Little did I know what a step-family might do to this wonderful holiday. It was a beautiful winter and I was still consumed by my 1 month-old baby so I was kind of in my own world. I was busy spending my days cuddling and napping and cheering for Thomas as he started hitting huge milestones! (okay not really milestones but back then the things he was doing seemed amazing). I mean he started to smile sometimes, he even rolled over when he was just one month old, I was having a great time.

That is until it was time to make plans for Christmas Day. All seven of the kids (me included) had two sets of parents and two sets of grandparents that we had to try and divide our time between and try to coordinate with each other at the same time. That meant someone was going to end up feeling bad on Christmas. There was no way we could all coordinate the times when we would eat or open presents or whatever else we were going to do. It was impossible. And believe me, we tried but realized the effort was getting us nowhere.

It was hard too because my mom and my step-dad wanted us to celebrate as a family but it wasn’t really working out that way. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that the kids were so old when our parents got married. It’s not like we grew up together and had time to bond. It was more like we were just stuffed into a house and expected to become family. Not just by our parents but by our own expectations as well. But it didn’t work out that way. When we did do things together and try to get to know one another it usually felt awkward.

There were a few times when things felt a little more comfortable but most of the time it felt unnatural. But that’s the thing, we didn’t have just a natural family. And nomatter how nice we are, or how much we care about each other when we’re a step-family there’s just something there that feels a little different.

So Christmas was good, don’t get me wrong. We all celebrated in one way or another and we got to see a lot of family but it didn’t live up to our “one big happy family” expectations.

Arriving home was bitter sweet. We were living with my mom, my step-dad, my brother, my step-brother, and a younger step-sister that would visit often. This was our step-family, our new step-family actually. My mom got married when I was two months pregnant. Talk about a lot of life changes at one time. Lucky for me, I had a step-dad that was pretty cool.

A house full of teenagers is always going to bring troubles but the fact that I got a long with my step-dad made everything else a lot easier to deal with. Up to this point in our relationship the only thing we ever argued about were Tums. Yep, Tums. I was dying from heartburn while I was pregnant and I went through bottles at a time. Well the Tums were his and I wasn’t asking, I was just downing them as quickly as I could. It turned out he had heartburn pretty bad too and I had eaten the last Tums. I resolved to get my own bottles of Tums and stop eating his and that was the end of it.

Compared to other people’s horror stories of step-parents, I thought I had it pretty easy.

Lying in bed, soaking up blood that belonged to a stranger, I was shaking all over again. I was cold, nervous, and terrified. My mom hadn’t been around for the emergencies that took place the night before. In fact she didn’t even know what was going on. The day before when she’d left the hospital everything was fine. When I called her crying and after the fact, she was furious that nobody had called her earlier. She had a few words with the staff at the hospital because as she put it, “I was still a minor.”

After what seemed like days, the blood transfusion was deemed successful. I was happy because I wasn’t sure that my eyelids could stay open any longer without staying that way permanently. Sure that I would be able to open my eyes again, I fell fast asleep.

I was still sleeping when the nurse buzzed me and said I had a visitor. I said I didn’t want any visitors because I had just been to hell and back. She told me it was Melissa, and I said she could come in. When Melissa walked through the door, she wasn’t the Melissa I was expecting. The Melissa I was expecting had grown a belly with me over the past 9 months. The Melissa I was expecting was also a teen mom and she understood everything I was going through. The Melissa I was expecting had her baby just two nights before and I wasn’t embarrassed for her to see me because she probably looked just as bad. It was a different Melissa. A Melissa that I didn’t want to see me in that condition because she wasn’t a teenage mom like me and I was afraid she would just think I was fat and ugly. I was afraid what she might say to the other kids at our school.

Nevertheless I smiled as big as I could with my swollen face and told her to come on in.

I explained to her that I just had a blood transfusion and she gave me a hand mirror. I hadn’t seen myself since a day or two before and I almost threw up. My face was bruised and swollen. I thought my vision was just blurry but when I looked in that mirror I realized that my eyes were almost swollen shut, and that was the reason I could hardly see. I looked like I had been beaten with a baseball bat. And once I knew what I really looked like, I was mortified for her to see me that way. She had the grace to only stay for a few minutes though (I guess she could see what kind of pain I was in). After she left, even though I was embarrassed, I was glad that she came in to see me. She was one of the few people from school that cared enough to take time out of her social life to come visit me.

Boy was I wrong.

I just kept on losing blood. When the doctor finally came in to tell me I had to get a transfusion I could see the concern on his face; and when your doctor looks concerned you know you should be very afraid.

A friendly nurse came in and hooked me up to a machine. She was there for about 15 minutes and she couldn’t get the machine to work. On the outside I remained calm but on the inside I was panicking. I knew I only had a little time left on earth unless they gave me the blood quickly. My doctor had ordered the blood transfusion right away and here was this nurse that couldn’t get the machine to work. And the worst thing was… she was nice. This made it impossible for me to show her my anger.

I didn’t say a word the entire time she was fidgeting with the machine. Thoughts were racing through my head uncontrollably. Was this my punishment for getting pregnant at 16? Who was going to raise my son? Would he have a terrible life because he didn’t have a mother? Would another girl raise my baby? Who was going to protect him and teach him everything he needed to know about life? I was good while I was pregnant. I didn’t smoke, drink, do drugs…I even went to the gym. Why was this happening to me?

She left the room and a new nurse came in to give it a try. She worked on it for about 10 minutes and while she was there she cursed a few times (if that wasn’t a dead give away that things were bad, I don’t know what was). She looked at me apologetically and explained that the connector was broken and that there weren’t anymore. I was furious, why would they only have one connector in the entire hospital? There I was hemorrhaging to death and I knew it would probably be a heart attack that would kill me first. Tears started streaming down my face and I was shaky all over. I just wanted to close my eyes and rest but I couldn’t. What if I didn’t wake up?

A third nurse came in and it took her less than three minutes to hook up the machine (I resorted to counting the minutes to try and calm myself down).It turned out the other nurses hadn’t hooked one up before and they were doing it wrong. I started crying even more. This nurse had just saved my life.

The I.V. was taped to the top of my right hand. It hurt when they put it in so I clenched my teeth and closed my eyes. When the blood first went into my vein it hurt. It felt like a cold bee sting. After a few seconds my whole arm stung but I didn’t say a word. I wanted that blood in my veins and nothing was going to stop it.

Of course I had been bleeding that much. I mean look what had just come out of me! And isn’t it normal to bleed after you have a baby? She said I was losing too much blood and quickly got me back into bed. Another nurse came in and pricked my arm to get a few viles of blood. I couldn’t stay awake any longer; gravity yanked my eyes shut and I fell back asleep.

I woke up and felt like I was in an episode of ER. There was a doctor, a couple nurses, and my boyfriend, and they were all looking down on me. The light was so bright that it hurt to open my eyes. I remember the doctor saying he was giving me a drug that was equivalent to heroin. He shot it into my arm and the next thing I knew it was morning again.

When my boyfriend came back in the morning, I told him about this weird dream I had. I told him about the bright lights, the nurses, and all the talking I heard. Then I told him in my dream I was screaming at the top of my lungs. He looked at me with a frightened look on his face and said, “that really happened.” Then he proceeded to tell me what went on the night before.

I had several blood clots that needed to me removed because my uterus didn’t shrink back down the way it should have after the baby was born. I guess it was a pretty painful procedure and I could tell it wasn’t a funny matter by how horrified my boyfriend was. And that scared me because he could make anything a funny matter. But that wasn’t the end of my horrible experience. Little did I know there was more to come.

As I lay on that cold, hard table with my legs spread uncomfortably apart and cold hands prodding me, my doctor asked that infamous question, “would you like to get an epidural during labor?” I quickly answered that I didn’t want an epidural, I was going to have my baby naturally. My doctor chuckled and said though he’d never personally been through childbirth, he’d heard that it was pretty excruciating. He said I should keep my options open and remain neutral about the epidural until I was actually in labor. Then I chuckled and told him I would think about it. But I secretly knew I wasn’t going to get it.

In those past 8 months I had been let in on a little secret… Strong women, real women, don’t get the epidural. In fact I had been in circles of women chatting at the park and witnessed epidural-free moms scoff at moms who chose to get an epidural. It was almost painful to watch and I knew I didn’t want to be the mom that other women were frowning down upon. I wanted to feel that pride when I told people I had my baby without an epidural.

There I was hooked up to a million different machines, trying to stay awake on the table, and listening to the steady whooshing sound of my baby’s heartbeat. Each contraction hit me harder and harder until I began to lose consciousness. I would hear my sister’s voice calmly reassuring me one minute and the next minute I’d be waking up from complete darkness. I thought I was going to die and wondered how any woman would choose to do this more than once.

When my doctor came in to see how I was doing, he asked that silly question again. “Would you like an epidural?”

“YEEEEEEEESSSSSSS!” The pain was unbearable and that was the only word I could manage to squeeze out of my mouth. I couldn’t stand it for one more minute, I needed drugs, and I needed them right away. After I got my epidural, it was a world of difference. And don’t get me wrong, labor was still hard and oh yeah, it still hurt. When it was all over with, I never wanted to do it again (I promised myself that I never would). But let me tell you an important lesson I learned on that fateful day in 1998: Every woman that has given birth is a strong woman, regardless of her “epidural status.”

After I realized that I didn’t wet the bed, I woke my boyfriend who found it hysterical that I was ‘overflowing.’ I joined in his laughter but my laughs quickly turned to tears as my swollen belly squeezed tighter and tighter.

Luckily my mom was just across the hallway so after she took a few unforgiving pictures, she drove us to the hospital. All the way there the only thing I could think was, there was no turning back. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that this baby had to come out and I couldn’t change my mind about it now.

My entire body was shaking uncontrollably by the time we got to the hospital. I was in fragile condition both physically and emotionally and the fact that I was 17 didn’t help one bit (I mean my frontal lobe wasn’t even fully developed yet)!

All the way to the labor and delivery ward I could feel people staring as they wheeled this pregnant teen down the hallway. I didn’t care though. Over the past 9 months I had experienced every look there was: concern, compassion, empathy, confusion, disbelief, disgust. Whispers and disapproval no longer bothered me. Yeah right, who was I kidding. Of course people’s looks bothered me, I just got really good at pretending they didn’t.

Since the county had implemented a new teen-parent education program, they contacted me to see if I was interested. Having nothing to lose (and being desperately lonely) I decided to give it a try. A tall, friendly, blonde woman would come pick me up in her minivan every Wednesday. We would make the rounds to four other girls’ houses and then make our way to the continuation school on the other side of town.

The first meeting was pretty awkward. I walked into a room full of other teenage girls I had never seen before. As I walked through the room I could almost feel the girls’ shame and embarrassment. But as I left the classroom that first day, those bad feelings left as well. When I came back the next week the classroom felt completely different; A strong feeling of relief seemed to fill the room. I think it was because each of us felt that we were no longer alone.

I looked forward to these meetings every week and quickly became friends with the other girls. There is great comfort in having other people to gripe with.

We all took a vow to keep our conversations within the walls of that room so we felt comfortable opening up to one another. We would often vent about back aches, sore feet, boyfriend troubles, our strong desire to wear normal “teenage” clothes again, and our fears about labor.

I lifted myself off the couch and headed down the hallway for the bathroom. Before I could get to the toilet, I blacked out, missed the doorway, and ran SMACK into the wall. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before and I immediately knew something was wrong.

I stripped down to nothing and stepped into a shower that almost burnt my skin off. As I stood there in that stream of scalding water, I felt like crying. I knew that in this situation I should be crying a lot. But I couldn’t. My entire body was numb (whether it was from the shower or from the shock, I didn’t know).

The rest of that week dragged hazily along. But two positive pregnancy tests, a teary-eyed confession, and constant nausea, made me fully aware that my life was in the midst of a drastic change.