fixed in a bent or straightened position. Some children born with this condition do not survive, including one baby boy who was born just hours apart from Bash in the same hospital and delivered by the same midwife. That baby’s spin was bent and locked in a C shape and he was unable to breathe. In Bash’s case, his elbows were locked straight, and his hands locked in a bent position. His knees and feet were also affected. Doctors said that he may never be able to take care of himself, but his parents were determined to help their son become independent in any way they could.
“Hard work has always been a part of this boy’s life and it’s his perseverance and winning attitude in the face of adversity that make him such a remarkable individual. […] It’s never about what you can’t do and always about what you can do,” Hagelin says in a video about Bash. His family chronicles Bash’s challenges and achievements in order to raise awareness for AMC and help other families discover therapies to help their children.
Hagelin describes his son as “full of wonderment and bliss with a big appetite for life.” He says that Bash “greets each day with a smile, grateful to be alive.”
Bash’s devoted family has used every therapy available to them to help Bash, and that plan eventually paid off. When Bash was one and a half, he was finally able to move around on his own by rolling, scooting, riding his toys, and using a specialized device that allowed him to walk with assistance. His parents worked tirelessly to help him stand up and flex his arms. Then on Easter Sunday at two years old, he took his first independent steps, which Hagelin called a “miracle.”
Without elbows that bend, it has always been extremely difficult, and one would think even impossible, for Bash to feed himself, but this boy doesn’t quit. Even after so many attempts that end with the fork on the floor, he keeps going and keeps smiling. At age two, Bash became eligible for surgery on his elbows that his parents hoped would finally allow him to overcome this challenge.
“I want to feed myself,” he says as his parents prepare him for his surgery by having him perform “surgery” on a Buzz Lightyear toy. And he would. That surgery was successful, and his elbows now have a 90 degree bend allowing him to feed himself consistently. He still has a lot of work to do to strengthen his muscles which are weak and underused, but his family recently learned about a device called Magic Arms that can help him gain even more mobility.
Most of his treatments have not been covered by insurance, so the Hagelins have had to rely on donations, but Bash, now age four, has a huge network of support which has grown even larger thanks to his father’s appearances on The Voice. Bash is showing the world that children with special needs and different abilities live beautiful lives. He has a contagiously happy spirit, a hilarious sense of humor, a dimpled smile, and a very bright future.
Article by Nancy Flanders
#NICKANDBASH #THEVOICE #HAGELIN #BUZZLIGHTYEAR
Dear Becky,
On the 18th of August I found out that I was 4-5 weeks pregnant. The father of my baby was my best friend and was already in a relationship with another girl, who is also pregnant and due in September. After we found out, I immediately told my parents (which I now feel was a huge mistake). My dad was very accepting and supportive as he always is. My mom reacted in a calm manner but felt that I shouldn’t go through with my pregnancy and my best friends mother felt the same.
They pushed me to make a decision very quickly, and i was made to feel that I was incapable of raising a child on my own… as this went on, i grew more and more confused everyday, but i knew that I had to make a decision.
They promised that they would support me if I went through with the abortion and I felt that they would, surely for a week and then everyone would go on with their lives and i would be left to live with the fact that i had, had an abortion.
After a couple of days I convinced myself that doing what my mum said would be best because she knew what it was to raise children as a single parent. So i decided to have an abortion, despite the fact that i felt that I could be a mother (i sometimes got excited).
On the 26th August I went in to the clinic with my mum. The wait was long, but I was okay because I had convinced myself that what i was doing was right for me. As I the nurse did my ultrasound, i saw this tiny little thing on the monitor and I knew that, that was my little baby. It’s size was 1,73cm and I was 5 weeks and a day…
I went in to have the abortion and when i woke up from the procedure, I had so much pain, and I knew that it wasn’t just physical… it was far more than that, but I didnt say anything.
When I got home, I just focused on healing and felt absolutly nothing about what I had done. I felt okay for 2 days afterwards. On the 3rd day, I started feeling alone and so empty.
I had promised my mum that whatever I felt, I would tell her. But i somehow feel that i can’t because I don’t think she would understand the pain i feel emotionally.
I’m afraid to look at at baby products in stores, on brochures, on the television… I would quickly turn and hide from the way I feel.
I now know that I should have listened to the inner me and kept my baby. But I realise that it’s to late and I don’t know how to live with that. As I bleed everyday since then, I feel more and more hurt, and angry with myself, my family, my best friend and my dad. I just wish my dad had done more to convince me… I had gotten his email to late, had i got before my procedure I don’t think I would have gone through with my abortion…
It’s so hard to live, knowing that I was too selfish to give my child life…
Yours Sincerely
Lyndall (South Africa)
Dear Lyndall,
I’m Julie from standupgirl.com. I’m so sorry to hear the pain in your heart! I know you are angry with yourself, and feel despair. Did you know that many women who have had abortions feel the same way? It is called post-abortion syndrome, and is pretty common. I don’t say that to make you feel it is no big deal – it is. I just want you know you aren’t alone in this experience.
I haven’t had an abortion, but friends have. And they tell me that a support group was a big part of their healing process. I don’t know if there are groups in South Africa, but I assume there are. You can get more information about post-abortion syndrome and recovery from http://www.abortionrecoverydirectory.org and http://www.ramahinternational.org.
Hang in there!
love,
julie
