The Art Of Having No Idea ~ Harry Lewis

~ BACKGROUND INFO ~

Sometimes life doesn't always go the way you think it will... for instance, Sophia was supposed to leave school, complete two to three years of college and then go to university in London. She was also supposed to have her friendship group for the rest of her life, like every teenager said when leaving school.

However... That was not the case.

Picture this, its the last day of secondary school, your white school shirt is completely covered in the writing of friends and acquaintances names from your year group (most of them you don't even like), and you have the most unsettling feelings deep in the pit of your stomach. Your period is late, by a week and a half. Yes... This is exactly what happened to Sophia.

Later that very day Sophia found out that she was pregnant. She had gone to the next town over by bus, you know just to be on the safe side, and went into a pharmacy there. She did the silly thing of pretending to be on the phone to a friend, so that it looked like she was buying it for "someone else". Yes, not her proudest moment. But, she was a nervous wreck, alone and terrified. Sophia didn't want to tell any of her friends, deciding that she couldn't trust any of them to not pass on the information to everyone else in their friendship group. The group of "friends" were what you would call "snakes". The one person that she was close with within the group, turned out to be the worst out of them all, since then she couldn't trust any of them with any personal information.

She went home and cried to her older sister, Phoebe, who sat with her throughout the whole pregnancy test ordeal. Yes, even when she was peeing on the stick, again, not her proudest moment. Sophia and Phoebe sat together for about an hour, on the cold bathroom floor deciding on how to tell their dad. He wasn't angry, just more disappointed and very emotional about becoming a Grampa so soon. But he supported her, just like always.

A few days after finding out, Sophia decided it was time to tell her boyfriend, Ben, that they were expecting a baby. They had been together for about a year and a half, so she thought that he would be more supportive, which he wasn't. Ben broke up with her on the spot, told her to leave his house and that he didn't want anything to do with her and the baby. She didn't blame him, he was sixteen years old too, just like her, he had so much more of his life to live. He had his life all set out, he knew what he wanted to do at college and uni, Sophia didn't, she just knew she would have followed him anywhere. Until this moment that was. She left, deleted him off all her socials, deleted his number, and didn't look back. She had a baby to think about. So that's what she did. She went to all her appointments with either her dad or sister by her side. Both of them were with her when she found out that she was having a little boy, her dad cried more than Soph and Phoebe did combined.

It was a few weeks after the gender scan that Sophia decided to document her life as a single, teenage mother, her pregnancy experience and life afterwards, so that she could look back on the process and see how far she had come from being absolutely terrified about the prospect of becoming a single parent. She started a Youtube channel called 'the diary of a teenage mum', she filmed every week of her pregnancy, sharing her story, her raw and emotional experiences, not expecting to be where she is now.

Her subscriber count slowly climbed throughout the final five months of her pregnancy to the point that over five hundred thousand people were invested in the birth of her son, Cormac, in January 2012. She had messages almost daily from the people she used to call friends, some of them tried to worm their way back into her life after 9 months of no contact. The others sent her hate messages, saying how she 'ruined Ben's life' or 'not letting Ben be part of the baby's life is disgusting'. So she posted a video about when she found out she was pregnant, what happened when she told Ben and her family and she didn't receive any messages after that. Something that was a blessing.