No. #3

"I think that she just deep down knew that that was her baby, and she didn’t want anybody else raising him."

My sister had a child that she had when she was thirteen. When she was thirteen-years-old, she thought that she was in love, and decided to have unprotected sex and she got pregnant. She was in school, but she didn’t have a lot of friends, she didn’t have a lot of positive role models in her life. Growing up, our dad wasn’t steady in our lives. I think that she wanted to run away, she was scared. She was nervous, what my mom would think and how my mom would react to that.

I lived at home. I'm 18 months older than her so it was kind of hard on me too. I felt like I was raising a kid as well. You know, on his first halloween or his first birthday, I would take him out, and hang out with him because she would be at work, or something like that, so we kind of both grew up super fast raising a baby, taking care of him.

Our dad passed away when I was 10, she was about 9. Then my mom remarried shortly after, and my mom put us on the back-burner. I think that my sister was just desperate to be loved by somebody, and so she just thought that the first guy that came around would be the one to swoop her off her feet and take care of her and they would live happily ever after, because when you’re thirteen, you’re not logical about things like that, obviously.

My mom actually told me, kind of. She pulled me aside and said, "Chelsea has something to tell you." And my mom was super upset and started talking to me about it and told me. Of course, I was devastated, I had no clue, I’m the older sister. So, I’m like, "I was supposed to have the baby first, not my baby sister!" It was kind of hard. And then after that, you really can’t be super negative. I mean, we’re super against abortion, so, I mean, I wouldn’t ever do something like that, recommend something like that.

Honestly, I think that our family pulled together and reacted pretty well to it. I mean, he’s a great little boy, and she’s super happy and she loves him, and she doesn’t regret it one bit, but it was very hard for her. I’ve seen a lot of struggles in her life because of the decisions that she made, especially the decisions to keep the baby. She wanted to be in love. She wanted to have somebody to love her, and if it wasn't gonna be the guy, then she wanted the baby to love her. And so she fell in love with her little boy, and she takes really good care of him. They're super happy, and now he’s fourteen. They do really well, and it’s fine. But, I mean, it was a really hard, hard thing for her. She lost her whole youth. She never got to go to parties, she never went to dances, she was never taken to prom, she never went to homecoming, she had to drop out of high school because she was bullied and teased. It was just too much of a burden for her to go to school and come home to take care of a baby. Even though she had a lot of support, it was really hard for her, and a lot of people were very negative to her, would tease her and taunt her. I mean, I remember in school one time, a boy came up and threw a basketball at her when she was about eight months pregnant, and hit her in the back, and told her that he wished that her baby would die.

Finding other guys to date was really hard for her. I think now, looking back, I think it’s harder now looking back because she sees how much of her adolescence was lost, and she rebels a little bit now because she feels like she never got that and so she feels like it’s kind of a right for her to live a little edgy sometimes. She's really mellowed out in the last few years, but it was really hard for a little bit for her because she kept on reverting back to trying to be a teenager, because she never had that. And so when her kid was old enough to actually leave him at home, or leave him with a babysitter, she wanted to have some fun because she never got to have that as a child. It was really hard.

She lost friends, a lot of family members were really hesitant to have to their own kids around her because they didn't know the kind of choices that she was making at the time.

People were really mean to her. We're from a very small town in Roosevelt, Utah, and there were a lot of people that were very rude. It wasn't common for people to be pregnant in my school. A lot of people had sex, obviously, I mean, she was just not the lucky one that got away without getting pregnant. But, there were a lot of people that were very rude to her, so.

It's hard for her socially, because I feel like she didn’t have that social interaction when she was growing up to be able to communicate with people now. It's really hard for her to have adult friendships because she never had childhood friendships. So now it's really hard for her in that sense. So she’s always very negative when it comes to things like that. She gets really sad because she doesn't have the same age group in kids. Like a lot of the kids that are his age, their parents are so much older than what she is, so it's really hard for her to, I guess, visualize a friendship with people that are a lot older than her as well, because they’re people that are my mom’s age. My mom was having kids — I have a brother that's two years older than my nephew, and they’re best friends and they get along really well, but that was heartbreaking to my mom too because my mom was actually getting ready to have another baby, and she was going to start having a baby when she found out my sister was pregnant. So it was really hard for her.

My sister started dating a really good guy when she was about seventeen or eighteen, and he immediately took a liking to my sister and her baby, and took really good care of them. And they ended up getting married and having three more kids, and he adopted him and took him as his own. And after that, the rest was history.

Our support system at the time was my mom, my step-dad, and me. My grandparents and aunts and uncles too, of course, but it was really hard for them to even know what to say or to do. A lot of our family members immediately said, "You need to put this baby up for adoption. What are you doing letting her keep this baby? She cannot raise a baby by herself. This is not gonna end well. Don’t do this. Make her put this baby up for adoption." But, my mom also had me and my sister young. She was sixteen when she had me, and seventeen and half when she had my sister, and so she was very young herself, and she knew that it was going to be a very hard thing for my sister herself, but my mom stood behind her and said, "If you're willing to do this, then I’m gonna support you and help you, but you’re gonna have to get a job and you’re gonna have to help support the baby." My sister immediately knew that she wouldn’t put the baby up for adoption. I think that she just deep down knew that that was her baby, and she didn’t want anybody else raising him.