I don’t think I was being dramatic; I wasn’t taking a brave moral stand or anything. I understood that for some people, sometimes, it’s the choice they have to make. I just didn’t think that I was one of those people, or that this was one of those times.

Surely there had to be other choices?

Another list, I’m afraid.

Sensible Tracy’s Sub-List of Options For Keeping The Baby

Have the baby and marry David

Have the baby and hand him over to my parents to raise

Have the baby and raise him myself, with help and support from my parents

Let’s review.

Option number one: Do I look stupid to you? Don’t answer that. Believe it or not, there were people who thought we should get married. I could understand if the suggestion had been offered only by silly children my own age, but it wasn’t. There were some perfectly sane looking adults wandering around, who assumed I’d be waddling down the aisle before the year was out.

Can you believe the things people come up with? Up until then, I’d always believed that adults knew better. I thought they were in charge and could be relied upon to do the right thing and give the right advice. I was flabbergasted to discover that while some adults are reasonably intelligent and doing their best, there are equally many who are completely fucking bonkers. And you can’t tell just by looking at them. Disguised as normal people, like teachers or kindly old ladies in Shoprite, these nutjobs wield immense authority over the lives and choices of innocent young people too dumb to know better. And the poor kiddies never know that the citizens in charge are smoking their socks. What a scary thought. It makes you wonder just who exactly is driving the bus here? I mean, really. To get married at my age to someone I barely knew, let’s face it – and bring a child into such a dodgy situation? Good grief. That’s a whole episode of Ricki Lake all by itself. Marriage for the right reasons is hard enough, but for the wrong ones? That’s just madness. At least I knew that.

So, no. There would be no tinkly sound of wedding bells or shotguns in my immediate future. Of course, I didn’t know then that there’d be no wedding bells in my distant future either. But that’s a fish of a different kidney altogether.

Option number two: right, so I would carry the baby for nine months, give birth, hold him in my arms – and then dump him with my mother and carry on with my life? Leave my parents to love him, feed him, comfort him, raise him? Live in the same house as my baby, with me a stranger or sister? Go back to the way things were before, with school, boys and attempted suicide? Let a child of my body, my heart, grow up seeing his mother every day, and knowing she doesn’t care enough to be a mother? Who does stuff like that?

Not me, that’s for damn sure. No, it seemed like motherhood was the only choice. Real motherhood: Option Three. If I was going to do this, I would have to do it right.

It’s all very well deciding this in your head. It’s quite another convincing others that you haven’t taken leave of your senses. I was dreading telling my mother what I’d decided. I was expecting arguments, threats and general motherly bullying. I wasn’t sure if I could stand up to that. I thought I’d give in and let her tell me what to do. Yet I didn’t know how I’d live with myself if I did that.

But my mother didn’t argue. She didn’t threaten or bully. My mother did a brave thing. She left it up to me. She trusted me enough to make the choice myself. That’s because she was cleverer than me.

Sitting on the lawn behind the garage that afternoon, she asked warily, “So, what do you want to do?”

I panicked for a second, because I hadn’t done my bar-graphs yet. Then I looked in her eyes and I realised she didn’t want graphs. I knew she was still cross with me, but I could see that she didn’t hate me, either. She never had. She was just scared for me.

“I want to keep the baby. I’m going to keep the baby.” It was weird to hear the words said out loud. It was weird that it was me saying them. I really did want this, more than anything else in the world. Even weirder was the realisation that I would fight for it, no matter what I had to do. No matter what. That was my first maternal thought, and it’s one every mother recognises. I think my own mother saw it in me.

Then I began to cry (big surprise).

“But I don’t know how I’m going to do it!”

I was scared because I knew I had no plan, five-minute, five-year, or any kind of a plan at all. I was graphless. All I had was the little voice in my head. I’d thought Mom would say I couldn’t keep the baby, that it wouldn’t work. “Over my dead body,” I expected her to say. “You’re on your own.” The Ugly Cry loomed.

But I’d underestimated my mother, as children do. She just loved me and was doing her best, making it up as she went along.

She put her arms around me and said, “Okay. Okay. That’s what we’ll do.” Her voice wobbled, but she held me and didn’t let go for a long time. She knew The Decision was something I had to make by myself. The Plan, on the other hand, we could do together. I told you she was clever.

Eventually we stood up to go inside. I was shaky on my feet, my legs all pins and needles, and desperate for the toilet again. I was a queasy and tearful mess. So it is peculiar that it should hit me then, in that state – I was no longer a child. I was a grown-up now, a mother. Me. Who’d have thunk it?