I Became Mother At 12

i was born deaf so i never knew anything different my mom learned to sign right away and that's how we would communicate my dad however didn't want anything to do with signing or with me he was super traditional and religious and it seemed like he thought he was being punished somehow by having a deaf child my sister that came before me was absolutely perfect and she was the apple of my father's eye my sister was nice enough to me and could sign well enough that we could communicate but she was just your typical teenager she was popular and pretty and all the boys loved her the girls loved her too she had an endless string of friends phoning and showing up at the house of course the phone never rang for me nor did the doorbell ever ring by someone there to see me it was a lonely existence i'll say that it was a silent world my mom had taken me to a school for the deaf when i was little so i could learn to talk everyone at the school signed but the real goal was to teach us to talk so the hearing world could understand us too it was different for some of the kids who weren't born deaf they could remember the sounds of voices of their voice and how words sounded but i couldn't when i tried to talk in the privacy of my room i had no idea what the sounds would be coming out i imagined them as sounding feral animalistic somehow as hard as they tried to push me at the school to talk or make a sound i never did there was one teacher there in particular who really tried to get through to me i was stubborn though i had always been this way and didn't see a need to change i know their reasoning was so i could go out into the hearing world but why would i want to do that why would i want to be a part of a world that didn't include me when i was 12 my sister was 15. she had a different boy on her arm every weekend it seemed that was when i discovered i had a way to make boys like me that didn't involve me having to make a sound at 12 i looked older i didn't know much but i knew i was pretty i looked a lot like my sister and she always told me how pretty i would be when i was older i was tall and slim with thick curly brown hair that hung past my shoulders i had big green eyes with long curled eyelashes i had seen and felt boys looking at me especially the ones my sister brought round i'm not sure what had come over me on this particular day but shortly after i turned 12 i was ready to make some connections of my own my sister had this boy ben that she brought around often they were just friends had been since they were young but i had always had a crush on him he was 15 like my sister he had always been so nice to me he was the only friend of my sisters who ever tried to talk to me i would just smile and nod i could read lips very well but of course i wouldn't try and communicate back to him he would talk away and i could tell he felt awkward about it but was the kind of guy to feel more awkward about just ignoring me i had seen ben come in the front door but sarah had gone out my mom said he could wait but he had politely declined i was out in the front yard when he came out the door nice day isn't it he asked me i nodded and smiled at him in that moment i realized i wanted more from him much more i wanted to know what it was like to be held by a boy kissed by a boy as i knew sarah was often i gestured for him to follow me which he did we had a shed out back at the bottom of the garden i looked around and didn't see any eyes on us so walked through the shed's door and closed it behind us what are we doing in here ben asked innocently i was on the other side of the shed not that it was far but i coily lifted up my skirt and just above my knees it was clear what i wanted and i could see ben swallow the lump that had formed in his throat he said he wasn't sure if this was okay but i nodded and pulled him closer to me i laid down on the floor and pulled my shirt up again he took the hint and that day i learned what all the fuss was about i felt like i wasn't a little girl anymore and i loved it i couldn't talk and hang out like normal hearing girls but maybe this was something i could do just as well as hearing girls ben smiled at me awkwardly afterwards as he was doing up his zipper he cleared his throat and said um is this something we're keeping between us i nodded and he seemed relieved he kissed me goodbye and discreetly left the shed i waited for a few minutes before i left and returned to my room in the house i couldn't stop smiling for the first time in my life i felt somewhat normal like i had something to actually offer boys looking back i know it was the wrong thing to offer or to feel like i had to offer but that's just how i felt i had developed early and gotten my first period when i was only 11. so when my period didn't come in the next two weeks when it was supposed to i was confused i didn't know much about the birds and the bees but i knew not getting your period when you were supposed to definitely meant something i waited and waited but it didn't come i was afraid to talk to anyone about it but my fear of what it meant outweighed the fear of telling someone i waited until one day when my mom and i were home alone i sat down across the table from her and signed that i had something to talk to her about she was all ears or eyes i should say i signed that i suspected i had done something i shouldn't have i could see the fear dart through her eyes but i could tell she was trying her best not to show it i told her about ben about the shed about how i just wanted to feel normal like my big sister i saw the tears form in her eyes when i said that she asked me how late my period was and when i told her two weeks she said we should go get a pregnancy test before we started to panic we went into town bought a test and went straight home to take it it not surprisingly came back positive i could tell my mom was trying to hold it together i could imagine she was the most concerned about telling my father he had already seemed freaked out enough by me i couldn't imagine this would help at all when my dad came home that night my mom told me to stay in my room which i was more than happy to do one thing about being deaf at least you didn't have to hear your parents arguing i did however peek around the corner to see what was happening and i could see arms flailing and read the odd word from my parents i saw disaster so young and mistake more than once i ran back up to my room and waited for my mom to come talk to me she came up a while later and told me my dad had gone out for a drink but not to worry that he needed some time to process the news but would come around i asked her what she meant by come around and she said well about the baby of course the more we talked the more i got that my mom was planning on me keeping this baby i wasn't sure what i thought about it but i knew 12 was pretty young to have a baby my mom assured me that she would be doing the lion's share of caring for it the more i thought about it the more i liked the idea of a little baby i bet to that little baby there wouldn't be anything wrong with me i would just be its mom [Music] so i got bigger and bigger and my dad grew more and more distant my sister was a little upset but also very happy about the thought of having a little niece in the house to gush over ben still came around and the meeting with his parents where we told them what was happening was definitely tense his parents offered to help out as much as we needed though and they had a lot more money than we did so we felt like we had a lot of support two months before the baby was due my dad left he couldn't take it he said he was too young to be a granddad and he was worried about the baby being deaf too he said he always knew i would be trouble and that he had been a patient man for many years but that this was just too much to take my mom was sad but said she saw this coming years ago and was actually surprised he had stuck around as long as he did so it was a house of girls now we turned my room into half a nursery and got ready for the big arrival i couldn't believe i was about to become a mother at 12 but you take what life deals you [Music] i learned my lesson from that afternoon in the shed with ben i realize there are lots of different ways to get attention from people but that there was such a thing as the wrong kind of attention i was lucky that ben was such a nice guy i could have picked the wrong guy and had quite the different experience [Music] by the time the baby came we were more than ready my sister had painted my room for a fresh look and the house was stocked with diapers onesies pretty much everything we would need people felt sorry for us but most of all for my mom to be on her own raising two girls one deaf was about to have a baby at 12 she was a strong woman and was well respected around town the week the baby was born the doorbell was constantly ringing with people dropping off casseroles and lasagnas it was great i loved my little daughter and my mom and i tag-teamed looking after her i definitely wouldn't have been able to do any of it without my mom i named my daughter betty after a favorite character of mine from a book i had read when betty was four months old we had her hearing tested and were happy to find out she was perfectly healthy and normal in every way i was a little disappointed that we wouldn't exist in my silent world together but i wanted better for her so i was happy about the news i wouldn't recommend becoming a mother at 12. but thanks to my support system i felt like i finally belonged with and to someone to watch more animated story videos like this hit that subscribe button and tell us in the comments section what you thought about this story you

Channel: Real Amazing Stories

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Length: 12min 2sec (722 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020