Conquering Chaos

by Catelynn Lowell

  I never smoked crack, though, even while my friends were doing it, because my dad was a crackhead, and I wasn’t about that. But one day she asked if I wanted to try “cocaine.” I thought, sure, why not? I snort Ritalin and Adderall, what the hell? So I stayed up all night snorting coke with this old woman, coloring crazy shit in coloring books. And I remember waking up that morning and my first thought being, “I want more.” There was this crazy moment where I would have done anything to get it. But luckily, a lightbulb came on, and I got up and left.

  After that I told myself I’d never do cocaine again. I was freaked out by how bad I wanted it, and I was like, I’ll never touch that again. I was even scared to tell Catelynn I’d done it in the first place, because Catelynn was totally against it. So I wasn’t going to tell her, but my sister ratted me out.

  Catelynn freaked. She told me she’d break up with me if I ever did it again. She told me, “My life got destroyed by this stuff. My mom’s life was destroyed. I won’t date somebody who does this stuff.” And then suddenly I realized crack and cocaine are basically the same thing, and that stuff had destroyed my dad’s life and my life, too. That flicked the switch. I wasn’t gonna mess around with it anymore. So that was the last time I ever did it.

  Catelynn:

  Mom and Mike got me, too. One time I was at that house and she offered me some kind of anti-psychotic medication. I took it without thinking much of it, because I was doing dumb things at that time, and I’d taken tons of pills. So I swallowed this pill, and then sat around with all these forty-something-year-old people. I remember we smoked two blunts. And then all of a sudden I woke up on the floor, shaking, and my head hurt really, really bad. All of them were standing around me going, “Oh my god, are you okay? Are you okay?” Apparently I was standing there in the living room and I just lost consciousness and fell over backwards, smacked the back of my head right on the floor. I wandered out of there, but I couldn’t even go home, I was so messed up. I had to stay at my friend Sam’s and sleep it off on his couch.

  Tyler:

  All the neighborhood kids stopped going over there after awhile. It got old. They always felt like since they were providing all these drugs, they could treat the kids however they wanted. They ended up moving away after awhile. It was very strange.

  Catelynn:

  Over the years I think I’ve seen drugs and addiction cause so much damage. I’ve seen people acting crazy and forgetting what’s even normal. After everything went down with that crackhead boyfriend of my mom’s, she ended up getting back together with him when he came around saying he was dying. He came up with some fake hospital papers to prove he had some disease and he only had two years to live. He was my little brother’s dad, after all, and she was thinking, “Well my son needs to know who he is, he only has two years to live.” But it was a total lie. He was a con artist and a schemer and a pathological liar.

  Growing up with all of that, seeing all that bad stuff as a kid, is the reason I’ve never even touched hard drugs. I smoked weed, I dabbled in a little alcohol, and I’ve done all the typical teenager drugs. That’s not supposed to downplay them, but you know. The pot, the air duster, the ecstasy, those were all things people pretty typically dibbled and dabbled in back then. They were little phases for me. But I never touched the hard stuff, because I’d seen what it could do.

  Closing Thoughts

  Alcoholism and drug addiction have destroyed people in both our families for generations. We talk a lot about breaking the cycle, and that means understanding the cycle itself. What mistakes do we avoid? How did these problems get the best of the people we see around us? It’s crazy to hear some of the things our parents went through before they had us, and what even our grandparents went through. We see all this damage caused to aunts and uncles and cousins and it always traces back to another parent with a drinking or drug problem. And looking at the ones who got out and did better, you don’t see the drugs and alcohol taking up a big part of their lives.

  We always had that in mind. We thought about our limits and we always told ourselves not to go too far. There was a hint of maturity there, even in the bad kid days, that came from seeing all that destruction and wanting to move far away from it.

  We just wanted something different than what we had. And lucky for us, we had a few people in our lives who’d made the same decision. We each had somebody pushing us to do things with our lives, either a parent or a grandparent, to counteract the bad examples we were getting. Maybe that was all we needed to boost whatever in us that made us think, “We’re not going to be like that. Not like them. We’re gonna be different.”

  Still, obviously we weren’t perfect. It would have been better not to mess around with air duster and snort cocaine in middle school. No doubt about that. And we can never be certain how long that phase would have lasted, if it wasn’t for one little thing. Once that pregnancy test came back positive, there was no more room for drugs and alcohol in our lives. We dropped that stuff and didn’t even have time to look back.

  CHAPTER 4:

  * * *

  FROM TEEN SEX TO TEEN PREGNANCY

  Sooner or later everyone probably experiences an event so important and meaningful that they start to look at their life in terms of before and after. So far everything you’ve read in this book took place in our “before,” back when we were just another couple of poor Michigan kids stumbling (and huffing) our way through teenagerdom. Sure, we had a sense of wanting to grow up and become something more, but we hadn’t really figured out how yet. Neither of us had any real plans for life except for whatever we were doing on any given day. There wasn’t any meaning yet.

  Back then, we were pretty reckless: about drugs, about getting into fights, about stealing. And guess what? We were kind of reckless about sex, too. We didn’t mean to be. We sort of thought we knew what we were doing, to be honest. And that was probably half the problem.

  Your first experiences with sex are huge, and they can have some serious effects on you. As kids grow up and take in more and more information about sex from the world around them, they start to develop their own outlooks, identities, and values. Some kids are more curious than others about sex, and some are so curious it’s downright disturbing. Others don’t seem to be interested at all, or have ideas what’s appropriate and what’s not. And, as much as people hate to talk about it, a lot of kids have learned way too much, way too soon.

  We got together with totally different outlooks and backgrounds as far as sex was concerned. But we both ended up on the same wild ride. Our decision to have sex — and the way we handled it — brought about a consequence that changed our lives forever. In a way, sex and pregnancy are what created “before” and “after.”

  Tyler:

  Catelynn and I got together by holding hands, but for months and months that was pretty much as far as it went. She was a virgin and had no interest in rushing into sex.

  I was the complete opposite, and that wasn’t a good thing. I had actually been dating girls since grade school, and I’d broken up with them for not wanting to fool around. In the fourth grade, I got suspended for pushing a girl against a locker and trying to kiss her. Looking back on it, it’s horrifying. Why was I such a hypersexual kid? Well, all I know is it started when I was nine.

  The older girl who molested me was a friend of my older sister. She was about four years older than me, which is a big difference at that age. One day I went over to her house with my sister and some other people, and for some reason or another, everyone else left but this older girl and me. For the next several hours, while we were alone together in her house, it was sex act after sex act after sex act. It went on all day. She had us doing everything she could think of, one thing after another. There’d be a break and then it would start up again. And when it was finally over, I didn’t know what the hell had happened.

  My reaction was to brag about it with all my friends. I think I was trying to get a reaction out of them to help me understan
d what to make of it. As young as I was, I had some sense that what happened wasn’t right. But I didn’t have many ways to process something so crazy. And my bragging didn’t work out. One day I was at a barbecue and I started talking to two girls about it. They knew immediately that something wasn’t right, and they went and told someone. When it got back to my mom, she freaked out. She thought I was lying or saying dirty things to those girls, and I think it scared her. That day she pulled me aside and smacked me for it.

  After that, it turned into this very ugly, awkward kind of thing with other adults hearing about it and being concerned. That’s what clued me in that what had happened was wrong. My mom and I never talked about it again until much later, when I was older and we went to counseling. I think she just didn’t know what to do. Neither did I. Things are weird when boys are molested by girls. People think about it differently. The message you get is that it’s a cool thing to happen, something to brag about. Then on the other hand you learn adults don’t want you to talk about it.

  It wasn’t cool at all. It made me think sex was something kids could do, which influenced me to act too sexual when I was too young. Before long I was breaking up with my little girlfriends because they were prudes. Prudes! We were ten-year-olds! It’s so messed up.

  I wound up finding a girlfriend who wanted to do it all the time. She was crazy, and that was basically all we did. Going from her to Catelynn was a real shocker. But I never thought about dumping Cate for holding back. There was something about her self-respect and the way she just came right out and said “no” that almost compelled me to want to get closer to her. Cate was really good for me in that way.

  Catelynn:

  Yes, I was a prude. I wasn’t having any of that. I was a little punk, but I was a classy punk! I was a virgin when I met Tyler, and I didn’t see any reason to throw that away for no reason. He’d obviously had more experience than me and had different ideas about sex, but that was his deal. I had other boyfriends before him, but I didn’t do anything with them at all. I’ve just always been the kind of girl who respects my body. I never liked to show it off in skimpy clothes or anything, and I didn’t feel like giving it up to some guy just because he wanted it that second.

  Tyler really wanted to have sex, but I made him wait for about nine months. I never worried that he’d dump me like he’d dump those other girls. Not because I was sure he wouldn’t, but because if he did, that would just mean he wasn’t the right guy for me. It was that simple. I wasn’t going to compromise my self-respect.

  And it was worth it, because he waited. Instead of having sex we hung out and talked, and talked, and talked. We built a really strong relationship without that one thing. And then one night, when we were fooling around in his room, I just said, “Are you gonna do it already, or not?”

  Tyler was like, “What?” He was so shocked when I suggested it, all of a sudden he was the one who wasn’t sure! He kept asking me, “Do you really want to do this? Are you absolutely sure? Are you sure you want to?” So in the end I was the one saying, come on, let’s just do it!

  Once we’d done it once, we were doing it all the time! After waiting so long we turned into crazy, horny teenagers. It was so bad. We would drink and party together and fool around constantly, all the time.

  Oh, the stories. Tyler’s mom had this camper parked by her house that we used to hang out in sometimes. One night we went out there with some booze and started drinking. Once we were good and buzzed, of course we ended up banging in his mom’s trailer. We were having a good old time until we heard her come outside and yell his name.

  “Tyler! What on earth are you doing?”

  We just froze and stared at each other, and then Tyler jumped up and yelled, “We’re just talking!”

  His mom wasn’t fooled! “Put your clothes on and get out here!”

  It wasn’t until later that we realized we were in the camper with the lights on and she could see everything! Thank God we were drunk, or we’d have to remember that incident sober.

  Tyler:

  All those months of waiting paid off, but unfortunately, we were not being safe at all. We were using the pull-out method, and that was it. I didn’t wear condoms and Cate never went on birth control. We just didn’t feel like we had to. My parents hadn’t given me a real talk about it yet, and Cate’s parents hadn’t given her a talk. We went through sex education and everything, but I sort of thought I was an expert already. We thought pulling out is good enough, and like typical dumb kids, we couldn’t actually comprehend what would happen if it wasn’t.

  We can’t blame anybody, but I wish someone would have hammered it in a little harder. We just approached sex like we’d taken the pills and the air duster. It was fun and it was available, so we did it, because the risks didn’t really scare us. We were doing adult things with a child’s level of understanding.

  Catelynn:

  Now we believe it’s really important to talk to kids as much as possible about sex. We don’t exactly believe in abstinence-only education. It would be nice if everyone could be abstinent, but the fact is, most teenagers aren’t. You can tell the teenagers of the world to stop having sex as much as you want, but they’re going to do it. You’ll never have a world where teenagers are not having sex. So you can still teach them that abstinence is the safest thing to do, but you also have to make sure they understand that when they do have sex they can do it in a safe and healthy way. That means condoms and also having control over your own decisions. We want to teach people, “It’s your body, it’s your choice, and you don’t have to do anything without protecting yourself.” If you’re going to do it, be smart about it. Don’t be stupid.

  A Major Consequence

  Catelynn:

  I didn’t ever suspect that I was pregnant. One day I was cleaning the shower and I suddenly got really sick. The door was closed, and I just thought, “Wow, I probably shouldn’t have locked myself in a room with all these cleaning supplies.” I didn’t feel good for a couple of days. I couldn’t hold anything down, not even water. And I had my period, so I ruled out pregnancy right away. That was the first thing my mom asked me on the way to the doctor. I told her I needed to go because I might have the flu, and she was asking me if I was sure I wasn’t pregnant. I was like no, mom, geez. I’m on my period. I just think I have the flu.

  So they hooked me up to an IV, had me pee in a cup, asked me if I was pregnant, and I said, “No, I’m not pregnant.” Then I lay there for awhile, with my mom sitting in the room with me, waiting to hear from the doctor again.

  When she came back in, she didn’t say anything except, “Well, you’re pregnant.” Then she walked out.

  I can’t explain why, but my feeling was instant rage. I just wanted to get out of there. I was like, Get this IV out of my arm, and let me get out of this place. My mom got the papers from the doctor and we got out of there. She drove straight to Tyler’s house.

  Tyler:

  I knew Catelynn was going to the hospital, but I thought the same thing she did. I didn’t think she was pregnant. I was hanging out with friends of mine while she was at the doctor, and they were giving me all this shit. “Dude, what if she’s pregnant? Dude!”

  “Whatever,” I thought.

  Then Cate and her mom pull up. So I go out to the car, and she’s lying in the backseat. I get in with her and have her lie down on my lap. Her mom doesn’t say a word, just hands me a bunch of papers and starts driving.

  Catelynn doesn’t say anything, either. So I look at the papers and at first I don’t understand them, because it’s all this medical mumbo-jumbo. But I read, read, read all this stupid stuff, until I get to the bottom.

  Pregnancy Test: Positive.

  “No.”

  I felt like I was going to throw up. I barely even remember the car ride back to Catelynn’s house, but I know it was silent. I didn’t know what to say. I just stared out the window with my chin on my hand, thinking, “What am I going to do now?”

 
Catelynn had already moved ten times that year and they were in a new trailer with no furniture set up yet. It was this empty place. You could hear the echoes as you talked. All Cate had in her room was a mattress on the floor. She lay down and closed her eyes, and I just sat down against the wall beside her in shock. I didn’t know what to do.

  My first reaction was, “You’re going to do this, you’re going to have a child.” And then I was thinking, “This can’t happen to me. How can this be happening?” I looked at Cate and I just thought, “I don’t know what to do.”

  It was an intense, draining, emotional day.

  An Extreme Decision: Abortion, Parenthood, or Something Else?

  Catelynn:

  I was so overwhelmed and upset that I slept that whole day. My mom woke me up at six the next morning and the first thing she said was, “Do you want an abortion?”

  I had always been against abortion. But you never know how you’ll really react until you’re in that situation. I was young and I was absolutely terrified. I broke down crying and said yeah, yeah, yeah. People say that they’ll do a certain thing, but when I was caught off guard, woken up like that and still shocked and scared, that was how I reacted.

  Tyler:

  Cate’s mom called me up and asked if I could skip school the next day. And I said, “Sure, I guess, what’s tomorrow?” She said, “I made Cate an appointment, we’re gonna get an abortion.”

  I said, “Hang on, just wait a second. We need to think about this.” I didn’t know how to process that. But it was my baby, too, and I didn’t want to make any big decisions I didn’t understand. I told Catelynn’s mom we needed to take some time so we could all think it over and discuss what was going to happen. After I hung up I just sat there trying to untangle my thoughts. I was sure I wasn’t ready to be a father, but I didn’t like the sound of an abortion, either.