I don’t want to live in my boyfriends’ parents’ basement for the rest of my life. I don’t even want to live here for the rest of my life.

But I want the baby.

I haven’t told anyone this yet–not even my boyfriend. I want to give it more time. Not much more time, but more time. Until the end of this week.

If I make this decision now, though, while he or she is still mine, still growing inside of me, while he or she isn’t promised to anyone but myself, it won’t hurt anyone but me. And it won’t even hurt me, maybe. Change things? Of course. Throw my life off balance? Sure. But ruin my life? Probably not.

My mind has been made up all along but I wouldn’t let myself realize it. I understand the commitment, and I understand that maybe we’re not ready yet. But we’ve got time. And if this is what we decide in our hearts is what we really want, then we’ll get through it. Because we have to. Because Maybug deserves it.

I call him my boyfriend but in the strictest sense of the word he isn’t. Being that our only romantic interactions prior to this were the ones that were necessary to create Maybug, perhaps “baby daddy” is more accurate. He’s in love with me in a way that would be creepy and obsessive under different circumstances.

He wants to marry me. We can live in his parents’ basement suite. The TV room can be our room, the storage room the baby’s.  I told him that he couldn’t be so idealistic but he is anyway. Maybe I’m a cynical old bitch in the body of a sixteen-year-old. Maybe he’s the smart one. I don’t want Maybug to fall into a hole of living here, never leaving, never wanting anything else, never knowing anything but his or her grandparents’ basement.

“Don’t you want anything else?”

“I want to be with you.”

“I want to finish high school and go to university and get the hell out of Dodge.”

“Can I come with you?”

“Don’t you have your own dreams?”

“I want to be with you.”

He’s not stupid. He’s not like the other people who go to school with us, who think that this is it, it doesn’t get any better than this. But he loves me. He loves us–Maybug and me.

I love him too, of course. And because I love him I want to protect him. I want him to understand that he’s  got a life, that you can’t just marry the first girl you accidentally impregnate just because you accidentally impregnate her. You should do everything that teenagers do, like have a girlfriend and dump her for a newer model, like go to prom and speed and not have to worry about anything except your chemistry test. My life, at least for this year, has been upturned, but that doesn’t mean that anybody else’s should be.

Or should it?

I had my first therapy session today. It was after school, and I had to pick my little sister up from school before. Maybug’s dad said he would come with me, and he went to my house at lunch to get my sister’s car seat from my dad’s van so she could ride in his car. People made fun of him all day long for that car seat, but he never said a word.

I told all of this stuff to the therapist, of course, but I’m writing it here now too. She says the same thing all the other adults in my life say–that I’m very brave and intelligent etc. We didn’t talk too seriously about anything. I was nervous to, I guess, despite the fact that I have no problem spilling it on here.

I need him–Maybug’s dad, my boyfriend, whatever you want to call him. It sounds horrible, I know. But we–or I–have begun a sort of hibernation, isolation. People don’t talk to me anymore. Even my best friend, who was with me all this time, has quietly upgraded to new friends who can go out and do stupid teenage things such as sit in cars and drink alcohol in their parents’ basements then go and do stupid things to other teenagers. We tether each other, he and I, quietly. We’ve drifted away from everyone else, but we can’t drift away from each other.

People are always saying that babies don’t make couples closer but maybe they do. Even when Maybug is far away from us with his or her new family we’ll always remember that we were with each other this whole time. We’ll always be a family, always, all three of us.

Always.

I don’t really have anything to say but I felt like i was abandoning the blog altogether which isn’t something I want to do. It’s cathartic to write, so write I will.

Maybug and I are good. Thing haven’t really changed on that front since my last post, which is why i didn’t see fit to write yet. It’s still just Bug and I against the world. My dad promised that he’d make me a counseling appointment and I’m still trying to decide what I’m doing with regards to the adoption. I’m giving myself til the second week of February to make that decision. If I do before, then great, but that’s my deadline. Hopefully we’ll have some kind of solution ( a family or something else, although that issue requires a much more coherent version of me) by then.

They found a new biomom. She’s due in “less than a month” and she’s older than I am. They want to go with her instead because she’s had more time to think it over and she “knows for sure”. I know for sure, too. I’ve known for sure since September. I really liked this family. They were young enough to be cool but old enough to be mature. They already had a three-year-old son that they adopted. They were perfect for us–for Maybug and me. I don’t know what we’re going to do now, but I’m going to talk to the lawyer tomorrow to find out what she recommends. I’m pretty sure (but maybe someone more knowledgable could correct me, I’m going to do some research too, because that’s what I do) that it’s too late for me to join up with an agency. I feel so sad for Maybug for some reason. I thought that I had chosen a family who really wanted him or her and and they just…bowed out for some newer model. Now it’s just Maybug and me, two against the world, and I don’t know what we’re going to do.

I read a blog that’s linked on the side of my page pretty often called optionadoption. It gives me a good insight on the other side of what I’m going through, the parents’ side, and it’s given me a good perspective on why, exactly, I need to go through with this. There are so so many people like this and a woman who has commented here before (I really hope you guys don’t mind me singling you out) who want, genuinely want to have a baby who just can’t for some reason. I want those people to be able to someday hold a baby–their baby, and watch him or her grow and develop and be loved. I wanted to do that for someone because I know that I just can’t, at this point, do it myself.

I shouldn’t feel so shaken up about this setback, but I do. I don’t know why, but I do.

Although the baby’s dad (who I’ve never talked about before. This blog has really been the Me Show since I opened it, which isn’t fair to him, is it?), when I called him, brought up the terrifying proposition of raising the kid ourselves when I told him that they’d bowed out. I can’t say the thought never crossed my mind, but it was jarring to hear it spoken by someone else.

I wish I could better articulate what I want to say about the idea of keeping the baby. I feel bad that I can’t. And I feel even worse trying, but here goes nothing.

I have the vision or fantasy sometimes of what it would be like if something happened and we ended up keeping the baby. I guess it’s apretty normal teenage girl fantasy of what it would be like to have a baby, but it’s all that more real. I always think of Maybug as a boy–make of that what you will–and I imagine what he’d look like and sound like. I browse through racks of tiny baby clothes and pick out ones with firetrucks and bugs and puppy dogs and picture dressing him up in them with a little hat that matched. Maybe with ears. I found a car seat the other day at Wal Mart that had dinosaur print and I wanted to buy it for him. I could see my baby (in his puppy-dog sleeper) riding in that car seat. I pass by rows of formula and picture myself in the middle of the night making a bottle for him. He’s even cute when he’s screaming his head off.

I told someone once that I thought that if it was a boy I might not want to let him go. I think I was right. I don’t know why I’m so attached to the notion of having a son, and I don’t know what it means for me in the long run. I guess time will tell.

Although when I have those fantasies, I do try to be as unselfish as possible about them. I do remember how I got into this position, and I do remember that I was so scared and uneasy and I knew all along that I couldn’t keep the baby. And if that isn’t enough, I remind myself of all the people who want to be how I am and can’t, and I think of the way a baby would be a fantastic gift to them.

Sometimes, though, it doesn’t help much.

(As an aside, I checked my views before I logged on and I have 100 views and I’ve only had the blog for a week. Geez! I had no idea that my ramblings would be that interesting to people.)

So yesterday, when he or she was still buzzing from the caffeine, I laid down on my back and every time he or she kicked, I tapped back at him or her. We had a good ten or fifteen minute “conversation” with each other like this, going back and forth.

I’m emotionally connected to him or her now, on some level, I’ve realized. Finally, the reality of him or her has hit me, in a way that even seeing exactly what he or she looks like couldn’t make me see. I love this baby, and he or she loves me, on some unconscious level of his or her being. I’ve been trying so hard not to get an emotional attachment, but I think it must be  healthy.  This way when he or she comes and goes, I’ll be able to mourn, be able to take it as a loss and somehow get through those first days or hours or weeks where it’ll almost certainly be the worst emotional pain I’ve ever felt, instead of pretending that it never happened, bottle it all up until someday ten or fifteen or twenty years from now when I’m pregnant with my own baby and I’m an adult and I’ve done the stuff you’re supposed to do before you give birth and give up your life for someone else when I just snap.

I think loving him or her is the only thing that will get me through losing him or her.

And this is what Maybug looks like right now:

It’s really weird to think that there’s an actual person growing inside of me, not just some parasite that steals my brain cells and makes me hungry. And, in fact, he or she is kind of cute. There’s a real living human being inside of me and that, to me, is just the coolest thing all of a sudden. Every one of those kicks and squirms comes from an actual person. I’ve known that all along, you know, but it was never really real until I saw that picture. I have a ultrasound picture of him or her from about a month ago, but he or she just looks…blobby. An outline of a person. I just look at that thing for hours on end. Sometimes I play this game where I try to imagine what he or she will be like when he or she grows up, and it was always really hard because all I had was the blobby grayscale outline. But seeing that picture…put it into a weird sort of perspective for me.

Hey, I make people. That’s pretty damn cool.

I usually call the baby The Baby or “he/she” or even, the dreaded “it” when I’m talking about it. (there I go with it!) I don’t know why…it just seems really cute (in the bad way) to refer to an unborn baby as a nickname or even a real person name. In my head, though, I think of it as Maybug.

I didn’t really know that much about the actual bug called a may bug when I started secretly calling it Maybug. I don’t think there are many may bugs where I live, or at least none that I’ve ever seen. They appear to be most native to Europe, and their alternative name is cockchafer, which makes me laugh so much. If I had known that I probably wouldn’t have called the baby Maybug, but it stuck now.

In case you were wondering. Which you probably weren’t.

Most of them must be sadists–I mean, you’d have to be. Or child-haters. Like, I don’t understand how sixteen-year-old high-school kid is going to be so much more of a competent parent than an adult who can’t have a baby for some reason and really really wants one. And I mean…just because you have a happy functional marriage and a well-paying job and all of these other things that are necessary for raising children doesn’t mean that everyone is.

Shockingly, I know what I’m doing. Don’t try to divert me. I have a brain, I know how to use it.

I love this kid more than I love my own life. I’m not abandoning him or her in the cold. I’m giving him or her a chance. A chance that I would never be able to give them.

And I think that’s what’s most important.

I’ve always been really talkative in sort of a discordant and random way, and ever since P-Day I’ve had about three hundred related thoughts running through my head on the same subject: the baby.

I found out I was pregnant on September 23, 2007, at 4:00 in the afternoon. I was exactly 8 weeks pregnant at that time, and I had been convincing myself otherwise for about 22 days. Somewhere in my heart I’d known all along but I refused to allow it to become real in my head.

I’m sixteen. I had only been sixteen for three months. The baby’s dad and I weren’t together. I’m still in high school. So pretty much the whole situation was fucked.

I had more to say but by the time I got around to it I forgot it all…uh…that happens a lot lately. Babies kind of eat your brain cells I think. So in case you plan on getting pregnant, be warned. It makes you stupid. Big blessed bundles of…stupid-bearing.

So anyway. This is my life. Enjoy?