Am I Normal?

What is normal?

Now that is the $64 000 question.  For me, nowadays, normal is about 6 hours of sleep a night, followed by school at 8.45 every morning, then home to look after Jordan, do odd jobs, and sleep.  In amongst all that I also have to try and figure out and balance friendships... For others in my year level at school, normal mostly involves school everyday, followed by homework and a relaxing weekend.  For mum and dad, normal consists of getting my sisters and I ready for school and either babysitting Jordy all day or working.

A year ago, my normal was completely different.  Normal was receiving academic honours and having ambitions to become a kick-ass lawyer.  Now I am down to almost a half-load of subjects and I struggle to complete my homework.  All throughout the first half of this year I have fought a battle in my head regarding my inability to cope with a regular workload at school.  Sure there are others doing reduced programs too, but most of my friends manage six classes, they are all jealous of my three spares, but I am jealous of their normality.

The fact of the matter is I can't cope with a 'normal' load anymore.  Because I am not what society calls normal.  This could lead into a whole new issue of society's influence on our everyday lives, but that is a track I might follow in the future.  For the rest of society, it is normal to go to school and muck around with mates in spare time.  For me it is not.  I am different.  Not just because of Jordan.

For the entirety of primary school I was subject to the name 'ranga-belle' because of my red hair... For years I absolutely despised my curly auburn hair, but now I have cherry red locks that I am proud of! That is one, fairly superficial example, but it helps to prove a principle, it is okay to be different.

What is normal?
It's a trick question, there are about 7 billion different types of normal, one for every person on the earth.

lets just continue as normal shall we?

So after the HUGE news that Will and I were having a baby, most things did go back to normal for a while.  The next day at school I think I received the more hugs than I have had throughout my life so far... But everyone seemed to react positively, even up to this day I have only heard of harsh words from one person, who's opinion is worthless to me anyway.

However

Being pregnant brings with it ALOT of challenges... both physically and mentally.  To begin with, each morning I struggled to get out of bed, having woken up multiple times in the night due to either a full bladder or nightmares, which made a frequent appearance throughout my pregnancy.  Then place on top of that the stress of school, an advanced VCE subject and coping with all the developments and hormones of being pregnant. Life was not easy.  It still isn't.

I didn't go to school a lot.  At least once a week in term 2 I had the day off..  I just couldn't go.  At this stage in everything I was EXTREMELY reliant on Will, so whenever he didn't make it to school, I almost always didn't either.  Being so reliant on Will meant that I tended to neglect my friendships a little bit.. okay, a lot.  Almost every recess and lunchtime I would spend with him.  Which I now realise was probably the wrong thing to do.  Lately I have been blaming my lack of friendships on having Jordan in general, but I am beginning to realise it was more my fault for being so preoccupied with other things.  Although now it may be the wrong thing to focus so much on Will, at the time it was what I needed, it was my coping mechanism.

Then there was home.. Of course things were going to be different.  To begin with, mum and dad no longer trusted me, plus everyone in the house had to get used to the reality that there was going to be a baby in our house.  My youngest sister, Daisy, is 11, so we haven't exactly had a baby in the house for a long time.  Because of everything going on, even before he was born, there was a big shift in the focusses and the attitudes of people in the house.  Partly good, partly bad.  But the good news is, we are all still here and we all still love each other.

So no, we did not just continue as normal.  But I think when we made the decision to keep and love our son, we knew without even having to think about it that our lives would never be 'normal' again...

The BIG reveal

So we had told our parents, the next step was to speak to the school about how we could handle it and what they were willing to do.  We got a similar result to speaking to our parents not the shocked 'what?!' that we received from Mum, but they told us that they would support us as best as they can for the duration of our school years.  Speaking to the school was relatively easy, the most nerve-wraking thing for me still to come was speaking to our friends...

We have spent ALOT of time with the school counsellor, Dean, since I became pregnant, and he has been one of the most helpful people throughout this entire time.  We discussed with him what the best approach to telling our peers would be.  Being 16 at school, we knew that anything we said to anybody would inevitably be spread to the majority of our year level by the end of the week.. and we wanted to avoid a 'chinese whispers' situation where the story got messed up as it was passed along the chain.  In the end we all decided the best approach was for Dean to hold a meeting with all the year 10 students and explain to everyone what the situation was, so that there was a minimal margin for variation on the story.

The day of the meeting arrived and we had both decided to tell one friend each just before the meeting. So we met up with them and headed to the health centre, with me attempting not to hyperventilate... Once again, I couldn't even say anything and will had to tell them.  I can still remember the action of my then best friend, the first thing she said was 'so?' meaning it hadn't changed her opinion of me one bit.  This was relieving.

So Will and I headed home for last period because we thought it would be best to avoid the wondering stares and million questions that would be waiting for us.  Dean had told everyone in the meeting to give us all space for the night and not to contact us wanting to know information.  But later that night I was regretting that because I didn't hear a thing from anyone that night and Will's friends messaged him regardless, which only made me more worried..

how do we tell our parents...?

We were going to wait a week, that way we could do another pregnancy test and be absolutely sure that it was positive. But we couldn't... we both had the day off school on Monday and decided to tell our parents that night.  Will brought his mum around that evening to 'talk'.  Of course my mum was suspicious before they even arrived.  We sat down, Will, his mum (Karen), my mum and I, and I just couldn't say it.  I don't know why, I guess I was scared and nervous at what they're reaction would be.  I've always done pretty well at school, without trying to sound arrogant, its my strength.. so I knew mum and dad had high expectations of me which just made breaking this news even worse.  Some parts of that night are a blur now, but other parts are crystal clear.

The first thing mum said was 'what?!' but she didn't really say it, she shrieked it.. It has got to be one of the most scariest things I have ever done. Will even cried.  

All in all though, I suppose it did go fairly well.  Both my parents and Will's parents had said they would support us no matter what we decided was the right thing to do for us, although they were EXTREMELY angry.  Maybe not angry... I think more disappointed than anything, which is fair enough.  I have to say, I was VERY relieved when that conversation was over, but everything was still hanging over our heads waiting to drop, any second.

One hurdle out the way, time to decide which one to face next, because there certainly were, and still are ALOT of things to deal with.