Reaction - Lesley Choyce [5]
“You could have a procedure,” the doctor said, “if this is not the right time. If you really don’t want to have a baby, we can schedule you in. I’m not advising you to do this. It’s just that the earlier it’s done, the simpler the procedure is.” She paused. “The other option, of course, is that you can have the baby. Then you could put it up for adoption. There are a lot of married women out there who can’t get pregnant. To them, it would be a blessing.”
“What if we didn’t want to give it up?” I heard myself blurt out. The room went silent, and Ashley looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
“I’m just saying, what if ?” I added.
The doctor cleared her throat. “It’s an option,” she said. “This is all about choices—your choices. What’s best for you both and what’s best for the baby. If there is a baby.”
Ashley took my hand now but didn’t look at me. “When do we have to decide?” she said.
“The sooner, the better,” Dr. Benson said. “Just be sure you decide on something you can follow through on. Something you can live with.”
When we left the office, we didn’t say anything to each other. I think we were in shock. I walked Ashley home and tried to start a conversation—first about the decision, but then anything just to fill the dead air. Each time Ashley said the same thing: “I can’t talk about this right now.”
As we approached her house, she said, “I’m okay from here. You go on home. Let’s sleep on this and see what things look like tomorrow.”
I nodded and gave her a hug. I knew she didn’t want me anywhere near her house or her parents. Best to keep a low profile, I thought.
I slept terribly that night. I’d doze off and then wake back up. At school the next day, Ashley still looked like she was in shock and didn’t want to talk to me about the clinic or the decision. I got that. I didn’t want to talk about it either. On my second near-sleepless night, I got up and sat down at my computer. I visited websites on teenage pregnancy and abortion. Pro and con. I tried to stay away from the sites where people expressed strong views one way or the other. I wanted this to be our decision. Ashley’s and mine. Man, there were a lot of strongly opinionated people out there on this topic. I didn’t know who was right or who was wrong. And I didn’t know what I thought about it myself. I guess there were a lot of things I was uncertain about.
Then I googled teen fathers. It was weird just keying in the words. I mean really weird.
I ended up at a website in New Zealand, of all places. Teenage guys had posted their stories about being fathers.
Now I was wide-awake. Some of them were eighteen and nineteen. Some of them younger. One guy was only fifteen. They wrote about how difficult it was. Some of them had been pushed away by the girl or her parents and were angry. A couple of the older guys had actually moved in with the girl and the baby and were trying to make it on their own. They were struggling. But a couple of younger guys had decided to just stay in the picture. Both parents were still going to school, both lived at home. They sure as hell didn’t have it easy. But these guys were committed to being the baby’s father. One guy named Mark made it sound like it wasn’t so bad, and he seemed totally committed to being there to help his girlfriend and to be a good father.
I read every posting on that site. There were pictures—some with the mother and father. Some with just the dad and the baby. There was even one dude who was raising his kid at home with his own parents. After the baby was born, the girl had said she wanted nothing to do with him or the baby. None of the stories suggested anything was easy.
I kept wondering why and how these guys had been able to go this route. Man, it must have been damn hard. But some of them seemed proud of being a father. They were helping to raise their own kid. One part of me thought that was awesome. But the reality of such a decision