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  • Writer's pictureKelli Brien

Why I'm "Here"


I was in seventh grade, on the bus to school, when my friend leaned over to me and whispered in my ear: “I did it” the shock that went through my pre pubescent body was unimaginable. I couldn’t grasp the idea that while I was still cutting my Barbie’s hair and making slime in Mama’s mixing bowls, my friend …"did it,” it was the strangest feeling, but not nearly as jarring as when she announced two months later on that same school bus home “I’m pregnant.” She was one of the most beautiful and popular girls in school, the girls wanted to be her, the boys wanted to be her boyfriend. She was “too mature” for seventh graders, she’d fallen “in love” with a high school boy. We’d only been acquaintances… I wasn’t popular. I don’t know why she came to me, but I was honored (and scared as hell.) I was in denial, sure that there must be some alternate reality, a place where surely we were still invincible, where our harshest consequences were missing a dance. How could this happen? I knew that I could go home and sleep in my bed and wake up a kid. I also knew that she’d never wake up as a child again. Who was going to stick by her, and how? We went together to tell our Home Economics teacher, because she was the “cool” teacher and she heard, cried and called her way into my friend and her baby’s life. Mrs. Casas treated her like a delicate china doll, it was what she’d been missing from the beginning. Even as a kid, if you’ve got a daddy sized heart hole, you can pick out another daddy-starved kid a mile away. Trust me. I watched her stroll (increasingly more slowly) into her class during lunch, after school, and any time she had another bout with morning sickness. The news of her pregnancy sent chills (and rumors) through the student body and rocked all of our realities. She became a poster child. That hurt her. She was just strong enough to know that this would NOT be the end of her. It meant that her adulthood took the elevator, while her heart took the stairs. She kept her head up. Fast forward to three days before Christmas and I got a call from my friend, she had the baby. The only logical response to this news was to sneak out of my house and walk to the hospital to see her. The hallways stretched for years, the faster my dirty sneakers went, the longer the halls grew and it was painful trying to restrain my legs from sprinting to her door. I entered her room and my heart fell to the floor. She was alone. She laid there, holding her son in a room with no windows, no cards, flowers, balloons or company, just this young girl and her baby. I searched for something to say, but words stuck to the top of my mouth. I looked in her eyes, and there was more than sadness, there was shame and so many questions. I was terrified. “Hand him to me” spewed from my lips and I scooped him up and began to tuck her sheets and talk about his cute Santa outfit. She’d been trying to get out of bed and relax in the recliner, so when she sat in it, I reached down with my free hand to pull the lever and realized I was tipping the baby. (Seventh graders aren’t equipped, you know?) She quickly grabbed the lever and I returned her son to her arms. The swift but gentle way she retrieved her swaddled prize was a silent message to me that the “mama bear” instinct was very present. I realized my limited capacity to help her, and I wanted to burst into tears. She spoke softly as she explained how she’d realized that her life was different from then on. We reminisced about the bus ride when she first informed me that she’d had sex. “I walked into the house and felt different, I felt like I was bigger in my house, like I wasn’t a kid. My mama couldn’t tell me nothin’…HUMPH” then she sighed and looked her tiny man in his eyes and we both got eerily silent. We shared minimal words and just spent time discovering him, the way a child examines the class guinea pig or the toad that made it’s way into the house somehow. What do we do with him? It became apparent to me that I was unqualified to give anything more than words and hugs, offers to hold and change diapers, but it felt so painfully insignificant. I felt like I was in an emotional prison. How could I have all this love and no way to express it? I never got over the look on her face, and the news that she would be transferred to the school for pregnant teens and I’d likely not see her for years other than the limited interactions in the neighborhood when she’d have time. That pain etched itself in my mind and remains one of the biggest reasons why I wrote Speak Life, because no mother should birth alone, and no one who wants to be with her should be hindered. I became a doula because there are little girls like she and I who need someone who’s willing to walk the distance, hold the hand, hold the baby (or the mom) and tell her it will be ok, and help it to be so. That’s why I’m here.

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