I Got Knocked Up By a Man I Barely Knew

I chose to keep the baby

It sucks being a single mom.

Yes, I said it.

I have been in survival mode with this spot and have found many justifications for me to not feel shitty about it.

Things like:

I have help from my parents, more than non-single parents do.

I’m better off without her father.

It’s been better without him in the picture.

Or look at all the struggles my friends have gone through with their baby daddy’s, with court cases and custody. Oh, at least I don’t have her father involved to struggle with that, or so I would say to myself.

All these wonderful, legal, and justifiable reasons to not feel the tenderness in my heart. Clever.

I needed to play that game at the time. I had the impression that feeling this tenderness would have made me weak. And I needed all the strength I could get in order to get through this role as a mother.

I want to and will allow this void of my heart to finally speak up and out.

It’s time.

The more I open this spot, the more anger and rage I feel mixed in with sadness.

In May 2014, I had a lot of sex with a man named Dave who unofficially changed his last name because of his criminal history. If you googled his legal name, you would see articles written of him from a time he escaped prison.

He was a hitman.

He was the first white guy I had ever slept with. He had tattoos from his neck all the way down to his feet. He mostly tattooed himself and he spent a little over a decade of his life in prison. When I met him, he wore a suit and tie every day, and wore a circle hat thing, a kippah, that apparently said he was Jewish. *insert eye roll*

I roll my eyes here because he wasn’t really Jewish. He was raised Christian and he was Christian in prison, but when he got out he wanted to recreate his whole identity and he found out someone in his bloodline was Jewish, therefore, he chose to become that. I don’t care much about the actual religion, I care more about the fact that it was all false.

It was all an act.

The suit.

The tie.

The being “Jewish”.

The words.

He was an actor.

Probably a sociopath.

I mean he did blow up a school bus when he was just 11 according to him. I didn’t see any of this truth when I started with him. I was blinded with illusion and I saw his heart. I saw the broken heart underneath and I saw the bad boy that would potentially fuck the shit outta me. And it was true. Not that size is everything, but his dick was enormous, and he even had a tattoo with a smiley face on it.

It sure made me smile.

I had broken up with my very catholic boyfriend a few months before, so I was still grieving (more like rebelling) that. Despite the shame and catholic guilt lurking, my ex and I had unprotected sex all the time and he would climax inside of me even when I was ovulating, yea, I didn’t care, and I never got pregnant.

But with Dave — that wasn’t the case.

I remember the day I got pregnant.

We were in his room, that I helped him move in to.

He had gotten kicked out of his ex-girlfriend’s apartment because she caught him talking to me. I didn’t know about her, yet she managed to call me to warn me about him in solidarity of sisterhood.

My mind was still so young. Immature. Naive. My shadowy parts became way more intrigued with him after this.

Her warning just brought me closer to wanting him.

He was homeless for a few days as a result of that and I even slept in my car with him since I felt partly responsible.

It was all part of the thrill and adventure for me.

It was like having a bird trapped in a cage for what seems like forever and then suddenly setting it free.

Such a wild free spirit at heart and she’s been kept trapped behind bars of shame created by Catholicism. Never quite understanding how to simply be with herself without someone telling her how to be.

At this time of my life, I had three jobs and I was in school full time getting my Master’s Degree. Really, I had more energy than I even knew to do with.

So much so that I barely slept.

Now, I’ve learned to handle this level of energy and now understand it as a blessing, as having a lot of access to Life Force Energy, not something to be victimized by. The mental health world tried to label it as Borderline Personality Disorder. I now understand it as my very first initiation into my spiritual awakening; right into my Saturn Return. It’ll take an entirely different article to explain that journey, but for the sake of this story, I’ll get back to how I was managing at the time.

I was working full time as a Teacher Assistant in a New York City jail.

I was a part-time personal trainer at a gym.

I was a part-time unlicensed freelance massage therapist.

I was also a full-time graduate student at Brooklyn College.

All this, and I still managed to find the time to fuck this man, sleep in a car with him a few nights, help him find a place to live and move. Jesus.

I remember the night I got pregnant, we drank a lot of beers.

I remember walking to the store on Myrtle Avenue, right across the street from Sumner Housing projects in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. We were celebrating him finding a room to live in. We smoked and we jammed in his bedroom.

He barely had a bed to lay on.

He barely had anything, but I was enamored with him. I felt like a good person loving him.

That was the night he had shared with me that Amy Winehouse acoustic Valerie track, and I remember feeling his heart. I told him,

You’re a good person.

Mainly because I felt it and it felt true.

Especially after he shared his heart with me.

I didn’t judge him for his past actions.

His prison history.

His very suspicious white supremacists tattoos, which he covered up, and denied being racist and said it was for prison survival.

I believed him because I could feel his heart beating just like mine.

For years, I’ve played victim to this as an empath and righteously labeling him as a sociopath. If you read my last article, I’ll tell you all about this construct and how we empaths also have a part to play in this unhealthy dynamic.

He was inside of my pussy and while he was in there.

I allowed it to happen.

I told him to cum inside of me.

I was so willy nilly.

Lost.

Googly-eyed and heavily influenced by my inner demons.

I say inner demons, but it’s really just the shadow version of me.

See when you deny your shadow, it has a way of coming out sideways in your life regardless of your approval.

We all are light and shadow.

We all carry this polarity.

If you deny this then, you’re probably playing all sorts of weird patterns and just taking no responsibility for it.

If you deny this, then you too are contributing to the “problems” you see around you.

I knew I was ovulating, but since I never became pregnant with my ex, I took my chances.

He climaxed inside of me.

Little did I know this man had 4 other kids.

Little did I know how fertile this man really was.

Little did I know how shitty of a father he’s been to all his other kids.

I knew, but he had so many stories and justifications as to why and I believed it.

I never believed he was a bad person.

He wasn’t and he still isn’t.

This is not about good or bad, it never is.

I learned the hard way how to have and experience love in my heart.

A love that is big enough to roam through any gutter. To see the love in all the places, places where most people would be horrified to look.

I thought I’d be the exception somehow with him.

Well, I wasn’t.

I wasn’t the exception at all.

As soon as I was got pregnant, it was as if my muddy glasses became clean. My vision and thoughts became as sober as fuck. I noticed all of his co-dependence and mine.

I noticed how controlling he tried to be with me in all things.

I noticed how he didn’t have any other friends outside of me.

The truth is I didn’t know him.

It had been less than a month of being with a man I barely knew before I got pregnant.

That’ the truth and my brave admission.

Yes, I got knocked up by a man I barely knew and I kept the baby.

Despite my friends talking shit about me and calling me stupid.

My friend Liza was disappointed in me and would look at me with disgust when I told her I was going to keep the baby. I understand she was coming from a place of love. She had gone to an intervention my therapist had for me the month before because my therapist said that she was concerned with some of my behaviors.

I was dealing with lots of suicide ideation and also different forms of self-mutilation. Instead of getting on medication, I apparently preferred to get pregnant and that was what changed the whole course of my life.

I could have taken the drugs, but life had it that I went on a different path, the shadowed path.

My baby. My pregnancy.

Stepping up in my role as a mother brought out my sword completely in the relationship with Dave. I chose to leave for two months that summer to go to the Dominican Republic for space and clarity.

He decided he didn’t want anything to do with ‘our’ daughter.

Though I still tighten up with the word ‘our’, it really was the best thing that could have happened for us.

He wasn’t there for my whole pregnancy, or the birth, or her life.

After much enlightenment, I realized how I chose that to be the case, somewhat. With much pride, I’ve definitely tried to put the whole thing on me as my responsibility, and in truth, I cannot put it all on me.

He chose to walk away.

After my daughter was born, I sent him pictures of her through email every month hoping for a response, and nothing.

No response.

I managed to get a response because I sent him an email in November 2015, when she was about 9 months, and I didn’t mention my daughter. That was the only way I got a response. I intentionally only spoke about him and me and the times we shared to test out my theory that he didn’t care about my daughter, his daughter.

My hopes skyrocketed, I decided to move back to Brooklyn (I had recently moved to Colorado) to be closer and I thought for sure now he was going to be involved at that time since he answered, but no. It wasn’t the case.

More disillusionment.

I did everything possible to have him be involved. I went to many lengths, tried very hard for him to see her, but that didn’t last long.

It didn’t last long because I was the only one holding the pole for it. #realsinglemoms

He met her three times before she was one, and that was through heavy and unfair negotiations on my part. Things like, “I’ll pick you up from work and you can see her,” or “I’ll swing by 6 am before you leave for work and give you a ride.” I even conspired with his sister, who I barely just met, to arrange a meeting so he’d go.

I was desperate, it was obvious.

It wasn’t his desire to see her.

The last time I saw him was March 2016. It was when I hit my final straw, it was now obvious and clear to me that he didn’t want to be involved with her or me. So I made him say the words.

“Say the words!”

I told him,

“Say it!”

“Say you want nothing to do with her!”

“Say you want nothing to do with me!”

“Say it to me again!”

“Say it again!”

Again and again, he said it.

He said it.

I demanded the truth and I got it.

I demanded he repeated it at least 15 times.

He said it and all illusion was shattered.

My heart broke into a million pieces.

I cried. I screamed.

And not just for me, it broke for her too.

It still breaks to this day.

I was completely broken open to the truth.

“Don’t contact me,” I told him.

I told him, this was final.

I felt a fire grow across an energetic field and it encircled around me and my daughter.

The dragon was summoned.

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