You Can't Break Her

Chapter sixteen: part seven | May

May 2006
Oliver, Ontario

Three months later I moved two hours away. Patrick still did everything in his power to visit. We still cared deeply for each other. We fought on occasion, as all pregnant teenaged couples do. I had a flare for the dramatic, everything was the end of the world in my eyes.

On weekends when we could get a drive, Patrick would come visit and bring me home with him. It wasn't allowed at the home I was staying in, but I couldn't bare to be without him for months at a time. I would tell the home I was staying with Renee for the weekend and just stay at Patrick's house.

We talked every night on the phone before we went to bed. Every lonely doctor's appointment was a jab to my already frail heart. Pregnancy, mixed with the inability to see the father of my child wore me thin. Depression set in. I began sleeping 18 hours a day, not even leaving my room to eat.

The staff at the home worried over my health and that of my child. They beckoned me for a meeting one day.

"We are worried that you are depressed. Sleeping constantly and not eating is not healthy for you or the baby. You also need to start attending school and parenting programs down the street at our other location."

I sighed heavily. My mind was permanently asleep, or so it felt. I nodded. My energy was so drained I couldn't even argue.

The programs were detailed parenting courses. They taught me something new in each session. I learned things that would better my life. Not that life, but this one, so many years later.

The group programs were the toughest. I could barely hold back my shock when meeting a pregnant girl who was fourteen and the thirteen year old, babies father. All because the girls parents let her boyfriend live in their basement.

Couples lined the circle, each arguing and discussing their home lives. I yearned for that, wishing one day that Patrick and I, could have a life together with their new bundle of joy. I wanted my happily ever after.

I was luckier than most, but I couldn't see it. With my hormones constantly on the fritz and moods changing drastically at the smallest issues. All I could see was that nothing was working out how I wanted.

At my 5 months doctors appointment, I was able to find out the sex. Patrick was happy to find out that he would be having a son. We started thinking of names for our baby boy.

Each name we came across wasn't good enough. And we wouldn't find a name that stuck until right before he was born.