“Oh my God, you’re pregnant! Well, your life is over now.”
I can still hear those words leaping from my mother’s mouth as I shamefully explained that I was eight weeks pregnant.
I looked through tearful eyes to find the end button on my cell phone to hang up.
After my mother called me everything but a child of God, I settled into a melancholy mood and began to examine the shattered pieces of what I had planned as a picture-perfect future.
I was living with my boyfriend, a decision we made after we discovered that our carefree relationship was about to take a drastic turn. The stress of this new information put a huge strain on what I thought was a great one-on-one relationship.
In my mind, I planned on marrying him, spending quality time with him and being able to travel the world before we began a family of our own.
But all that changed.
It was supposed to be my last semester, after which I’d be working as a news producer somewhere, climbing the ladder to a high-paying job. But with the upcoming arrival of a baby, it appeared all that was over.
After a few nights of swollen eyes from relentless crying, I finally made the decision that God would decide whether my life was over, and since he hadn’t actually taken it, I knew it was not over.
I pressed through three and a half months of morning sickness, one month of bed rest and many sleepless nights in the hopes of walking across the graduation stage. On Dec. 16, 2005, I did just that.
My beautiful daughter was born in June 2006, and I returned to school this semester to receive a second bachelor’s degree in Spanish.
After this, I will go on to graduate school. The days of women getting “knocked-up” and their lives being over are a thing of the past.
I am not trying to make this sound like a walk in the park because it’s not. If you can delay having a child, delay it! I am simply trying to let you know that you can make it.
Sure, life will go from having numerous friends, partying and drinking every weekend, and living a carefree lifestyle, to crying – you and the baby – changing diapers, visiting the doctor a ridiculous number of times and being just plain ole exhausted.
But again I say that you can make it.
All it takes is a little discipline. You need to know that your little one is expensive, and you have no choice but to provide for him. I have been told that I am lucky because my “baby daddy” and I are still together. Is it not supposed to be like that? I have his help. But even if you are a single parent or a soon-to-be single parent, the message remains the same: You can make it.
Tesia Poulos is Spanish student from Miami. She can be reached at TesiaP@hotmail.com.