I am so honored to have my story featured over at Kindred Mom today.

It's been rather cathartic for me to explore my journey afresh as I step into a new season of life. It feels like I'm seeing some of the pieces of the puzzle starting to come together. Here's the first post in a series of three that tells the story of my unplanned pregnancy:

It was the spring semester of 2002. I was finishing my junior year of college at a notoriously hippie-dippy party school in the mountains of North Carolina. At 21 years old, I’d spent years looking for something to numb the hurt of a messy and damaging childhood. Even though I’d grown up in the church with a mama who loved me well, I couldn’t escape the adverse effects of my family falling apart when I was in middle school. My heart was like a stew with meaty chunks of trauma and four varieties of immaturity floating in a soup of survival mode. College life introduced me to the flavor of drugs, drinking, and attention from men as everything came to a boil.

In the sunshine of a crisp April morning in the Appalachians, I smoked my last cigarette. I knew it was my last cigarette because I knew I was pregnant and once I took a test, that was it. I’d been in denial for weeks, convinced it was only PMS. I couldn’t remember my last period, but it seemed long overdue. My boobs were so huge and sensitive thatputting on a bra was a production of wincing and moaning. As I looked at the evidence, acceptance set in. A test seemed like a necessary formality, so I walked across the highway to the drug store and bought a pregnancy test. I played it cool with the clerk. I told her the kit was for a friend—that she was too embarrassed to come in and buy it herself.

When I got home I peed on the stick and then couldn’t bring myself to look at it for nearly 20 minutes. My roommate was asleep in the next room, but once I got up the nerve to turn the thing over, she was startled awake by a shrieking F-bomb. “What!? What’s the matter?!” She stumbled into the room, brushing the hair back from her sleepy face. I threw the stick on the floor and started crying, “No! No, no, no, no, no!” She hugged me and didn’t say much. What was there to say?

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Read the rest of this post at Kindred Mom. I share how I told my mom and the reaction from the Church.

You can also catch Part Two here and Part Three here.