A Life Unsettled…The Beginning

As far as life stories go, ours is not typical. 

Let’s take a moment to imagine two teenagers: one boy, aged 18 and one girl, aged 17, sitting in the front seat of his mother’s SUV. Him in the driver’s seat and her carefully buckling herself into the passenger seat. They close the doors and turn to each other with a look of trepidation on their faces as he gently puts the vehicle in gear. 

Their newborn baby is carefully buckled into a car seat behind them, asleep.

That was what now feels like a lifetime ago.

Flash forward a few months later. After countless sleepless nights and thousands of hours spent balancing work, school, moving into our own little (federally subsidized) apartment, and keeping said baby alive, we did what was expected at the time in our tiny, rural, conservative hometown: we got married. In a giant, everyone-knows-because-you-announced-it-in-the-local-newspaper ceremony at our local church. 

As you’d expect, we started out with nothing. We lived in low-income housing and were on government assistance, including HUD, food stamps, daycare subsidies…THE WORKS. We worked a variety of jobs between the two of us in order to make ends meet. Needless to say, we didn’t have any extras.

This was before the era of MTV’s Teen Mom — not that we could have afforded cable to watch MTV in the first place — and nobody came to me and asked me to star in a TV show. It was not a glamorous existence, but we were determined to not become the statistics they use to scare you away from having sex as a teenager. 

You’ve heard the statistics and know that the majority of teen parents never finish high school, never earn a college degree, never marry the mother/father of their child, and never even get out of poverty, but we refused to let those statistics hold us back.

We invested our youthful energy into creating a little family, all while we watched our peers going off to college, heading to parties, and having the freedom to make mistakes. We didn’t know what FOMO was at the time, but we were suffering from a serious case of it.

But mostly we fantasized about having a “normal” life.

Just like the older, more established parents in our baby group. We thought that if we could just fast forward to when we’d be finished with college, working in our dream jobs, and living in our very own home, then we could take a break and bask in our accomplishments. We thought that ticking those boxes was the key to our success and, therefore, happiness.

I guess you could say that looking from where we were to where we wanted to be was pretty terrifying. Nothing felt easy, or certain, or even possible.

Those days, not knowing how everything would turn out, we were certainly living a life unsettled.