So. There I was.
Sat in a public toilet staring in disbelief at a pregnancy test with 2 very obvious blue lines on it. I slumped to the floor as my legs couldn’t keep me upright anymore.
Very much aware of my current situation. I was living back in the belly of the beast with my mother, my boyfriend who only seemed to treat me like I was human if he was stoned, and me trying to survive and feed us both on £7.50 a week.
I let the news settle in my bones for a good few days before I dared to even speak the words out loud.
Pregnant. 16. Homeless pretty much.
Scared, because I’d been here twice before, it never ended well. I didn’t have spare money to test again, so I took another test from a chemist, just to see if it still said the same thing.
Still there. 2 solid blue lines.
I thought about telling him, I thought about telling my mother, but I needed the time to let it process into my mind.
Only hormones caught me out this time. I felt sick from the moment I was upright in the morning till the moment I went to sleep. He noticed. My mother noticed too.
We were on our way to go hang out at a friends place, and he stopped me.
You’re pregnant aren’t you? he asked.
‘Yes’ I replied.
Not knowing which way the weather would carry his response.
‘Well, you can’t be thinking of actually keeping it?! we have nowhere to live, no money! How the hell are we going to look after a child?! he shouted.
Not the reaction I was hoping for. It was just sinking in for me, I just couldn’t process his feelings too.
Then he told my mother.
She was less than impressed. She had been drilling into me every time I happened to see her how I wasn’t going to be like my brothers girlfriend, another teenage pregnancy.
I happened to think my nephew was actually, adorable. This tiny perfectly formed human made of my brother and his girlfriend, he was cute, with an adorable lil face. My brother was making a go of things, starting his family. would it really be so bad?
Time passed and Social Services were informed, I continued to stay at my mothers, not ideal. But I really didn’t have much of a choice.
She had this weird thing with her mind where she believed people were coming into her flat when she wasn’t there, claiming they’d come in, make toast, make a mess and leave. Or they’d use her computer and games would be out for it that she was sure she had put away, it was bad enough she put wrapping paper on the front door to stop people spying on her.
I could never work out just what it was she was so afraid of.
My sister took the news a bit better. I knew for her this came as a heavy kind of happiness, she had hoped she would be the first one to have a child out of me and her, but we grew quite close over the course of my pregnancy.
She wanted me to have nice things, She didn’t want my situation to be made worse by having nothing for my baby, so she took me into Mothercare and we browsed prams and cots and all this stuff that was designed for mothers to be, grown women with big bumps browsed the shop with us, I felt ever so slightly uncomfortable and the looks felt like sabres of judgement and disapproval.
But my sister said she wanted to help me, So we picked out a brand new pram. It was ridiculously expensive, I looked at the price tag and swallowed hard. £500. That was not including any extras, but my sister insisted.
‘In the very least, have something nice to take my niece or nephew out in? I can’t see you have some second hand pram from out the paper, you have to let me help you to get this. Please?’
I relented. ‘okay’.
It was really beautiful.
So she grabbed the pram, the matching bits and pieces to go with it and a rain cover, She also had me fitted for a maternity bra and bought me a maternity dress. It was the closest we had been since I was tiny.
She knew I had very little money, she said if I could put a fiver a week to it for the remainder of my pregnancy she would pay the rest. I was awe struck, but very grateful.
Then things started to get worse at my mother’s, she would do really random things like walking into our bedroom with just a T-shirt and badly fitting knickers on leaving very little to the imagination, it was creepy, it was weird.
Then came the garlic.
See she found out really quickly that certain smells would have me wretching and heaving, Garlic was one of those things. She would buy chicken kievs or garlic bread, cooking them first thing in the morning then sitting back all smug with herself as I struggled to keep even fluid down. She actually found it funny.
You see I also didn’t look pregnant for quite some time. Rumours went around like wildfire, The stories I heard were quite wild, I was in my last trimester before you could look at me and see I was visibly pregnant.
My sister wanted to help as much as she could, she asked if id be okay to house sit whilst she went on holiday and I agreed, She went to Social Services and a plan was made that she would foster me for a few weeks, to have someone look after me and give me some actual food, now this being in 1998, My sister was being paid around £275 a week to have me sofa surf, this meant that she could help me finish buying the things I needed for my baby.
Only he wasn’t welcome.
She left me to flat sit whilst she was away, I had her flat to myself and it was so good to have some real actual food for once, a bath I could soak in and a front door to shut the world outside out.
I’d sit there quietly in the evenings, watching tv, stroking my tummy and marvelling at the way this tiny human inside of me was growing. See I’d seen plenty of pregnant women in my time, but being one? was a whole new experience. I vowed I’d do my very best for the little person growing inside my womb.
He wasn’t allowed to stay at my sister’s she made that very clear, so he ended up sleeping on the sofa of this woman who lived across from the Kids Home, she was a bit weird. A rather grossly overweight woman who captured the attention of the boys at the kids home, not for her looks, nothing like that. She had prescription drugs, heavy duty stuff that the teenage lads seemed only to eager to try.
I heard a rumour at the time, that whilst I’d been staying at my sisters place, he had been taken in by her. I was grateful at first that he found somewhere to go but then I was told by a friend of ours from the home, that one night, whilst the friend had also stayed over, that he went to go to the toilet in the night and as he went to go in, my boyfriend had come out of the bathroom, fully naked, drying his tackle off on a towel like he’d just been having sex.
My stomach lurched. Surely he wouldn’t be burning his ass on the lightbulb by mounting that, that, whale?!
I confronted him about it at the time and he assured me that he didn’t, said our friend was lying and trying to stir up trouble between us, naively I believed him. It would be a good five years later that id discover the truth. It made me feel sick to my very stomach.
Especially when she tried to make out like she had chosen the name of our baby like she was proud of sleeping with a kid who was only 3 years older than her son. I just thought she was vile.
My sister returned from her holiday and I wasn’t able to stay much longer, so social services helped me fill in some forms so I could go on the housing register, the plan was I’d be there till I was almost ready to have my child, then I’d go into a mother and baby unit until a place more permanent was found.
I arrived at the bed and breakfast. There was a family sharing each room, some had one child, some had two or three, and the main cooking area was taken over by an older mother with several kids. There was no provision of food of any kind, despite the name of the place.
He came with me and we settled in as best as we could. Only we also fought more often than not leading to physical fighting, it seemed to be a regular occurrence.
See I was back to a familiar place in our relationship. My £15 went nowhere. It didn’t seem to matter that I was pregnant either, if he didn’t get his weed he took it out on me and our unborn baby. The break at my sister’s a distant memory already, but it was nice whilst it had lasted.
Social Services for some reason were still paying half the rent at my mother’s so that took £20 before I even got my cheque to cash, to get it would be a 7 mile round trip, walking all the way there in the heat of the summer, for £15. It didn’t matter that the countless times he put me in hospital or the amount of times the hospital tried to keep me in for my own protection, Social Services refused to assist, and each week that trek grew harder and harder.
He was still taking his weed money from me, I was paying a fiver a week to my sister to help pay for my pram and it left me with the odd pound or two if I was lucky. We had no choice but to turn to shoplifting to try and help us get by. We learned tricks to help us, including stealing items and returning them for gift vouchers saying they’d been bought as baby gifts and they were things that I didn’t need.
I’d collect gift vouchers and then use them to buy 10p items, so they’d give me the rest in actual coins, it was a lot of effort to make not even £10 as a result, and the stores cottoned on very quickly to the dangerous game we were playing. But at the time I was desperate. I had no money for food, and even a tenner scraped together still largely was reduced to just a couple of quid once he had taken what he needed for his weed.
See when you are in the thick of a situation like that, you can’t see it even though those red flags couldn’t have been more obvious, but at 16 and the first person to show me what I thought was love? well. When you’ve been rejected over and over and over again, a little affection lights up the brain like Christmas and is just as addictive as any drug, even if the only way to keep that love from beating the living daylights out of you, is to make sure he didn’t run out of that thing he needed. The drugs.
We picked up other ways to get food, one of the other families was a couple addicted to Heroin, who had 2 children, a toddler and a baby. They showed me how to find food if I was desperate, the mum took me with her a few times, showing me how a local supermarket would triple bag rotisserie chicken before tossing them in the bin at the end of the day, and if we were really lucky, we would find one or two and share them, you’d think I’d never seen food before, but desperate times caused for very desperate measures.
My sister would still come and visit any time she could, she would often ask where our food was and I’d have to lie and tell her it was in the kitchen or it was going to be collected later, she cottoned on very quickly to the fact that I was lying, especially when she took me out for a treat to get me out of the bedroom and away from him for a little while.
We went to a local cafe, she asked me what I wanted to eat and in my mind it was like the times when I was little, where she would find me all alone without a friend to play with, but she would use her money to buy little packs of chocolate chip cookies and she would sit with me and share them, she was more like a mother to me than our own mother ever was.
Only one minute I was upright, the next minute? Floor.
Without any warning I’d passed out, toppling backwards onto some poor unsuspecting elderly gentleman who had the misfortune of being behind me.
I got my bearings and got into a seat and practically inhaled the food she bought for me.
‘How long has it been since you last ate?’ she asked.
Four days was my reply.
She was utterly horrified. She was also a bit cross that I didn’t tell her or ask for her help, to be honest, I’d didn’t know how to ask her, how to explain where my money went, and there was no way I could tell her I was shoplifting and eating food out of supermarket bins to survive.
She took me to get some food that I could keep in my room, nothing huge as I confessed I didn’t have any way to store food, except for one drawer in a freezer where I could fit 2 bags of chips, I’d have to ask the mother downstairs if it was okay to use her chip fryer, which was always filled with lard and leftover food. But there really wasn’t anything else if I wanted to try and cook what little food I had.
But it still didn’t make that much of a difference, any food my sister would buy to help feed me and my unborn child, would get eaten by him and his mates if they stopped round, I got stuck in a revolving door of being hungry, no money, him getting violent with his weed, and landing me in hospital, where I’d stay a few nights, and again, get released only to not get the bed rest I was told to have, and exhausting myself every week for that £15 life line.
Then one night, when I was about 7 months pregnant, I’d been asleep whilst he was out with his friends, he’d been drinking, I could smell it. He got undressed and into bed beside me, One minute I was resisting his advances, the next were minutes I never did account for, but I knew from the feeling between my legs and the sight of him stood up, that he had taken something without my permission.
The next day, back in hospital I went, they asked me what I’d done to be bleeding again, and I told them the truth as I knew it, that I had no memory of what had occurred.
Social Services decided I needed some time away from him, a chance to try and keep my unborn child inside of me for as long as possible, but because I hadn’t had my child yet I was put into a hostel for homeless women, I would be in there with many drug users, many women with equally as bad if not worse situations in their lives but this was my last stop before I had my baby, I just needed to keep him inside of me for as many days as I could.
only a few weeks later, another beating because he didn’t get his own way and back to hospital I went.
Only this time, one of my foster sisters was there. She had just given birth that very night, and she proudly showed me her newborn daughter. She was beautiful, all scrunched up and new, with a big mass of dark brown hair. I held her and that moment was so very special. We had both lived in the kids home at the same time, we both just wanted a life that was ours, we both had so much pitted against us.
I quizzed her about how the birth had gone, what did it all feel like? I wanted every detail of the experience that would soon be coming my way, she described in great detail what happened, and then I asked her, how do you know when your waters have gone? she shrugged and told me I’d just know, she said imagine peeing but you are peeing its just fluid that won’t stop.
Moments later, 9 weeks early, I suddenly felt warmth, water, what on earth???
Just like that I knew.
My waters had just broken.
Unwearing the Mercury 