Senior Year

It was a very good year 1982/83. Suntans, cars, drinking, drugs, girls, guys… Life was good beyond all expectation. I grew up in a very affluent South Florida community. My parents and most of my friend’s parents were wealthy, by any measure - An upper class existence where everyone at school had a car, many new BMWs and Mercedes, Porches and Corvettes. Boats, planes, weekend trips to Bimini – life was good.

I was the quintessential popular kid. Tall, firm, athletic, rich, friends with the jocks, the preps, the geeks, the freaks, the misfits – and a straight A student.

A good year, the year my girlfriend of 4 months told her family and I that she was 5 months pregnant. The year I choose, without hesitation to claim the child as my own. Step up in public and make that claim, even though this baby was in no way my child. Not many guys would have done it; most would have bolted – even now. But for me it was the right thing to do.

In the superficial world we lived in back then, a teenage mother was not something that would have been accepted; much less one without the responsible father. It’s not as if we lived in the inner city after all – these things did not happen in “Whiteville”. Girls were expected to “take care” of it. Abort.

Not that I’m a Bible banging pro-lifer – I’m not. I’m pro-choice. Life is my choice. And I have no right to pass judgment or my beliefs on anyone else. But it was a hard choice, for a 16 and 17 year old to make and go forward into life.

We both took a lot of crap about this – from teachers, other students, people, in the community. But fuck them.

Why I did it, I don’t know. Does it define me? Without question. And it has driven me to seek answers – why I am the Man I am. Why did I make this very right decision – at a time in life that I was unsure of my self in more ways than one - this was the same time of my first relationship with a boy...

That most beautiful child that we introduced to the many things on this planet, to this life is now introducing a child of her own to the wind, the rain, the laughter and sorrow that is our existence. Had I allowed that child to be aborted I know that I would not be as complete as I am.