About a year ago, I was 16, seven months pregnant, and living in my car with my boyfriend. We showered at gas stations and bought grilled cheese sandwiches at Walmart. I worried that we wouldn’t be able to provide for the daughter I would soon have. Some days, I felt utterly defeated.
Although I’ve always wanted to pursue an education, I felt that this was no longer possible for me.
A year on, my boyfriend is now my husband, and we live together with our thriving 7-month-old daughter, Harloow, in a house with a fully stocked fridge. And I’m on track to graduate high school and plan to pursue a career in nursing. My story is about persevering, but it’s also about getting the unique support I needed to turn my situation around — support that my mother, a teen parent herself, didn’t have a generation earlier.
