Never Too Late

by Amber Portwood

  What the hell kind of way to act is that? This is the same man who used to care so much about others it would kill him to hurt somebody like that, and who I still have so much love for in my heart, and is such a big piece of my life. And here he was cheating on me and coming over to my freaking house to act all sweet with me and make me feel good about us, and then he’s calling this girl up and telling me to leave him alone. It’s crazy how somebody can show such different sides.

  I don’t know how to explain what happened to him. But I do think, hypothetically speaking, of course, that an experience like a reality show can turn a regular person into a piece of shit. That man was less than a boy at the time. To me, behind closed doors with the cameras off, as far as I could tell, he was nothing but a cheater and a liar. And nobody knew because by that time I was already so used to trying to hold up the routine. And I know people might think they know how bad it was from what they saw, but what was inside our world, what we did keep from showing other people, was even worse.

  There were times we’d physically fight, both of us. He’d spit in my face and I’d spit back in his face. He’d hold me down and lay on me, all three-hundred seventy-five pounds, and I’d be fighting and telling him he better knock me out because if I got up I’d beat the hell out of him. That was our lowest point. We hated each other for what we thought we’d done to each other, and we got to just about the worst place in our relationship that you can imagine.

  I don’t know exactly when it became so bad between us. I can’t really pinpoint where it happened for him. I know for me, I checked out when he cheated, and I checked out double when things went bad later, when I lost Leah. But I don’t know what happened for him. I can’t speak for him. From all I can try to understand, I think it was the attention and the money that did that to him.

  Today our relationship is confusing. It’s very, very sad. It’s one of those tragic situations where two people share so much and have grown so much together that they’d love to be together if it was possible. But they’ve hurt each other so bad, it’s not possible at all. Every time I look at him, all I see is all that heartache and pain, and it’s even worse that it’s all mixed up in love and family ties. It makes me want to jump out of my skin, because I still get caught up in what he used to be. I always think that one day he’s gonna come back and be that beautiful person I could count on, the one who said to me, “We’re gonna get through this” and meant it. It just breaks my heart because I know that in a perfect world we would have had an amazing life together. But we’re so scared of going back to that low point we went to, we’re probably never going to be able to give each other a chance to try again.

  Those scenes on Teen Mom of me beating up on Leah’s dad don’t really leave any room for doubt about how completely destroyed we were at that point. How do you come back from that? I was wrong to get violent with him. Even back then, I never would have said behavior like that was okay, especially in a family. I know it was despicable and I take full responsibility. And there’s no “but” about that, just the added fact that even if he forgave me for what I did to him, there was a whole lot still left between us that couldn’t be forgiven. There was nothing we could think of to repair how bad things had gotten.

  And once it was over, when I had given up and truly wasn’t with him anymore, I just started going haywire.

  By the way, he and I never forgot about Leah. We love our daughter and we would never forget what that meant. Nothing that’s happened between us ever stopped us from caring about our daughter and the life we were giving her. We lost control of our relationship with each other, and what we’d had together ended up smashed to pieces, but that didn’t mean we ever forgot our child in our home. You have to remember we had come from growing up in messed up homes ourselves, and we knew what it was like to live with parents who were screaming and fighting and getting physical. It’s devastating that we let that happen to us as a couple, as a family, and I wish more than anything we hadn’t ended up that way. Things were just really hard, and we couldn’t handle it. The stress and anxiety and anger and hurt were just filling up that house no matter how hard we tried to fight it back, to the point where I was feeling like I lost my mind.

  We weren’t holding up the routine anymore, and it’s not like this was happening behind closed doors. And all of a sudden, we weren’t the only ones worried about our child. When the show aired and everybody saw the footage of me beating up on him, there was a lot more scrutiny coming from all directions on how all this was affecting Leah. Obviously the most important place it came from was Child Protective Services.

  After I hit Leah’s dad on TV, CPS started a file on us and wound up monitoring us for six months. That put even more pressure on us, because we never wanted to get in trouble with them. To make it even worse, the court picked up the case and they brought battery charges against me. That brought along a no-contact order, which was absolutely devastating.

  The no-contact order meant that he and I weren’t allowed to be around each other with Leah. We weren’t even allowed to call each other on the phone. Now, how was that supposed to work when we had a kid together? We still had our child, and the court pretty much made it impossible to co-parent while they stayed on our asses with their investigation. The restrictions combined with our problems getting along added up to a completely impossible situation.

  Then, in another charming twist on my fame experience, my house got vandalized and trashed. Because of that, CPS decided it wasn’t safe for Leah to stay with me overnight. So before I even knew it, I lost a lot of control over the time I spent with her. Since she was with her father every morning and every night, I had to count on him or the people around him to communicate with me for everything in between. That didn’t always work out so well. As a mom, pretty much the bare minimum you can ask for is the ability to know where your little girl is at any given time. But whether it was on purpose or not, there were many times when my calls went unanswered and there was nothing I could do to see or talk to my daughter.

  He and I fought to have the no-contact order removed so that we could handle things better and have a better parenting situation for Leah. The judge finally agreed to modify the arrangement, but there was a huge catch. Even though we could talk and hang out as much as we wanted, Leah wasn’t allowed to be present during those times. The idea was they wanted to protect her from the problems between her parents. But what happened was it made it so that the only time the three of us could be together was the few minutes during pick-ups and drop-offs.

  Even when things did go as well as possible, it was heartbreaking. Absolutely heartbreaking. When I’d take Leah back to her father after spending time with her, there would be a few moments where she was so happy to see her dad. Then she’d realize I was leaving and she’d just fall apart. There’s no way to explain to a child that young why one of her parents was always walking out the door when she came around. When I had to kiss her goodbye and she was on the floor crying and screaming that she needed me, begging me to just wait, not to go, it was the most horrible feeling in the world. No matter what anybody thinks of me as a mom, then and now, Leah and I have always had a deep bond, and that ripped my heart out. I couldn’t explain to my daughter why I kept leaving her, why I couldn’t be with her. I don’t think any mom can go through that and not be affected in the worst way.

  Meanwhile depression and anxiety were pulling me down, and I was having a hard time finding happiness in anything. I agreed to work on anger management while the investigation was going on, and I was on a lot of medication to deal with my anxiety attacks and depression. But nothing was making me feel better. I felt like a complete failure, and everybody was telling me I was. Strangers were calling me worthless and saying I didn’t deserve to be a mom. People were saying I should kill myself.

  It was almost like I started living up to what they were saying without even thinking about it, and at one point I did try once again to take my own life. It was right after I
was found guilty of the battery charges and right before I headed to rehab. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

  In fact, let me stop for a minute and talk about the whens and wheres of my story. This might come as a shock, but being on a bunch of opiates isn’t all that great for your memory. Even though I was technically present and aware at the time, when I try to look back now I find a lot of the details missing. What happened, and when, and in what order—damned if I know sometimes. That’s just one more problem with doing drugs. You can’t remember whether you did some awful thing or another before or after you went to rehab, or how many days or weeks or months went by in between. Things get all fucked up and blurry. Looking back, a lot of times I have to take somebody else’s word for it on how things went down.

  But I can tell you that the day I signed over custody rights to Leah’s father was the day I completely broke. I felt like such a failure. People might have seen me talking about it on camera and they could see I wasn’t happy at all. But on the inside it was so much worse than that. It was like getting sucked into a whirlpool. Everything that happened around that time is a complete jumble, because after I lost Leah I literally went insane.

  That was the one thing that had been kind of holding me together. I know it’s not fair to put this on a kid, but at the time, Leah was the only thing that was keeping me decent. I don’t give a shit what everybody had to say about it at the time, about my parenting skills or what they saw of my relationship with my daughter. I loved her with all my heart. When I agreed to sign over custody to Leah’s dad, I was trying to do the best thing for her by getting CPS off our backs and making it easier for us to spend time with her together. But it doesn’t matter what the circumstances are when it comes to how you feel about giving up parental rights to your child. It was the hardest thing to do in the entire world. Even though I believed him when he said it wasn’t going to be used against me to keep me from seeing Leah, every time things got ugly between us I felt so uncertain and scared that I had no right to her as a mom anymore. I had given up my control, and I was the one who signed the papers. But the way I looked at it, it really felt like my daughter had been taken away from me.

  It just felt like I was backed into a corner. If things hadn’t gotten so bad in the first place, CPS wouldn’t have been on our asses the way they were. That damn no-contact order wouldn’t have kept my daughter and her father from being around me at the same time. The fact was, signing that custody agreement didn’t feel like some kind of empowered choice I made. I did it because the legal situation basically had my family held hostage.

  After it sank in that I’d lost my rights as a parent, I literally didn’t care anymore. I remember thinking, “There’s no point now. I’m not even allowed to be a mom. I might as well get crazy.”

  It was a bad time. I started going out, fighting, and par-tying. It spun off so fast I can’t even explain it. Until then, I’d kept as much of a grip on my issues as I could because I was focused on Leah and trying to get things back in order for her. But once that was off the table, I finally got to a place where the attention and money started getting to me, too.

  I was doing whatever I wanted, and I didn’t do anything in moderation. It was always extreme when it came to partying and sex. When it really got down to it, my life at that time was nothing but pills and men. I used to get boyfriends for three months at a time, get bored, leave them, and go find another guy. I never thought there was a problem with it. I mean, serial monogamy is the rule these days. But looking back I think it’s obvious I had a bad sex addiction along with the pill addiction. And those lifestyles go hand in hand. They feed each other. I used to get into fights with boyfriends over how much sex I wanted. If they weren’t in the mood or they were too tired, I would go off. How insane is that? I don’t know what I was trying to satisfy in myself. Probably the same thing I’d always been trying to satisfy, just in a new way. I had a lot of fun—I mean, come on. Obviously. But on the whole, I didn’t get much good out of it, and I definitely got some bad. Two of those boyfriends sold stories about me where they said they couldn’t keep up with me, and I could be a porn star. You know, just your average gentlemanly behavior.

  After I’d gone a little ways down that road, I ended up not giving a shit about Leah’s father anymore. Meanwhile, he was yapping in my ear like a Chihuahua. The man would come over and dig through my trash can for condoms, even though we were completely broken up.

  Oh, the drama. At the time he was saying that he wasn’t having sex with anybody, and he was trying to get back together with me. I was actually considering it. Little did I know he had been sleeping with this other girl for a couple of months.

  One day I got a random text from somebody saying she got my number from a friend and wanted to hang out. But then she called me up on the phone, and who did I hear in the background? None other than Leah’s father. That seemed to explain where she got my number. When he asked her who she was talking to, she said, “I’m talking to my friend Amanda.” So it was pretty obvious something fishy was going on. I don’t know what her deal was. I think she just cared about the MTV stuff and wanted to be around us, maybe hoping a camera would show up and she’d get her face on the color TV or something.

  Needless to say, I had no interest in hanging out with her, but she kept texting me and stuff. In my mind I knew they were messing around, and when she mentioned they were hanging out, I just knew.

  What can I say? I got a little mean. One day when she texted me to hang out I said, “Okay, fine, drive to my house and we’ll go out.” Now, let me just mention I was looking pretty damn good at the time, and that day I dressed up to the T. White spandex and heels, man. I was at my peak.

  When she showed up, we did the small talk bullshit for awhile before I said, “Okay, let’s take my car.”

  But I’d already been scheming. I was talking to Leah’s father just an hour before she showed up, and I asked what he was doing that day. He said he was gonna be hanging out at home with his friend Joe. So I pulled out of the driveway and started heading over. When the girl asked where we were going, I just casually said, “Oh, we’re going to my old boyfriend’s house.”

  She started freaking out a little bit and asking why we were headed there, but I was just like, “Because that’s where we’re going.” I drove us there, got out of the car, and walked right up to the house. Leah’s father opened the door and saw the girl sitting in my car. His face was absolutely priceless. I just said, “What’s up?” And I walked into the house.

  The girl got up and followed me, and I could see the look in his eyes as he was shaking his head at me like, “What the hell . . . this crazy bitch.” That’s when I looked at him and said, “Yeah, what’s up? So, pick one.”

  And guess what? He picked me.

  Not like that made a difference to me at that point. All I did was turn around and look at the girl like, “That’s right, bitch.” Let her deal with him, was the only thought I had on the matter. My give-a-fucks were gone.

  The poor girl was obviously in over her head. She was just kind of cowering on the side and looking at me like, “Oh my god. My car’s at your house...”

  So I was a bad bitch for a minute there, and that was satisfying. Of course, then I realized I had locked my keys in my car. We had to wait for somebody to come and unlock it. That was a little awkward. Then I found out my tags were expired or something when I got pulled over on the way home, with this girl in my car. By the time she finally got behind her own wheel and drove off, I was pretty bored of the whole thing.

  Oh, and just to be clear, I did not get back together with my ex. As far as any chance of romance was concerned, I had made up my mind and I was done with him.

  One thing I know one-hundred percent about myself is I have the ability to make some tough-ass choices when I have to. Deciding to stay away from Leah’s father was one of those big decisions I made when I looked around and just had this wake-up moment, and I realized I didn’t want to be stu
ck in that terrible situation.

  Like I said, I never really feared consequences as much as a normal person should have, and I was never held back from doing anything by any fear of regretting it later. It’s actually the opposite. I have this fear deep down inside of being on my deathbed and thinking, “I wish I would have done that.” I don’t want to look back and regret what I didn’t do to save myself because I was letting pain hold me down. I don’t want to ruin my life and then sit there looking back and seeing where I missed the chance to get back on track.

  When I have that clarity, I have the strength to make those drastic moves. And that’s just my style. Not doing anything in moderation can be really bad in a lot of ways, but when you’re really feeling stuck in a bad situation, you have to be ready to go to the extreme and say, “Enough is enough.” For me, it was a skill that would come in handy later, when I found myself needing an emergency exit once again.

  I wasn’t there yet, though. In fact I felt like I was in the tiny eye of a horrible storm. Everything around me sucked. Everything had fallen apart. And as far as I could tell, I had nothing to lose. It was not a good state to be in.

  8

  There’s More Than One Way to Rehab

  I’m going to share some life advice with you now, just a piece of wisdom earned through my own unique experience. The advice is this: if you have paparazzi knocking on your door saying, “Hey, I heard you’re fun to party with,” chances are you’re doing something wrong with your life. Just make a note of that somewhere.

  The media attention I was getting at that point was ridiculous. I’d walk up to my house and there would be four cars just sitting there out in front. Just a bunch of paparazzi in Anderson, Indiana for no damn reason but to follow around the notorious Teen Mom Amber Portwood and hope she did something juicy enough to sell a picture of. And, well, to be fair, they were on the right track. I was wild as hell at that point, and doing everything I could think of to go even wilder.