“How could you get yourself into such a big mess? You’re making the biggest mistake of your life, what an idiot you must be, you’re never going to amount to anything”. These are just a few of the words my great grandmother yelled at my mother while she laid on a hospital bed having her first born child. As a fourteen year old little girl she never pictured she would be giving birth to a little girl herself. Statics show that out of all teen pregnancies nearly a third is terminated; I could have been another statistic. One more child left life less with no future or hope and with all odds against me growing up with a young mother was one challenge that I would learn to live with.

My life growing up with a young mother has not always been easy. I can recall a time in middle school when I didn’t want people to see my mom because I didn’t want to be judged. Whenever she would come up to the school to pick me up I would notice the judgment on people’s faces. Teachers would assume that I probably had no home training because my mother was young and students would assume that my mom just let me run wild and that she did know how to raise me. It always hurt me to hear negative comments about my mom but every time I got upset my mother always told me the same thing. She would say that I’m not normal like everyone else and I shouldn’t want to be. She said that since I know that she loves me and takes care of me than it’s all that matters. Even though I admire my mom for having me at such a young age I don’t want to make the same choice that she did because I see how hard it is being a young mother. I was always told that once you have a child it’s time accept that people are going to Say bad things and all that you can do is prove them wrong.

Seventeen years and five more siblings later my life is still the same. People still make judgments about me before they get the chance to really know the truth but I’m not the same scared middle school girl that was to ashamed to be seen when her mother. When my little brothers and sisters ask me why I’m so much older than they are I tell them the truth and most importantly when I’m asked how old my mother is I say thirty-one but now I say it with confidence.