Sixteen is not an Ideal Age to Have a Baby.

It’s not simple to say my mother doesn’t recognize herself in the life that has become hers.

As often is the case with many mothers, her kids and her husband have taken more than she gave them. Mothers are paid in emotional dividends of hugs, kisses and baby snores.

When something is too unbearable to face, a mother conjures the love she gathers from her family and uses the warmth as a currency to turn her love into pride. Mothers live in these moments. If they’re lucky the moments they relive are joyous.

My mother was quiet and shy during her school years. Equal parts mousy and pretty she was the average teenage girl; the kind that blended perfectly into the middle of the pack. It wasn’t long into her sophomore year in high school she was invited to a house party from a boy she found interesting enough. Barely 15 years old, she arrived at the party a virgin and unbeknownst to her left the party that night — pregnant. Biology happens.

My mother told me once when I was young she intended to give the baby she was carrying inside her up for adoption the moment she gave birth.

Teen pregnancies are a difficult path to navigate forcing the expecting teen to carry twice the weight of shame — a share of shame for herself and another share on behalf of her parents. This was 1975, sex before marriage wasn’t uncommon, but times were more conservative than now. Adoption was the most likely option to consider.

When the moment came and the healthy baby girl arrived, my mother told me she asked the nurse if she could hold the baby just for a moment. The nurse complied and placed the infant on her chest. My mother never let her daughter go and walked out of the hospital a sudden and rather unprepared teenage mother.

Telling the younger me that a parent could just give up a kid and leave it for a stranger to take away was far too disturbing for me to process.

My mother only spoke of that story once when I was small. She has never mentioned that story since and I’ve never had the courage to ask her about it again. My mother’s truths are often very complicated to follow and I’ve never pursued this storyline with her. I always figured the truth didn’t matter because I have a sister, she obviously kept her baby which trumped my need to verify the truth.

For years as a young child and into initial adulthood I tried to place myself in her pregnant teen shoes grasping at what she would have been going through mentally and physically as she watched her abdomen expand with another life growing inside her. Was she feeling dread? Did she have anxiety? Apathy, maybe? Surely there were moments of joy and excitement, too, right?

I had to abandon these thoughts. The concept of adoption stirred terrible anxiety in me. Telling the younger me that a parent could just give up a kid and leave it for a stranger to take away was far too disturbing for me to process.

I understood the power in what she was saying the day shared that story with me. Despite the unbearable weight of shame and uncertainty, my mother remained focused on the beautiful moments. She explained how that unbearable weight of fear was swallowed by what she described as instantaneous love that exploded through her that was too warm to keep to herself. To this day I use these thoughts as a never-ending supply of warmth that transcends any ill feelings I harbour in darker moments.

Sixteen isn’t an ideal age to have a baby. Cast out of social hierarchies, put in an alternative school for delinquents despite her average grades in school and not exactly the party material other rambunctious males her age were seeking, she learned the pang of loneliness at a young age.

The father of her daughter, expecting my mother to give the baby up for adoption, didn’t stick around to help her in a parental or financial manner when she announced that she had kept the baby. Growing up we only knew the name of my sister’s birth father by the name my mother called him — Peckerhead. We never met him as kids.

The nest was too small and my mother knew it was time to fledge.

The pressures mounted for my mother as she tried to cope with the tiny life that demanded all of her waking attention. Her own parents, as loving as they were, were not happy with their daughter bringing a baby home. Tensions created dissension within their large family and my mother was as eager to leave the home with her daughter as her parents were to see her go.

My mother knew she was loved by her parents, but they were raising five kids of their own. A sudden granddaughter in their tiny home was simply too many bodies in an already tight space. The nest was too small and my mother knew it was time to fledge.

On the off chance she could get out for a night as a typical teen and not as a mother, she happened to meet a charming man 2 years older than herself. They hit it off and within months they moved in together. No time for a courtship it seemed as they were married and pregnant by the time she was 17.

I was born 3 months after her 18th birthday in a raging snowstorm. A storm so legendary — ‘the snow was deeper than the cars!’ — it had to be told at the end of most of my father’s drinking nights. I never minded hearing this story. Not because I was in it, but because my father would smile and deliver the story with true passion and exaggerated actions to drunkenly sell just how crazy a night it was.

Game to participate or not, my birth lottery meant I was now forced to embark on a journey I wouldn’t take control of for 36 years all leading to my father’s death and my 60-year-old mother announcing rather suddenly a newfound way to escape reality — cocaine, and how she is addicted.

This story continues at The Anonymous Son

Originally published at theanonymousson.com on February 7, 2019.