Happy Friday & welcome back for more of the tea! ☕  If you didn’t read my blog post last Friday, “21 & pregnant?!” you totally should! Not only because it’s entertaining, but also because this post is a continuation of that post and while you CAN jump in on this one without reading the first one, where’s the fun in that?!

So last week, I was pregnant and HOMELESS! Why?! To get out of my summer contract with my apartment complex so that I could move back home at the end of the semester. My apartment complex told me that they had already found someone else to take over my lease and gave me an unrealistic amount of time to move out. Even though I hadn’t figured out where the heck I was going to live for the last month of undergrad, I went ahead and moved because I didn’t want to have to pay for an apartment that I wasn’t living in!

Nonetheless, for the month of April, that’s exactly what ended up happening!

The leasing office had the audacity to call me and say that the person they found had backed out and that it was still my responsibility to pay the rent until I found someone to take over my lease! Naturally I was like, okay..so can I move back in since I have to pay for it? AND what did they say to me? THEY SAID NO, but not explicitly. They basically said that if I moved back in, I would no longer have the option to allow someone to take over my lease later and would be responsible for paying my rent even if I did decide to move again in May! None of this was detailed in my contract, but how was I going to fight that alone? They held the power. ??

SO what you’re saying to me is that I have to pay the rent, I can’t live there if I want ANY chance of getting out of my contract, AND I have to find the new tenant for you because you’re incompetent?!

Ugh, so I’m 21. I’m pregnant. I’m homeless. I’m in school.  I have 4 jobs. And I’m sad as hell. Haha. So what to do next..

I was super social and had lots of friends, so I had faith that my friends would come through for me and everything would be FINE! I would rotate who’s houses I crashed at since I was in class and at work ALL day anyway, so I just needed somewhere to sleep; its going to be a BREEZE. WRONG. It was okay, but honestly I think my inner independent woman was crying because I don’t like HAVING to depend on other people and that’s what I had to do for the sake of my growing family. It was truly a humbling experience and for a few days my friends DID come through and we had sleepovers and laughed and enjoyed the extra quality time with each other, but I felt super vulnerable and helpless.. AND I WAS! And it SUCKED!

I spent a lot of time hanging out in Bumblebee, my beautiful Chevrolet Spark, and my ferrets were living with my friend, because they couldn’t bounce around with me; that’s ridiculous. After a few days though, my friend came through CLUTCH and let me crash in her spare bedroom in her apartment style dorm on campus, but that also came with some “issues.” ?

Your student ID had to be calibrated for you to get into the building; because they locked the lobby late at night. Technically, I didn’t live there and thusly, my student ID wouldn’t give me access to that building! So I had to be let in or walk in with other people, but getting in the building wasn’t enough! You ALSO had to swipe your ID to get on the elevator to get her floor. ? To top it all off, even if I did manage to get into the building and onto the elevator, which was pretty easy during the day, she still couldn’t make a copy of her key due to university policy; so there was still a LOT of dependence on her to get into the room and coordinating our schedules and checking in with each other! And she was down for it! Naturally there were frustrations and miscommunications along the way, but she altered her life for me and I will be forever grateful! Das da homie. ?? There was also the necessity to hide from the resident assistants AND not let the room LOOK like it was being lived in just in case there was ever a room inspection or random drop by; and there were!! Don’t forget that my car is tiny and 90% of my belongings were in my storage unit; so I took lots of trips to my storage unit to get stuff because I couldn’t technically move in. It was a mess, but it WORKED and it was consistent; that was more than I could’ve hoped for at that crazy time in my life!

Side Note: I did look into the possibility of staying in a hotel for that last month, but it was going to cost me over $1000, which I had, but I also ended up having to pay April’s rent and I wanted to use my money in a more constructive way as I was preparing to have a baby, which is also super expensive! So that was a no! And no, I didn’t have any family in the city.

I know when I previously talked about this, I made it seem like I took the pregnancy test divine intervention bore light upon my face and I immediately knew what I needed to do with my life, defer my acceptance to vet school, move back home, and life was all going to be great; NO! I was LOST! I had never in a million years considered the possibility of being in school with a baby and quite frankly, being in MEDICAL with a baby seemed significantly more daunting for obvious reasons!

When I took that pregnancy test, we were in the midst of a bunch of inclement weather. I was googling places in Knoxville to go take a formal pregnancy test to confirm my pregnancy and find out how far along I was, BUT EVERYTHING WAS CLOSED! It was like the universe had dropped this baby into my womb and said, “deal with it. Bye.” ?

The next day, when SOME places thought that the streets were safe enough to be traversed by people, I scheduled an appointment to get a confirmatory test at this place called Hope Resource Center right down the street from my school. (what a convenient location. Haha. It’s like they expect college students to get pregnant or something.. hahaha.) Anyway, contacting Hope was the BEST decision I made! I hadn’t even told my boyfriend yet because I wanted to be SURE and be able to tell him how far along I was; so it had been a scary and lonely couple of days trying to get it all figured out by myself!

When I took the pregnancy test at Hope and it was too positive and they estimated that I was around 6 weeks based on my last visit from lady red. They also offered to allow me to participate in this Baby class with other pregnant women where we would have light snacks before hand and learn about topics relating to the pregnancy process leading up to having the baby and tending to the needs of these tiny humans. They also offered counseling as a part of this class since pregnant women are emotional and have lots of feelings and also since it was VERY apparent that having a baby was not at ALL on my list of things to do until I was at least THIRTY! I immediately enrolled and started planning HOW I was going to tell Brad that he was going to be a DADDY!

Brad had JUST moved to Memphis on Valentine’s Day and I got that positive pregnancy test maybe 3 days later; so I’m sure that becoming a dad was the FARTHEST thing from his mind at the time! I got my acceptance letter to Vet school the same day that Brad moved and it was just a whirlwind of change happening in our lives and I now had another BOMBSHELL to drop on him! Naturally I was dropping very subtle hints about the possibility of us having a baby to him in our conversations, but he’s a man and completely missed ALL of my hints. So Wednesday morning of that next week, I told him that we needed to talk, so cliché, I know, but after a couple of hours of waiting on me to tell him what was going on, he walked out of his new job orientation to call me because he just couldn’t wait anymore! So I told him…

He didn’t panic or anything; he just was really surprised and subsequently quiet. Haha. So we said our “I love you”s and he went back into his orientation and I went back to whatever it is that I was doing, but he went back a changed man. I was the same because I already knew. Haha.

The next couple of days we were both SUPER emotional and SO in LOVE and full of so many EMOTIONS and EMOTIONAL AND EMOTIONS!! Full of all of these emotions, Brad wanted to come see me and that weekend he packed a bag and got on the road to do just that!

If you remember correctly, I said that we had experiencing inclement weather, Memphis was not exempt to this and this was an off on and on thing for several weeks! So when he got on the road, it wasn’t long before he ended up in a standstill on the interstate due to this inclement weather! There was ice everywhere and people were having accidents and sliding all over the place and he wanted to turn back and go home! “ NO! I WANNA SEE YOU! I NEED to see you!” inserts crocodile tears You know, being super dramatic and hormonally ridiculous; so he kept trying to make his way toward me.

After about 6 hours of not moving very far at ALL, I decided that I was going to go meet him! It was super late at night and there was ice everywhere, but I was determined to go see my man!

My apartment complex was on top of a giant hill, so with the use of my parking break and a lot of prayer, I slid my emotional tail down that hill and slowly made my way toward Nashville! There was NOBODY on the interstate because clearly, I was the only person in the city dumb enough to want to travel under these conditions.

After 12 hours on the road for Brad and 5 for me, we met in Lebanon, TN and got a hotel and spent the weekend together being happy, crying, and in shock. I was so full of emotion and running on adrenaline that I didn’t even pack a bag; so the next day we went to Walmart to get clothes and toiletries and stuff. Now every time we drive past that Lebanon exit we look at each other and smile, because we really did have a good weekend reveling in our new truth and it was very memorable for many reasons.. we were going to be PARENTS!!!

NOW that the cat was out of the bag to baby daddy, we had to figure out how we were going to tell our parents, which I was concerned about, but I knew that ultimately it would be easy to tell MY mom. Brad has a already met my parents and they loved him, BUT…

I hadn’t met Brad’s parents yet…….

AND I’m pretty sure they didn’t even know that I existed…..

…………………………………………………….

So not only did he have to tell him that we were dating, but that we were also going to be giving them a grandchild…

Seriously y’all, I am NOT making this up!

SO if you want to find out what happened when I met my future in laws and the next steps in our pregnancy journey, COME BACK NEXT WEEK!

Talk With Us

comments