Well in all honesty, my memory of the time is very fractured, I don't know how much my mind has just blocked out some of the details, or God has granted me the peace to let some of it go, but I do remember enough.
Things were in a perpetual stage of flux by the end of that summer. Dad had moved out and Mom moved back into the house with my brother and myself. I had virtually given up hanging out with most my friends from school, I had lost all interest in anything that was remotely what an average 16 year old girl was interested in. I still "lived" at home, but it had become somewhere to sleep at night. I ended up loosing my job at the daycare center due to poor attendance from staying home to watch "his" kids if they were home sick or needed to go to a doctor appointments, whatever, so he ended up pulling the kids out of the daycare center and I ended up become a full time sitter for him. This furthered my opportunity to slide into the roll of the housewife & mom, cooking meals, cleaning, and "other" wifely duties.
On the down side of all of that, if my mom needed me for something she had become accustomed to finding me across the street. One day the I was in laying on his bed with him and we were talking and messing around a bit while the kids were playing in the front room, with my blouse partially unbuttoned I became alarmingly aware my mom was standing the doorway of the room. I don't remember all that she began screaming about, but I clearly remember her calling me a Slut, and at some point in the ranting she began crying and ran from the apartment. She went back to the house, straight to my bedroom on the second story which happened to be on the front of the house and proceeded to throw my recently purchased portable television out the window. As she was doing this I was grabbing my stuff and following behind her just in time to see my TV flying out the window and exploding on the front lawn, that event I remember clearly. Needless to say, that confrontation cooled how freely I spent my time across the street for a while.
When September rolled around I remember starting my junior year of high school at the local public school. Because of registering late most of the classes I might have wanted to take were full so I was stuck in the classes that had room to take me. A couple of my cousins attended that school, so I attempted to fit in with their friends, but that was proving to be an uncomfortable fit. With little interest in the classes I was taking or the kids I was meeting, it was very easy that only few weeks into the school year I was finding reasons to miss school. Upset stomach, headache, bad cramps...whatever I drummed up that morning that would keep me home for the day. Mom was off at work, which gave me an easy out when it came to skipping school.
By that point I had a key to the apartment and that was my usual place to spend my time, it had become a comfortable arrangement for both of us, and a mutual caring had been building between us. I would have dinner cooked when he came home with the kids and would stay until late in the evenings. We were working as a family unit, bathing kids and getting them to bed, doing laundry, I was even balancing his checkbook and helping with paying the bills.
It was mid-fall that I came to the realization I was pregnant.
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