Prologue

In life people judge you before they get the chance to know who you really are. It's human nature to make assumptions about people based on the way that they look, dress, or act. However if you judge everyone based on these standards you wont ever really get to know someone and form a solid relationship with them.

Over the past few years in my life I've learned to accept that people think they know everything about me, but it's become more apparent to me that I can't live my life without being burdened by judgmental stares. People walk by me on the street and look down upon me because of the decisions I've made in my life.

As a teenager it's all too common for us to be pregnant but for some reason teenage pregnancy is looked down upon in society. People look at me and think that I'm way too young to be having a child but they have no idea what I've been through to get where I am. If they knew my life story I don't think half of them would be walking down the street judging me like they do.

Maybe I did get pregnant at a really young age but that doesn't make it a mistake or something that's going to ruin my life. I see the way that people look at my stomach when they see me, thinking 'oh she's just another stupid teenager who's going to regret this for the rest of her life'. They think of me like I'm just another number to add to the teenage pregnancy statistic.

People that judge me don't know about my past with Colby, that I was raped almost two years ago, and that a year ago I barely let people touch me. They don't know that I went from being a musician to a mute and back again. You can't see these things by looking at me and you have to take the time to get to know me to fully understand how all these events affect the person that I am.

My boyfriend Matt, short for Matthew, has stood by my side through everything but he doesn't get the stares like I do. A guy recovering from cancer and just out of chemotherapy isn't all that likely to have gotten a girl pregnant. It's possible and it happened but to everyone else it just seems so completely unrealistic.

Our chances for conceiving in the first place weren't all that high anyway because my body hadn't fully recovered from the rape. I had been so close to dying the night it had happened and my body had been completely mangled. The doctors hadn't known if I would ever be able to have children so the fact that we got pregnant, in itself, was a miracle.

Even though we hadn't been trying, when we found out that I was pregnant there was only really one option. At barely eighteen years old, we were going to keep the baby and raise it so that it knew how loved it was. It was our own little miracle child and nothing anyone could say would make us think otherwise.

Now I was three months pregnant, just starting to show, and a month away from graduating high school early. My music tour across the state would end at the five month mark and by then I would be focused on preparing for the baby. Until that point I was determined to make the most of my return to the music scene.

After a year of disappearing completely I wanted to prove to my fans that I was dedicated to my career as well as my personal life. I needed music like I needed to breathe, it was that much a part of me, and I didn't want to disappoint my fans when I took a break to have my baby. They had been so supportive of my comeback and now I was going to have to step back for a while in order to figure out what it meant to be a mother.

Whatever it meant, all of the responsibilities included, I was determined to be so much more than just another statistic. I was going to prove to everybody that I wasn't just another pregnant teenager, but a real mother. My baby was going to be loved every second of every day for it's entire life because that's what I knew being a parent meant.


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