Thirteen and Pregnant

Pregnant and Thirteen

I hovered anxiously outside Freya’s partially open door. I wasn’t eavesdropping exactly I told myself. I was just concerned. She had been acting strange lately and I just wanted to find out what was wrong.

Who was she talking to? Was it somebody we didn’t know? She and James often talked on Skype and spent hours posting comments and photographs on Facebook that’s what it would be – something to do with a fall out with a friend I thought with relief.. I leaned my ear against the open crack. My blood turned to ice.

Pregnant!!  She couldn’t be. She didn’t even have a boyfriend – as far as I knew. She was still a child for God sake. The bedroom door gave a slight creak as she flung it open. Freya startled her pale face and frightened eyes stared at me.

“You can’t be…pregnant.”

“I am,” she wailed! “I’m sorry Mum. Girls at school said you couldn’t get pregnant if you only did it once or twice.” Sobbing loudly she threw herself across the bed. Curling her body into a ball she began to rock back and forwards the way she used to do when she was small. My arms ached to hold her but I was too shocked. I couldn’t believe what she was saying.  She wasn’t my little girl anymore. Soon she’d be an underage teenage mum.

 

“Tell me who got you pregnant,” I quacked hoarsely. Wild images and imaginings raced through my mind.

Her bloodless lips moved but no sound came out.

“Tell me! Did something – happen to you? Were you attacked? Fear engulfed me as a terrible thought leaped into my mind. “Was it Alan? Did he do something to you?”

She screamed and thrashed about on the bed. “No, no.”

“Who was it, then? Tell me,” I shouted gripping her shoulders so that she was forced to look directly into my blazing eyes.

She spoke his name softly. “James,” she said her voice barely audible through the tears and the curtain of hair that partially hid her face.

 

I couldn’t breathe. I felt as if I was taking a panic attack.

“James?” I said stupidly. “It can’t be James. He’s only twelve!”

Sobbing wildly Freya rammed her head under her pillow “James,” she said again.

I stood, bewildered; then sank unsteadily onto the end of her bed.

Sweet Mother of God I couldn’t take it in. My thirteen year old daughter was going to have a baby to her twelve year old step=brother!!

 

Fraya covered her ears. Downstairs her mother and Alan were screaming at each other in the kitchen. Three long torturous months had passed since they had found out about the baby. James hadn’t denied having sex with her. He’d just shrugged his shoulders and asked what was for dinner.

“Well, she did parade around half naked,” Alan was yelling at her mother. .

“At least she not a rapist, “her mother screeched back. “Either James goes to live with his mother or…”

“He can’t!”

“Either he goes or you both go,” her mother screamed.

Freya pummelled her protruding stomach. “This is your fault,” she bleated. “If James leaves life won’t be worth living. I love him,” Freya whispered finger tracing his photo.

Freya could hear the desperation in Alan’s voice.

“His mother’s boyfriend doesn’t want him with them full time.  He’s mean and they fight about him all the time. He says he didn’t sign up to support a horny teenager and a potential statutory rape case.”

“He’s not staying here,” her mother bawled

 

Shifting awkwardly over on to her other side, Freya sighed. In a way James was lucky. At least he was going to a different school where nobody knew about them, “Here, the problems just keep coming,” she muttered as the baby kicked her yet again.   Despite her mother objections the school had informed Social Services. It was turning into a nightmare. Her mother’s face had paled when the school counsellor advised her not to be surprise if Freya was put on the “at risk” Child Protection Register. And the possibility James might be put on the sex offenders register.

 

Freya logged into UTube but her mind couldn’t concentrate. It all seemed so childish now. Downstairs the row was still raging. Most of the fights were about what to do. Her mother wanted her to have aAa late abortion. Alan wanted her to have the baby adopted. James just shrugged indifferently. “I just want it over and done with,” Freya muttered. She heard the lounge door bang and her mother’s feet pounding up the stairs. Quickly she pretended to do her homework.

Going to school was a living hell. The walls in both the girls and the boys’ toilets were covered in explicit sexual slogans and graphic drawings of her and James. Her friends mothers refused to let their daughters to have anything to do with her. Bonnie, who had been her best friend forever, blinked back tears as she told not to Facebook her or phone her anymore. “My mother thinks I might get pregnant too,” she said her lips quivering as she tried to hold back the tears.

 

“You’re more concern with the damm school and its image than my daughter, “her mother hotly protested as the headmaster let her know that Freya could be home studied.”Less stressful for her,” he said lamely trying not to look at Freya beginning to strain the seams of her school uniform. “I could leave and repeat my year over again after the baby is born,” Freya had pleaded. But her mother was adamant.

“In the end my mother got her way,” Freya murmured.

 

The pains woke her in the middle of the night. Freya sobbed as her baby daughter fought for her life for three days.”

Her mother missus Alan and James came to take Freya home from the hospital. .She helped her daughter dress her little granddaughter in the white christening gown she had christened Freya in.

“Ready?”

Freya nodded woodenly.

Together they laid the baby to rest in a small cemetery plot especially for babies who die shortly after birth. On Freya’s insistence – the only evident she had ever been born – a small kneeling plate that simply read “Amelia, daughter of Jane and James.”

 

Freya opened her birthday card.

Love from James, it read. Freya tore it into shreds and flipping the lid of the  kitchen bin she  threw it in with the rest of the rubbish. Fourteen years old! Too young to be a mother – too old in mind to be a child again, she thought. While I got fat and suffered agonies of guilt and shame, James*s life just went on. When our baby was born he was on a school skiing holiday in the French Alps – all expensive paid. He never even saw his daughter, He didn’t want to; having sex was enough for him, she scowled