You are the one who tells your story

By Laura Fred-Smith

PROMPT — Ask Me.

Ask me what it’s like to be a forty-eight-year-old woman who was a teenage mother. When you are on the backside of that title, no longer a seventeen-year-old mother of a newborn, it’s sometimes hard to remember everything you have been through.

At sixteen, I found myself a scared teenager with limited experience in sex, yet pregnant all the same. Luckily, my very supportive mother wanted to be sure I did not become one of the lost young mothers who did not live up to their potential before early motherhood changed their lives. In elementary school, I was in gifted and talented classes. In high school, I was in college prep classes and had a plan to become an archeologist. I had plans to visit a cousin at the University of Kentucky to explore campus life during the upcoming summer. All of that changed with two little blue lines on a pregnancy test.

Looking back over the past thirty years, it is easy to forget what it was like. Ask me about finishing high school in the top 20%. Taking tests for government class in the morning, working in the afternoon, and staying up with a colicky baby at night were just how my days went. It was a normal life through my senior year. College was similar, with the difference of a full-time job and classes only two or three days a week.

During my senior year of high school, I also met my husband. The father of the baby quickly realized that he had no interest in being a teen father and left before the first trimester was over. My family agreed that there was no need to force a marriage just because a child was involved. This was the best decision of my life because it allowed my husband, Scott, to come into the picture.

With the support of my family and my new boyfriend, whom I married during my senior year of college, I could graduate college and find a job teaching high school. I taught at this school for eighteen years while also earning a Master’s Degree in Building-level Administration. After a few more years of teaching in high school, I moved to teaching middle school at the school corporation from which I had graduated. I also tried my hand at state politics. I ran for the office of Indiana State Senator. My attempt would have been impossible without the support of my family and the perseverance I developed as a teenage mother, even though I didn’t win.

I am in my twenty-fourth year of teaching now, at a different high school. My oldest son, the one I had as a scared seventeen-year-old, teaches in the same building, but in a different grade level and subject. Some students may have done the math and figured out that I had him when I was seventeen. We both have good genes and neither one of us looks our age, so maybe they think I am his stepmother, or I am older than I look and he is younger. I am not sure; no one asks. But if they did. I would tell them my story. They’d hear about my childhood in a home with a stepfather who was an abusive alcoholic, and how I slept with my shoes on because of frequent early morning escapes to safety. I would tell them of the struggles of trying to ignore the harsh looks and the gossip that is hard to forget. I would also tell them that being a teenage mother is more than being a statistic. It’s not just one person who might become dependent on welfare money and stuck in dead-end jobs. This is a story that could result in a good job and a happy family. It only takes courage to stand your ground, perseverance through the hard times, and a belief that you are the one who tells your story. You are what you make of yourself, and no one has the ability or the right to tell you who you are but you.

---

Laura Fred-Smith teaches high school Biology in a small town in Indiana. She has been married to her high school sweetheart for twenty-five years. During school vacations, she travels to as many haunted locations as she can to see if there is any scientific way to prove that she might be an empath. Laura writes from Royal Center, IN.