7
I was seventeen when I was pregnant for the first time but I got a kidney infection which spread into my blood. My baby died before he was born and I had to give birth at five months. Though we had a proper funeral I still didn’t deal with what had happened to me - I didn’t grieve as I should have done. I had messed around with drugs from when I was sixteen or seventeen but after my baby died it was all drugs from then on. I started using heroin and it was during that period of chaos that I had Jake. When I was twenty two I was sent to prison for stealing. I spent three months in Low Newton which doesn’t sound a lot but it was to me.
It wasn’t prison that was difficult. It was withdrawing from heroin and then it was thinking about what had happened to me and what I’d done. Jake stayed with my mum and because my mum was angry with me she didn’t bring him to see me. I couldn’t cope with not being with him and I couldn’t believe I had no control over whether I saw him or not. For me not being allowed to see Jake given what I’d been through in my first pregnancy was almost too much to bear. It was that desperation and lack of control which led me to stop using drugs. I can see it might have led another person to kill themselves.
My parents split up when I was fifteen. My dad worked away moving big concrete blocks at a factory in Leighton Buzzard. He met someone else down there and stayed and my mum found someone else up here. I missed my dad and worried about him and, in the end, I went to live with him. But then I missed my mum, so it wasn’t the answer. After a year I came home. I suppose I was caught between the two of them in a way and, because of that, I’m not sure I ever felt truly at home.
