Page 72 of Ask Your Mom If I'm Real

—Merriam’s secret thoughts

MERRIAM

I. Was. Screwed.

I’d meant to be home well before Dad had gotten home to see that I’d gotten a babysitter, but Dad had decided to get home early.

And he was pissed that I was out for the night, instead of at home taking care of my daughter.

I had a two-and-a-half-year-old little girl named Anleigh.

Anleigh was the light of my life. The one ray of sunshine in my perpetually cloudy day.

Four years ago, when I was young and dumb, I was a broke college kid desperate for a way out of the hellhole of a life I’d had.

I’d decided to defy my father’s wish of taking over his candy store and had decided I was going to use my business degree to become a teacher.

I’d become so dead set on it that I hadn’t realized that my father had caught on to my plans—leaving the mail I’d received on the counter had been so stupid—until he was already finished ruining them.

One second I was a twenty-four-year-old woman with plans to become a teacher, and the next I was in debt up to my eyeballs.

My father, the man that was supposed to take care of me and love me unconditionally, had ruined me.

He’d taken out all kinds of loans in my name. He’d ruined my credit. And to make matters worse, he’d rented an apartment under my name, trashed it, and then ruined my chances of renting an apartment ever again while he was at it.

I was literally stuck.

I still had so much debt I was drowning and couldn’t see a way out.

So, one night, in a desperate attempt to feel something besides dread, I’d gone out with Gisela.

I’d gone home with a man at a bar.

I’d woken up in his bed.

The moment that my eyes had opened, he’d kicked me out, and I’d been left to do the walk of shame in a neighborhood that I was incredibly unfamiliar with.

I’d had to walk to the bus stop which was miles away.

Luckily, Gisela had her phone on, and she’d come to pick me up.

That night I’d lost my virginity, my cell phone, and what was left of my will to live.

I’d actually been so far gone that in the next few weeks I’d contemplated suicide.

I would’ve probably done it, too, had Gisela not forced me to take a pregnancy test.

She’d noticed in the last month that I’d changed a lot.

I had, but not for the reasons she’d been thinking.

But I’d decided to humor her and take the test and had been flabbergasted to find out that I was pregnant.

That was when I’d realized that my life had become more difficult.

One, I had no clue who the father was. Two, I had no clue how to find him again. Three, my father was going to kill me.

Four…well, four, I had to figure out how to keep a tiny human alive in the midst of everything that I was going through.

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