At 13, She Was Ruined

[Deleted12]

Years ago, when I was a kid growing up in Appalachia, a new girl moved into the community. We'll call her "Annie." I went to school with her during the 7th and 8th grade. She was very pretty, with long dark curls that hung in ringlets down her back, and sparkling blue eyes. Unlike some of the other "pretty" girls, she wasn't a bit snotty and stuck up--she was friendly towards everyone, always cracking jokes that made even the teachers laugh. She was an instant hit with everybody.

I got to know her well when we were both picked to represent our school in the county speech competition. We were both in the storytelling category--and spent a lot of time together on the playground practicing our little skits. After that, we started meeting at the playground after school, along with a bunch of other girls, to hang out after class and on the weekends.

Summer came, and that year, my mom took us to Indiana to visit with relatives while my dad worked on a big construction job he landed in Florida. I didn't see Annie or any of my friends until I went back to school to start the 8th grade.

I was glad to be back home, and happy to see all my buddies again. Everybody had stories to tell about their summer, and I got a chance to catch up on all the gossip--who was dating who, who had broken up, who got into fights, and who had moved away. Annie revealed to us, that she, too, had gone and found a boyfriend, and the way she talked, she seemed like she was crazy over him.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/2 ... Was-Ruined

[emmyfair]

What a total freaking heartbreak...

[ladypuglover]

Damn her "husband", and everybody who could have stepped in and put a stop to that pervert's abuse of that child, but didn't. May they all burn in hell.

She had better know that she is damning her parents, aunts, uncles and any other family member who lived in that town as an adult when this happened. This girl was her friend so why didn't her own parents say something about their child's friend being hurt? They are not off the hook either just because it wasn't their kid.

that and I really doubt this ever happened at all.

[Wolfie]

that and I really doubt this ever happened at all.

Why?

I know somebody who got pregnant by and married somebody in their late 20's when we were in 10th grade. At the time, I didn't see it the same as the girl's parents should have. I also have had 8th grade students get pregnant. It's sad, but it's not out of the realm of possibilty.

[Sola]

That's sickening, really sickening.

[nimerha]

I agree with ladypuglover - the story is pinging my bullshit-o-meter way too hard. Way too dramatic, romantic and just-so. Reminds me of Amina/Tom of Gay Girl in Damascus infamy, actually.

I detest people publishing outright lies, or romanticized accounts of half truths in order to make a point, fight for justice or reveal some "higher truth". Write fiction and admit it as such, fuckers.

[JesusFightClub]

I don't know if this is based on something real but it is certainly romanticised.

And then I stopped cold, turned and went into the room where the bedridden woman lay. A photograph hanging on the wall near her bed had caught my eye. I had one just like it. It was my 7th grade class picture.

I cannot even see how that would happen unless she was gazing fixedly or actually walking into each room, not just glancing idly in on her way to a can of Coke and a ciggy. It makes sense she could have seen what looked like vaguely blurred pic of some schoolkids or something (possibly) out of the corner of her eye but surely the actual WOMAN COVERED IN TUBES would have been where her attention was focused. So either she's a voyeur spying on the very sick and noting their bedside photos in minute detail, or that isn't, ahem, quite how it played out.

Also, the photos seem to be...fortuitously chosen. No?

[LynnKaboom]

I'm sorry, I'm with ladypuglover and nimerha. This sounds like the plot to a particularly melodramatic television drama.

It wouldn't surprise me if parts of this story were true, but the way it was presented just sounds like someone ripped off a drama they saw. The photograph thing sounds especially made up, or if it wasn't, she was being a huge creeper and poking her nose in on the terminally ill.

EDIT: I'm not saying that Annie never existed, or that she wasn't abused, but something about this just doesn't ring true with me. At the very least, someone's embellishing a bit.

[Deleted12]

I agree that something sounds a bit off about this, but we still live in a society where women are treated like sluts even when they fall into the grasp of predators.

[bananacat]

It sounds to me like a combination of multiple true stories. There probably was a girl who was molested by an older creep, and she probably did get pregnant, drop out of school, and marry him. And she probably ALSO knew of a different woman or girl who had a stroke because of an unplanned pregnancy, but that was probably a more "typical" account with a 16 or 17 year-old. It just seems really unlikely that one girl would have so much bad luck in her life. Her points still stand that abortion needs to remain legal for health reasons, and that our society needs to stop slut-shaming, especially when it's a victim of abuse. I don't doubt that all of these horrible thing could have happened, only that it seems odd for all of them to happen in the same story.

[LynnKaboom]

Even if the point is valid, does that really excuse lying about it, though? Even if it's squashing multiple true stories into one, it's still misrepresenting the facts, and that's not a good way to get people to change their minds on anything. Look at what happened recently with those fake lesbian blogs. It might not be exactly the same, but they're comparable- both are lies.

Again, not saying that this DIDN'T happen- it could have. But I still maintain it sounds like a television drama plot.

[Rosa]

4 girls out of my 8th grade class of about 250 had babies before we started high school; 2 I know for sure had older boyfriends, older than high school at least (at 12 and 13 I wasn't very good at estimating adults ages). One we always thought the first baby was actually her father's; she didn't have another til we were out of high school and she was getting married, but when I moved back to town after college she had 4 kids. Another friend of mine never got pregnant but her stepfather moved back into the house after doing prison time for sexually abusing the kids, and I know for a fact he beat the crap out of her ( I never saw it, she wouldn't let me in the house if he was there, but I saw the bruises and sometimes I heard things when I came over and nobody would let me in the door.)

And, separate from that, a woman on my work team dropped dead one day of an aneurysm when she was pregnant. i dont' know the whole story, but it certainly happens.

[Hane]

I wish I knew. It does sound extreme--but then I remember this:

In the early 90s, the mother of my daughter's friend worked as a counselor at Planned Parenthood. She told me that it wasn't uncommon to see pregnant 14-year-olds come in with mothers, aunts, and grandmothers who were ecstatic over the news. Some of these girls had "boyfriends" considerably older than they were, but I don't remember anything about DCF or the cops being called.

[keen23]

I know there was a book, with the same general premise. And I've looked online, and I can't find it. Mid to late 1990s. Barely teenage girl falls in love with a convict/poet/country singer. They get married while he's in jail. She gets pregnant by him. She's all of 14 or something like that. I thought it was Wally Lamb, but it's not one of his.

[Inanna]

I don't know... I've known women (actually, I'm related to women) who have had lives like this. Preyed on by sexual predators while the family turns a blind eye or encourages it, knocked up at a young age, complications in pregnancy that ruin the rest of their lives, predator bails the second his "bride" isn't young and fresh and healthy anymore. Maybe I'm just a little jaded because my extended family is pretty much the definition of screwed up priorities, sexism, and abuse.

Granted, none of the girls I'm thinking of suffered a stroke and severe brain damage, but one relative had to have a hysterectomy at the age of 17 when her second pregnancy went horribly awry. Another attempted suicide after her much-older husband left her for losing three babies before her 18th birthday, then was institutionalized until she died in her mid-twenties. I could go on and on about similar incidents with slightly less tragic outcomes but I'm sure you get the idea.

Granted, none of these stories are exactly current events because most of them happened before I was born, and I'm in my 30's. But I don't doubt the story of the girl at all. The author's interaction with the story DOES seem a little too clean and dramatic. (Why would they put a 7th grade class picture by the girl's bed? That strikes me as weirder than an incredible run of bad luck, to be honest.)

[dastarddamsel]

I used to work with a girl like this, 15, and engaged to be married to a 39 year old. They had one kid when she was 14, and they were living at her parents' house.

The kid was an absolute angel, but the BF left a lot to be desired. Where we grew up, bowling was a huge thing, and he could often be found at the bowling alley flirting with other women.

I've lost touch with her, but I do remember her getting an abortion at 16, and eventually having her 2nd kid at 18. Her parents thought this all was perfectly ok, as did many of our common friends. At the time, my parents were threatening to kick me out of the house because I was sort of casually seeing someone 4 years older than me, so they definitely didn't think it was ok. But they were in the minority.

While I doubt Robin ever had any severe injury/stroke, I do know that this type of relationship and the resulting pregnancies are more common than we would like to think. And I do know that she looked and acted like a woman 15 years her senior. And had the health issues to boot.

[Rosa]

I agree that the article is a little too tidy, though if the young woman dropped out of school after 7th grade that might have been one of the few formal photos of her - people who have babies tend to take pictures of the babies, not the grownups. But it has the believable tinge of "I went away to college and rarely came back and OMG look what happened to someone I had lost touch with." The tidy thing I was thinking about was that the author blamed the man for divorce, when it might have been necessary to get the nursing home paid for.

I was thinking about this on my bike this afternoon, too - my parents were considered old when they got married, 22 and 26 or so. Most of their friends married in their late teens or early '20s (this is in the '60s, my folks were married in '68) and my partner's parents, from a big working-class Catholic family, married at like 19 and 21 and were considered totally normal in the mid-70s - if 18 is "normal" then 14 would seem young but not obscene, you know? Maybe 16 more than 14. I had a coworker who married at 17 in the late '60s and she talked about how looking back at her wedding-day self eating cereal and watching cartoons at her moms until it was time to put on The Dress, she was just a baby - but all her friends were getting married too, it was totally normal.

[The Archivist]

There was a girl in my jr. high who was pregnant at 14. And I didn't live in Appalachia.

I understand your skepticism, but I also think it's kind of nasty to call a writer a liar without doing more independent research first, or maybe emailing the author.

[SunnyAndrsn]

When I was in 8th grade, there was a big news story about a a local child molester being caught. His young step-daughter turned him in. We all knew it was someone in our class who had turned him in and had been his victim, but no one could figure out who it was. Being a gaggle of 8th grade girls, we were curious and it became the topic at a slumber party. One girl told the rest of us she knew who it was, and after several minutes of guessing someone turned to her and said "it's you, isn't it Kelly?" Kelly started crying and the rest of us felt like crap, not really understanding what she'd been through, the courage it took to speak up, or the hell she was still going through because her mother was very, very angry with her. Her mother never divorced her step father.

Fast forward to freshman year, we were all 14. Kelly was dating a senior and was pregnant before the end of the school year, give birth early the fall of our sophomore year. She was pregnant again before the end of our junior year--with twins. Three children before the age of 18. She did marry the father of her children at some point, but I don't know what happened to them.

Looking back on all of this, I remember she always had to wear skirts, never pants, even in the coldest weather. This is in the upper midwest where we can get subzero temps in the winter. After the step-father was arrested, she started wearing pants, and she admitted that he made her wear skirts or dresses all the time.

Poor thing, I hope wherever she is that she's found happiness

[dianapavelovna]

I know there was a book, with the same general premise. And I've looked online, and I can't find it. Mid to late 1990s. Barely teenage girl falls in love with a convict/poet/country singer. They get married while he's in jail. She gets pregnant by him. She's all of 14 or something like that. I thought it was Wally Lamb, but it's not one of his.

Are you thinking of The Most Wanted by Jacquelyn Mitchard? http://www.amazon.com/Most-Wanted-Jacqu ... 940&sr=8-1

there's something in the writing style of the piece that sounds more like bad fiction than truth. But its points are still valid.

[darkplumaged]

there's something in the writing style of the piece that sounds more like bad fiction than truth. But its points are still valid.

Yeah, exactly. The tone is off, somehow. But that doesn't mean that something like this couldn't happen or didn't happen. A girl my sister went to school with had a baby in eighth grade; it wasn't common knowledge who the father was, but I doubt it was another eighth grader.

I wonder about the psychology of men who think it is acceptable, even preferable, to have sex with young teenage girls. I also wonder about the parents of girls who have much older "boyfriends"--do they think this is OK? Do they have so many other problems or priorities that they're just tuned out?

[Rosa]

One case I wasn't supposed to know about, but did because she was one of my mom's students, was a little girl in middle school who was being pimped out for drugs by her own father. She acted out inappropriately in school, and instead of shaming her for sluttiness the teachers asked her why, and got her out of the situation.

She would have been about 10 years younger than me, I guess - I'm trying to remember when it happened. After I was out of high school for sure, so sometime in the '90s.

[teddybear]

I used to work with a woman who married at the age of 13, her husband was in his 30's. Her first child also got married at age 13 to a man in his late 20's. Needless to say, neither marriage lasted very long. Personally, I don't think anyone should be allowed to marry below the age of 18, no matter what the circumstances. And my mom married my dad when she was 16.

[MrsKay]

I live in Ontario, Canada, so the age thing is confusing me - you need parental permission to get married at 16, and you can get married without it at 18. Where is it legal under 16?

[keeperrox]

I live in Ontario, Canada, so the age thing is confusing me - you need parental permission to get married at 16, and you can get married without it at 18. Where is it legal under 16?

It depends on the state, but she says "Appalachia", which makes me think West Virginia, where it's under 16 with parental and judicial consent. However, Ohio is unlimited with parental consent, Pennsylvania is 14 in the case of pregnancy with judicial approval, and North Carolina is unlimited in the case of pregnancy, and all have Appalachian regions. Other states in Appalachia are Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi (had to look those last three up), and with the exception of Mississippi, all are 16 with parental consent. Mississippi is the same as WV; both parental and judicial consent are required but there is no minimum age.