The Year I Lost My Childhood: Teenage Mom, Trauma, and Trying to Survive

This was supposed to be the beginning of something beautiful — but it cost me more than I ever expected

My teenage years?

I should be telling you I was sneaking out, going to parties, playing sports, hanging with friends. But my reality looked nothing like that.

The truth is, the decision I made at just fourteen changed the entire course of my life.

Two short days after I turned fifteen, I gave birth to my first baby. And while I love him with every piece of me — and would never trade him for the world — I can’t pretend it didn’t come at a cost.

That choice… it’s shaped everything. Every move I’ve made. Every path I’ve taken. And honestly? It’s been heavy. It’s been traumatic. Because who in their right mind thinks a fourteen-year-old girl is going to go on to live some perfect, problem-free life?

Apparently… my own mother did.

After a lot of therapy, I know now that my brain has blocked out so much just to survive.

So maybe some pieces of my story don’t line up with what others remember —but this is my truth. And I’m finally giving myself permission to speak it.

What I do remember is how I felt.

So much shame. So much embarrassment. Like I was walking around with a giant sign over my head that said fuck up. Because you can’t hide the fact that you had a baby at fifteen. It’s not something people overlook.

I was still in school. I went back like everything was normal — except nothing about my life was normal anymore. He came with me to football games. People saw. They knew. And even when they didn’t say anything, I could feel their judgment. I wasn’t just the girl who had a baby too young. I was the girl who ruined her life.

At least… that’s what it felt like.

But it also felt like… I finally had someone who needed me. Someone who loved me. And that meant something — because the truth is, I grew up in a house that didn’t know how to love emotionally. Affection, support, safety — those things were missing. So when I became a mom, even though I was still just a kid myself, there was this tiny person who looked at me like I mattered.

And that filled a hole I didn’t even know I had.

But… my kids have paid the price for the way I was raised. For the trauma I hadn’t even begun to unpack yet. It’s been a long, windy, fucked up road — with a lot of mistakes and a lot of pain.

But thank God for therapy. Because I’m finally starting to untangle it all.

What I do remember clearly is how quickly I was expected to parent. Not just my son — but myself. My responsibilities. My emotions. My life. My mom did help, but it was on her terms. She constantly told me to get off my phone and sit on the floor and play with him —like if I wasn’t actively engaging every second, I was failing.

It felt like I had to be “on” all the time. She pushed so hard for me to be this ideal version of a mother, but never really checked in on the girl behind that role. I wasn’t allowed to be a teenager anymore. Just a mom — and the kind of mom she thought I should be.

And honestly, he got so used to having constant attention that he never learned how to just be —how to play on his own, how to self-soothe, how to have space. It was intense.

And it wore me down.

Hayley was a completely different story — but I’ll get to that.

Back then, all I knew was that I wanted out. Out of that house. Out of that environment. Out of that version of me.

So the second I felt like I had a way out, I took it. I moved in with Hayley’s dad not long after we got serious — and looking back, I know I rushed it. But at the time, it felt like freedom.

We had only been together about seven months when I thought it was a good idea to try and have a baby. Nineteen years old, still carrying the weight of my first trauma, still searching for love and validation in all the wrong places —and somehow thinking, “Yeah. A baby will make this better.”

Because that’s what trauma does. It convinces you that being needed equals being loved.

It just hit me while writing this —that decision I made at 19 to have a baby with Hayley’s dad? It didn’t just lead to a new chapter. It opened the door to even more trauma.

I remember being around six months pregnant when I found the first inappropriate conversation he had with another girl. And let me tell you — it wasn’t innocent. There I was, nineteen years old, swollen and exhausted, carrying his child, and the man I genuinely thought would be my husband (LOL)was already entertaining someone else.

And that wasn’t some one-time mistake. That was the beginning of a very long, very painful pattern that stretched across the entire seven years we were together.

I can’t even tell you how many times it happened. How many messages I found. How many times I was gaslit. How many pieces of myself I tried to glue back together just to stay.

And look — I won’t sit here and pretend I was perfect. I did things I’m not proud of. I acted out. I tried to get even. Sometimes just to feel something other than worthless.

But through it all, I really tried. I gave it everything I had. I kept trying to make it work long after it had already broken me.

I tried so hard that I ended up weighing 88 pounds, in and out of doctors’ offices, getting tested for cancer because I was so sick.

But it wasn’t cancer. It was stress. That’s how deep it was buried in my body —how loud the pain was screaming when I refused to listen.

I spent the rest of my teens and early twenties trying to make that relationship work.

Trying to build a family. Trying to prove that I could be loved. But what I didn’t realize was that I was slowly losing myself in the process.

By the time I finally left, I was 25 years old —and I had spent nearly a decade of my life trying to survive love that never truly held me.

And that’s where the next part of my story begins.