Lately, I've noticed how much guilt gets put on a person for one certain thing. From adopting, to having a mental disorder, to forgetting about specific things, to getting raped, to having an abortion that was your choice. Everyone is always turning to someone to blame for the situation and usually, it is the victim/person doing it. Really this entire thing makes me rub my temples in anger and gives me a total headache. I've got a few stories to go with this one.
The main reason why I came across this topic was I saw a story on Huffington Post about the 37 Ignorant Things About Adoption(1). Most of them were very ignorant things directed about the children about their race. For example, one of them says, "Say something in Chinese." The girls can't speak Chinese though because they were adopted as babies and so their first language is English. Another thing that ruffled my feathers was, "How much did she cost?" As a mother, that would bother me. Other ones though, were asking why the mother didn't want her own kids, or didn't she want one the same race as her? Guilt tripping the mother..
Oh wait, I forgot my definition...
Guilt-tripping; Verb; Causing a person to feel guilty for your own purpose. (I personally know this all too well)
Back on topic; I have a personal story to tell about how I've been treated like so. It goes into my personal life and some of my own views so if you're a little bit finicky on the topic of abortion or teen pregnancy, I'd advise you to skip ahead a little bit...
About three months ago, my boyfriend and I were fooling around and well, you know... a few things happened; we didn't go all the way though. I had a calender keeping track of my period and when I realized that it was almost a week late, I began to stress. My father and schooled me on the topic of teen pregnancy so much and I knew that I wasn't ready to be a mother anytime soon. When another week passed, I began doing research about what I could do, if I was expecting. I basically had three options. Adoption, abortion, or keeping the baby.
I started to research about abortion first because I had to keep this away from my father and I knew that my lovely, adult stepsister would help me out with everything. I came across a website called Teenbreaks.com(2). It was a poorly made website (that you have to scroll down half a page before you see anything), but it had information about what I was looking for. I spend two hours on this site (from 8-10) and when Jeremy showed up at my house to spend the day with me, we laid in my bed for a fully thirty minutes; him holding me and me crying to no avail. The entire website is there to make you feel guilty. They claim to "give you the facts", but all it had was stories of girls who were upset over aborting, procedures that makes everything look awful, "doctors" saying it's the worst thing that you could do, and the one phrase all of the site, "Abortion is serious and permanent. There's no turning back. Don't let someone push you into it." Everything on the site though, is trying to push you not to do it though. It's any pro-choice person's worst nightmare.
Two days after the incident, my period finally came and I knew that I wasn't pregnant. It was horrid though, going through all that. I never felt so guilty in my life and having all that pushed on me with my depression, everything just slowly got worse. Jeremy and I had many fights over those weeks, but after we were relieved, everything was so much better between us.
Let's say that didn't pan out though...
Let's say that I was pregnant and I was expecting right now. Would I have got an abortion, put my baby up for adoption, or keep it and ruin my future that had been laid out for me since I was 5? The guilt would have eaten at me under the first option. I would have cried for days after that and with my unstable mental state, I would have turned to harming again. Second option, would have rough for Jeremy and I both. We would have been letting go a part of us and neither of us could do that. He's always said that he wanted to be the father that his never was. The third option would have ruined my plan to go to Bridgewater College here in Virginia. I couldn't be the writer that I achieve to be. Everything would have fell apart. All eyes would be pointed to me, guilty teenager who has no idea what she's doing.
Guilt is one emotion that will bring any person to their knees. It hurts every person that it comes to and it tears people apart. An example of this was my research and the toll that it had on me. I couldn't even think about my future it hurt so bad. Thankfully, I didn't have to have the real taste of that guilt. I was saved from it.
The moral of all of this though is, don't make someone feel guilty for something. It hurts someone more than you think and you never know what they're truly going through unless you've been through it yourself.
Have a nice week, loves.
-Kayla VI
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