Shevaluable LIFE LESSONS A MEMOIR OF LOVE, LOSS, & FAITH (eBook)

Keeping Secrets

I had known my son’s father since I was in kindergarten. We were in the same class and had our mats side by side for nap time. We lived three blocks around the corner from each other, our parents knew each other, and we were friendly.

Some years had passed, and I had never looked at him in a romantic light until after Oscar and I broke up in high school. Soon thereafter, we started hanging out on a regular basis and began to see one another in a different way. William was strikingly handsome, and things clicked between us, organically and romantically. William was smart and a lot of fun to be around. We used to smoke weed together and hang out in his basement because that was where his bedroom was, right next to the laundry room. He was also a great break dancer. He had a special area in his parents’ four-car garage with a shiny wood floor where he and his friends practiced their dance moves. I was often in the audience. One day, William, whom we all called Jamie, picked me up from school. He was the only boy I knew with a car, and sometimes he would come get me after summer school. “Hey, do you want to go to Riverside?” He asked as I got into the car.

Riverside was a huge amusement park in Agawam, Massachusetts, which was at least an hour and a half away from home. Of course, I wanted to go! We drove up and had a great time walking around, riding the roller coasters, bumper cars, playing games, and eating fried dough and cotton candy.

We drove the hour and a half back home, and from then on, we hung out together every day. Time went on, and before I knew it, I was pregnant, just like that. I was seventeen years old, pregnant, scared, and confused with my mother’s words ringing in my ears, “If you have sex you can get pregnant.”

In the very beginning, for a short moment, I thought about having an abortion. It took me only a minute to know that I didn’t want to do that.

I said to myself, No, you’re having this baby! You’re going to be a mom.

I knew I was going to have to face my mother and deal with her disappointment over finding out I was pregnant. Thankfully, I wasn’t going to have to face her right way. I had just graduated from high school, and she wanted me to take some time to choose the direction I planned to go next.

She said, “You need to go to college. Join the Army. Do something! It will be one of two things, Shevalle, work or school. You decide.”

We agreed that I would take a summer trip to Jacksonville, Florida, to think things over. My brother Tubby was still living there with our father. I would stay with my sister Genice who was now in nursing school.

Little did my mother know just how much I truly had on my mind. I was six weeks pregnant according to my calculations and was grateful to have that time to figure out what I would do next for me and my unborn baby. If my mom had known that I was pregnant, I would have felt pressured to hurry up and plan my next move. This way, I was able to make this trip and really think about everything as my life was changing forever.

Not only did I keep the pregnancy a secret from my mother, I also kept it a secret from Jamie, my baby’s father. I wanted to be very sure about what I planned to do next before I told anyone about the baby.

Once I got to Florida, my sister and brother and I all decided to get a place together. We found a two-bedroom apartment, and Genice and I shared one bedroom with a master bath while Tubby took the other bedroom.

As we moved into our new apartment, I began to experience terrible morning sickness. I was losing my color and turning pale. Within two weeks, I was three shades lighter. Even a small dab of water in the mornings while brushing my teeth was enough to trigger my morning sickness. It was horrible, and I had to hide my sickness from my sister and brother.

The morning sickness turned into morning, noon, and night sickness, and I couldn’t keep anything down. It was so bad that it caused me to lose weight at the beginning of my pregnancy.

It wasn’t easy keeping the secret from my sister while also sharing a bedroom and bathroom with her, but I was successful for a while. I also managed to keep the secret from our father who came to visit us at the apartment from time to time. He hadn’t noticed because he was just so happy to have three of the four of his children living a few minutes away from him after the divorce put miles between us. Since I hadn’t told anyone my secret, I also could not seek prenatal care. I was in a liminal space of fear, confusion, and sickness while simultaneously carrying another life inside my body. I was sick and pregnant and trying to hold it all in, which had me as sick as my secret.

“Therefore whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered behind closed doors will be proclaimed from the housetops.”
~ Luke 12:3

Eventually, Genice, in her nursing expertise, put two and two together and figured out that I was pregnant. She knew since our childhood that she always wanted to be a doctor. Whenever we would get cuts, scrapes, and bruises as kids, she was always curt with her responses. She would walk around the house saying, “Paging Dr. Turner. Paging Dr. Turner.” One morning as she was preparing to head out the door to school, she turned to me with a matter-of-fact stare and said, “Look, you’ve got to tell Mom. You cannot keep walking around here hiding it or acting like it will somehow go away, because it won’t. Tell Ma.”

“No! I don’t want to tell her yet.”

“Well, you know eventually you’re going to have to tell her.”

“I’ll be eighteen in October, and I will officially be an adult. I will tell her then.”

Her glare felt like a weighted blanket of shame. “So, when are you going to tell Steven you’re pregnant?” she said with no warmth in her voice. Her voice was intimidating with the detachment of a doctor counseling a patient. I thought to myself, Steven? Why on earth does she think this is Steven’s baby? Steven was a boy that I hooked up with for an extremely short time after the break-up with Oscar and prior to me being with Jamie. Genice lived in Florida during this time, so she only got bits and pieces of what was happening with me while in my last year of high school. Then, in a flash, I realized, Dang, if my own sister is thinking this way, other people will too!

The same week I got to Florida, my friend Taylor had called me and told me that Jamie and Chantel had slept together since my short time in Florida. I was hurt and I became furious with Jamie, and though he did not know I was pregnant with his child, this gave me the excuse to create the lie. I didn’t want everyone else to think I was a slut by sleeping with both Steven and Jamie. I couldn’t have lived with that kind of shame even though it was not like that.

So, I answered her, “I don’t know.” How could have I known, considering that I had just made it up?

I thought to myself, Okay, then . . . I’m done with Jamie! He’s not the father. Steven will be the father.

Once that atrocious lie was out of my mouth, it set a series of events in motion that I would not be able to control. I was not brave enough to immediately retract the lie, nor put any thought into this instant lie, having no regard for whom it would hurt and affect or even how this lie would be detrimental to a lot of people. I would live with this lie forever.

I loved Jamie, and being with Steven had been another huge mistake of my many mistakes. Nonetheless, I let my emotions of anger, resentment, and shame drive my decision to weave a complicated and life-altering lie. I was going against everything my mother had ever taught me, and more importantly, I was going against myself, my inherent right to love myself and to be free in my pregnancy. Living this horrible lie that I created blinded me to the devastating hurt that would be caused by it.

“You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another.”
~ Leviticus 19:11

I convinced myself that pretending it was Steven’s baby was the perfect out. He was a nice-looking popular guy. We would have made a good couple, believable players for this imaginary mommy-daddy scenario I had concocted. We were no longer in high school, and this was the real world, the world my mother had tried her best to prepare me for. Steven was now living in Texas, so I told him about the baby over the phone. When he heard he was going to be a father, he was so excited.

Every day that I upheld the lie, it was like a cancer growing in my heart. I knew I shouldn’t be lying, especially about this, but I felt that I had taken things too far and it was too late to turn back. Every time I repeated the lie or went into greater detail with it, I dug a deeper hole for myself, and the lie got bigger. For example, questions of when the baby was due would come up, and I’d have to concoct a lie about calendar dates, none of which ever made sense. Time can account for...