Before I ever became pregnant, I was already living in survival mode.

I was fourteen and hiding a relationship with a boy I’ll call Ty. He was eighteen. The age difference alone made secrecy necessary — but the real reason I hid him was fear. Fear of my father. Fear of what would happen to me if the truth came out. So I learned how to disappear quietly.

For six or seven months, December-July, I slept at family members’ houses who would let him come over on the weekends. I snuck out when I could. I lied when I had to. None of it felt rebellious. It felt strategic. When safety isn’t guaranteed, secrecy becomes protection.

When my parents finally found out that July, fear turned into control. Jail was threatened. Voices were raised. Slaps were intense. That time I counted 14. In a row. But, eventually, they decided to meet him and allow the relationship — not because it was healthy, but because they knew I would keep choosing it behind their backs if I wasn’t allowed to choose it openly.

By November of my sophomore year, my body changed everything. I found out I was pregnant.

I called a friend who was older than me and asked her to come over with a test. When it came back positive, I didn’t panic. I smiled. That surprises people when I say it.

But I think part of me believed I was finally going to have something permanent. Someone who would stay. Someone I could love without fear of abandonment. I was a child who had already lost her mother — already learned how temporary love could be — and suddenly there was life inside me.

We told her mom first. Then my stepmom. And finally, I told my dad — carefully, over the phone and from a distance, when I knew he wouldn’t be home until the next night.

I was terrified of him.

When I said, “Dad, I have to tell you something,” he already knew.

“You better not be pregnant.” I told him I was. He yelled. He told me Ty needed to be at the house when he got home. Then he hung up.

Ty never showed up. I was left to face the Monster alone.

When my dad came home, he didn’t hit me — which almost felt worse. He walked into my room, looked me in the eyes, and said: “You made this baby. You will have this baby. You will raise this baby. And you will finish school.” Then he walked out. I was still a child. And suddenly, everything became real grown up.

When I called Ty to tell him what my dad had said, he was intoxicated. He told me he wasn’t going to talk to my dad — and that it probably wasn’t even his baby. He said it was probably Cameron’s, the son of the woman who helped raise me. That sentence cracked something open in me, because I had never been unfaithful. The next day, he swore he didn’t remember saying it.

At around nine weeks pregnant, I started bleeding. Ty picked me up and took me to the hospital. His grandmother met us there. While I was waiting, Cameron called to check on me — not because we were together, but because his family had been my family too.

Ty accused me of cheating, again.

By the time we left the hospital, we knew there was no heartbeat.

I was placed on bed rest until my D&C procedure. Christmas break passed with me laid out on the sofa — grieving quietly while my boyfriend spiraled further into drugs and dealing. He came to see me twice. The first time, he brought pills instead of comfort. The second time, he showed up with a black eye after being pistol-whipped for stealing drugs. I made him leave immediately before my parents saw.

Resentment grew where support should have been. Not only from Ty, but from my father too.

My father told me something that lodged itself in my chest for years: that he had prayed every night for me to lose the baby — and felt guilty when I actually did. For years he would often ask “how old would your baby be this year.” As if he actually cared. I dont know. Maybe he did. Regardless, I hated my father for a long time after that.

The loss hollowed me out. It pushed me deeper into every addiction I already had. It convinced me that love was unreliable and loyalty was conditional. So, I cheated on Ty — not out of carelessness, but out of exhaustion, out of resentment. I told him myself because I was tired of being accused and abandoned at the same time, I don’t even think Ifelt bad about it at the time. By then, everything was toxic, and he was no where near what I thought I needed.

On my due date, I had a dream: I was pregnant, my hand resting on my stomach. A small hand pressed back from the inside, stretching my skin, wrapping its fingers around mine. A little girl’s voice said, “Don’t worry, Mommy. I’m still with you.”

I woke up hysterical. Ty and I were staying at his mom’s house. When I tried to tell him about the dream, he rolled over, told me to shut up, and said it was just a dream. I lay there for hours afterward — staring at the ceiling, holding my belly, crying silently, and that when I named her.

I named her Winter.

I still wonder who I would have been if I had become a mother at sixteen. I still carry that version of myself — the girl who loved fiercely, briefly, and without protection. And I often wonder who she would have been, what she would have looked like and how loved she would have been.

But now, years later, I hold two truths at once.

1. I still grieve her

2. I look back and trust Gods plan

Not because the loss didn’t matter —

but because I believe He knew something I couldn’t survive yet. I was a teenage mother without a baby. And that loss shaped everything that came after.

CLOSING PRAYER

God,

You saw me when I was a child carrying life and fear in the same body. You saw the silence, the abandonment, and the grief no one helped me hold. Hold Winter in Your care. Hold the parts of me that never got to say goodbye. Redeem what loss carved into my heart and nervous system. Thank You for staying when others turned away — and for carrying what I couldn’t.

Amen.

XOXO, The Healing Wildflower