by Clarice Jones

Created on: January 05, 2009

They say that if you want to make God laugh- make a plan. Humph, I wonder if God still laughs when he thinks of me.

Becoming a single mother was not part of my plan. To raise a child on my own was never, in my wildest dreams, a life that I prophesized or plotted out for myself. To have such a great responsibility was never a prayer that I offered up when I put my head on my pillow at night. When I was a teenager, and even in my early twenties, when I was figuring out what I was going to be when I grew up', a struggling, juggling, running everywhere single mother was not the life I was concocting for myself.

Before my pregnancy, before I made the decision to keep my child, and before I had to rearrange my entire reality to raise this child, I was living a very interesting, exiting, and exhilarating existence in magical Manhattan. I was sprinting after the New York Dream: glamour, money, success. And, I was well on my way to chasing down and catching this illusive and illustrious reverie. What I was aspiring for full heartedly was coming to fruition. I had been working on the New York Stock Exchange for over five years, I had acquired my broker's license, and I had just landed a new crme de la crme job in the industry. I had just about made it'! I felt invincible. I felt incredible. I was in charge of my destiny.

As I navigated closer and closer towards this long time dream of mine, the farther and farther away I veered from my original origin in tiny Clearwater, Florida. My simplistic and stifling childhood in a small Gulf coast town seemed like a murky memory in the shadows of the bright lights of my new New York life. I was happyor was I?

BAM! Then it happened. The bottom of my world fell out: I was pregnant. A mistake, a misstep, a miserable me! What to do? What to do? The relationship with the father was going nowhere, my life was going somewhere, and I had to make a very hard choice. What to choose? What was "right" for me, what was right for the baby? What was "right" anyways?

I made the choice. I chose to have the baby. So, I quit my job, gave up the pending one, and moved back to Clearwater to live with my mother. Me, mom and baby in the belly- all under one roof. What an unlikey scenario- what an idea for a sitcom! Prodigal daughter returns home from the BIG CITY, knocked up, unemployed and scared beyond comfort. But I had made the choice,and I never second guessed it. Oh that is a lie. I second guessed myself throughout the whole pregnancy. As positive

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