And the first sentence read:
I was eighteen when I got pregnant.
I felt the air leave my lungs.
Brian.
The name meant nothing to me, but as I turned the page and kept reading, my entire world began to fall apart.
Brenda was eighteen years old when she got pregnant. I was twenty-six at the time, working on a farm three counties away. We had not even met yet.
I found an old wooden stool in the corner of the shed and pulled it over to the desk. The light from a small window above me cast a pale glow across the pages of the journal.
I sat down slowly and began to read.
Her story unfolded in front of me, word by word, like a life I had never known.
She was young, just out of high school. She had dreams of going to college, of becoming a teacher. But then she met someone, a boy from another town. She did not write his name. She just called him a mistake I made when I was too young to know better.
She got pregnant that summer.
And when she told her parents, they were furious.
They gave her two choices.
Give up the baby or leave their home forever.
She was eighteen. She had no money, no job, no place to go.
So she made the only choice she thought she could.
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