The Pregnancy Project: A Memoir - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Gaby Rodriguez made national headlines in 2011 when, as a seventeen-year-old high school senior from Toppenish, Washington, she revealed she had faked a pregnancy for a class project. Her experience inspired a Lifetime movie, also titled The Pregnancy Project. Her grades were in the top 5% of her graduating class, and she was a commencement speaker. She was also in the ASB Leadership group and president of the school’s chapter of MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil de Chicanos de Aztlan: Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan). She was raised by her single mom and has seven brothers and sisters.

Jenna Glatzer is the author or ghostwriter of more than thirty books. She has worked with Celine Dion on the authorized biography Celine Dion: For Keeps, and with Marilyn Monroe’s estate for The Marilyn Monroe Treasures. She also writes for publications such asThe Washington Post, Healthline, and USA TODAY. She lives in New York, where she allows drag queens to poison her daughter's mind at brunches and Tupperware parties. Find out more at JennaGlatzer.com.

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CHAPTER 1

BEFORE THERE WAS ME

For a moment, I understood just what it must be like to be a celebrity caught in the middle of a scandal. There I was, on a senior class field trip,in disguise, and running away from a reporter and cameraman who had followed me, trying to sneak a quote out of me for their story. That’s because I’m The Girl Who Faked Her Own Pregnancy as a Senior Project. Okay, it’s not an official title, but it might as well be. Overnight I went from being just another unknown seventeen-year-old girl in small-town Washington State to an international media sensation. It was weird.

Weird and scary.

I sure hadn’t planned on any of it. When Good Morning America called my school looking for me while I was in the midst of juggling four other interviews, I ran out the back door crying. Who was I to be on national television? And it wasn’t justGood Morning America—all the major television networks in the United States, plus some international ones, wanted to send film crews out to my little hometown to talk to me. Three of them came to my school to give presentations and try to woo me for my first “exclusive.” And in addition to the news programs, there were also movie producers, talk-show hosts, radio producers, newspaper and magazine editors, book publishers. . . . My principal nearly went out of his mind trying to keep up with the calls that had resulted from my project.

They all wanted to ask the same questions: Why did you do it? You really didn’t tell your boyfriend’s parents? What do you think of shows like Teen Momand 16 and Pregnant? What’s your message?

I worried about saying the wrong things. I worried I would be misinterpreted or misquoted or just plain misunderstood. I didn’t know how to turn my message into a sound bite for the media—how do you explain a lifetime in just a sentence or two?

Because that’s what it was, really. This wasn’t merely a senior project that I picked out of a hat, hoping for a good grade and the chance to go onThe Today Show. It was something that reflected a major issue in my family, which started with my mom decades before I was born. And if you’re going to understand my story, I first need to tell you about my family and where I grew up.

• • •

My mother is a superhero. I know this because I’ve seen her in action, under the hood of a car that is probably better suited for the junkyard than the highway. She learned how to fix cars by watching mechanic shows on television and by studying what other people did when they worked on their cars. That’s how she figured out how to fix washing machines and other appliances around the house, too. Even when she was eight months pregnant with me, she was rolling herself underneath a car to fix something or other, because that’s what needed to be done. Give her enough time and she can figure out nearly anything.

She didn’t learn these skills in school—she dropped out when she became pregnant in the eighth grade, at age fourteen. I learned that when I was in about the seventh grade, and it seemed unreal to me.I’m just a kid, I thought. How could she have had a baby when she was just one grade above me?

I always knew my mother had been young when she had her first child, but I never did the math, never realized that she was in middle school. And when she first told me she had Nievitas at fifteen, I assumed that meant she got pregnant when she was fifteen. Then she corrected me and said she got pregnant when she was fourteen, and for some reason that pushed it over the edge for me. Fifteen was still a couple of years away, but fourteen was too close for comfort. Some of my friends were fourteen. Picturing them with babies was crazy.

“I made a mistake,” my mother said. “But Gaby, this is not a road I want you to go down. This is not an option for you. You have a good life ahead of you, and I want you to wait until you’re ready before you have kids. Focus on school and think about relationships later.”

I was listening, but also distracted by the implications of what she was telling me about her life. It’s hard for me to even think about how she coped. In middle school, I was just starting to figure out who I was; I was thinking about my schoolwork and my friends and sports and what I might like to do with my future. My mother had to think about what time the baby had her last feeding, whether they had enough diapers in the house, and scheduling doctor visits for immunizations and check-ups. She didn’t have her own life anymore. Motherhood swallowed her up.

The summer before I took sex ed class in middle school, my mom decided to tell me the whole story. We had looked over my upcoming curriculum together, and my mom had to sign off on a note saying that she acknowledged that I would be taking sex ed as part of my health and fitness class the following year. I wondered aloud what they would teach us. She figured they’d probably talk to us about abstinence and protecting yourself from unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, and that led into the first of our frank talks about her past. I’m not sure anymore whether she started the conversation or I did; whenever I had questions, she always respected me enough to answer honestly, but she tried to protect my feelings by not sharing some of the more difficult details until she felt I was ready to hear them.

Her father had died of cancer when she was eight years old, and she was the second-oldest in a family of eight kids. There would have been ten, but one of my grandmother’s pregnancies ended in miscarriage, and another baby was premature and died in infancy. Three girls and five boys remained. After her father’s death, her mother reared all the kids alone, and she was deeply disappointed when my mother got pregnant at such an early age. My mom cared very much what her mother thought, especially because that was the only parent she had left.

Because her mother wouldn’t have it any other way, my mother explained, she married the boy who impregnated her. Secretly she hoped he would move back to Mexico so she’d be relieved of her duty to stay with him, but he stuck around and decided he liked the idea of having a wife to do the chores for him and be at his beck and call in the bedroom. Although she wanted to go back to school, he wouldn’t let her. Instead, she went to work at a potato plant warehouse. He worked in the fields driving tractors and trucks, a job that usually went to illegal immigrants, though he was a citizen. They had seven children together over the course of their sixteen-year marriage—all my brothers and sisters, but not me. I wasn’t born until years later.

Three girls and four boys. In birth order, they are: Nievitas, Genaro, Sonya, Javier, Fabian, Tony, and Jessica.

There were lots of physical fights between my mom and her husband, her husband and the kids, and between the kids themselves. One story my siblings told me that always stands out in my mind is about a fight that started when their dad was at work and my mother decided to run to the grocery store, leaving the older kids in charge of the younger kids. After all, the older ones were teenagers, and all the kids were just sitting in the living room watching television when she left. She figured she would be gone a short time, so what could go wrong?

Jessica, the youngest, was four or five at the time. She was sitting on the windowsill, watching the cars go by and waiting for Mom...