Barely a teenager and sexually active.

I guess a good place for me to start is at thirteen. When I started getting some tingly feelings down in my nether regions.

What you read about girls with "daddy issues" or young girls who have sex at a very early age, may not necessarily be true. I didn't come from a broken home, I wasn't sexually abused, I didn't crave attention from my daddy. None of this was true of my family. I had a mom who owned her own business, was always home when we were, worked her ass off to make sure we had every single item on our Christmas list, every year.

My dad was a hard working, blue collar guy, was a recovering alcoholic, sober and hadn't touched the stuff in all the years I could remember. He didn't yell or hit us, he barely even reprimanded us at all, my mom the screamer, handled all that mostly by herself.

We went on family vacations, we spent weekends together. My parents were the strict parents who were so strict most of my weekends were spent with friends at our house instead of me going somewhere else.

I was expected to get good grades and if I didn't, well there would be months of grounding to follow.

I had a younger brother, we had a dog, a cat and a house with everything except the white picket fence. I grew up in a small farming town in Ohio and everyone knew us and we knew everyone.

I had a steady boyfriend for most of my eighth grade year and like any young "love" relationship we were becoming increasingly interested in sex. By the end of my eighth grade year we had "done it" for the first time and actively looked for any location to get busy. We'd fake sick and he would ride his bike to my house, while my parents were naively at work, thinking I was home with the chicken pocks. So by my Freshman year in high school everyone in my own grade pretty much knew who the sexually active girls were in our class. I mean there were probably only 75 students in my grade and teenagers can't keep a secret to save their own lives. By the time I got to high school, looking back now, I'm sure the fact that an upperclassman football player liked me, had more to do with my "non-virginal status" than my charm and 100 pound little boy flat chested body. I immediately broke up with my 8th grade boyfriend and jumped into the deep end with Steve.

I thought I was in love. He was a junior, I was a freshman and he had a car. My parents had started to give me a tiny bit more freedom than they had in the past. I'm sure they considered high school as a right of passage and they were allowing me to test the waters. Test the waters I did! I hadn't been with Steve for more than two months when I suddenly popped up with an extremely itchy vagina. I had no idea what was going on. I hadn't even really had sex ed yet. I called my mom from the high school hallway pay phone and simply stated, "I want to scratch my privates with a banana clip." If you know anything about the 90's you will know that a banana clip is a very sharp hair accessory that is only used as a last resort for the alleviation of itchiness. Something was terribly wrong with my body. At the age of thirteen, young girls don't really keep track of the date their period is supposed to show up, some girls don't even have their periods.

I didn't even realize that I must of missed one or two by the time spaghetti started feeling like slimy worms in my mouth at dinner. I stopped eating and the vaginal itching didn't go away. Later in my life, when I was planning pregnancies, I discovered this is always a sign that I am pregnant. Yeast infections and all the insane itchiness that come along with them. For me, they're like a damn birth announcement, before I even miss two cycles.

I wrote my Steve a note, said hey something's strange I think my period is late. (no texting in 1992) I shoved the note in my coat pocket to give to him between classes. Later that evening when my mother came home from the grocery store wearing HER coat, the same coat I had shoved Steve's note into. She was red eyed as if she'd been crying, carrying a bag of pregnancy tests and screaming at me about how irresponsible I was, how could I have had sex.

All hell broke loose that night. I was the biggest disappointment to my parents. You could see it on my dads face, his discomfort in knowing that I had had sex. The sheer terror that his thirteen year old, not even developed daughter, had participated in such behavior. My mom immediately scheduled the abortion that I would have and called Steve's mother to let her know she would be expected to pay for half. My mom in the days leading up to the "procedure" was a rock in front of me and a mess behind closed doors. Now as I parent of daughters, I have come to appreciate her strength for me. She let me know that this is ok, that I am not going to hell. That girls who are thirteen are not meant to be mothers. She took me to the clinic on the anniversary of the Rowe Vs. Wade decision. Where we would encounter probably fifty picketers screaming that they would adopt my baby. My rock, my mom, told them to "get away from my daughter." She is and was in that moment the strongest woman I know. She was there for me even when I messed up and never in all the years following would she ever throw it in my face.

This is not something I wish on anyone at any age. Thirteen however, is a delicate time, delicate because reputation starts to matter. Girls begin to earn their spot on the social chain of high school. Somehow the meanest girls in school found out that I had gotten pregnant and had an abortion. Instead of gossiping behind my back, they started doing things to me in public, humiliating me for what they considered whorish behavior. A particular instance I remember as clearly as it happened, was the day Steve's cousin Ivy, came up to me at lunch with her giggly bitchy friends and stuck a piece of pizza in my face. She said

" Do you recognize this? It looks like your abortion doesn't it?" I'm sure it wasn't as loud as I remember, but in that moment I wanted to sob and run away, move to another school all together. I didn't though, I held my head high, I ignored her like she was invisible. I internalized all the hateful mean things this girl said to me and would continue to say to me until the day she graduated.

Needless to say, the relationship with Steve came to an abrupt end. My dad and cousin went to the local grocery store where he work and chased him around in the parking lot. He was on foot and they were in a truck, threatening to kill him for what he'd done to their thirteen year old little family member. I wasn't raped or forced into having sex, I thought I was in love. I made a horrible decision, based on my own limited knowledge and lack of fear about what would happen if I had sex. I was devastated when I was told I could no longer see Steve, that I was only allowed to see the boy my own age who I had dated in 8th grade, Mitch. Mitch was the boy I was permitted to date and to hang out with. If I didn't like it I could stay at home and do nothing.

So it began, I was back in a relationship with Mitch and my parents were very cautious about my level of freedom. They felt safe letting me hang out with me, by all rights he was a decent enough teenage boy. His step-dad had been raised with my very own father, his mom a local insurance lady in our small farm town. My parents did what they thought was right, gave me a little bit of freedom so I wouldn't become suicidal, like so many kids do today. Keeping me in the line of their vision so that I couldn't possibly fuck up as bad as I did getting pregnant.

Little did they know, Mitch would be the guy I would date all through high school. The guy who cheated on me my Sophmore year, the guy I would later marry and later have children with. The unfaithful husband who would travel working for his dads company while fucking his way across the globe, who I would become a swinger with, to keep him from cheating (dumbest thing I've probably done in my adult life). The man who would sleep with my best friend, at a music festival my daughters were at and would walk in on them, thus causing the terrible, insane, crazy divorce that followed.