Chapter 3, the next children brings new challenges

College life was moving swiftly along and over the years bf and I had fall-outs and issues as any young, dumb couple would have. And dumb we were! After passing first and second year of College and picking a few courses and dropping others I once again found myself pregnant! It was no immaculate conception, but I was surprised as though it were one!

My favorite lecturer, one day during one of our many coffee, smoke and heart to hearts in her office, told me something that makes me laugh still. I told her my highschool class were so supportive, it could have been any one of them that fell preggers that year and we were tight. She said, no, they all were using contraceptives I was the naive young girl who thought babies came from storks! Thinking back she was so right, naive I was, an yet still so eager to discover the world of pleasures that are available to women with the right resources. My parents in all their perfection never had "the talk" with me, it wasn't a topic we discussed, it just wasn't done. The sex ed classes, they didn't want us to attend in 6th and 7th grade (std4 and 5) we ended up attending but things were very scientifically explained and I dont think I really made the connection at that tender age, when they were talking about that certain bodiliy organ of our male counter part that was to enter the invagination of the female in the similar region and then procede with coital action that would encourage fertiliztion to occur and then produce a fetus, that this is the same thing as making love, which in some novels I had read to be euphoric and phenomenal, just didnt ever register to me as the same act until it was too late.

So after my first baby, I went on a injectable contraceptive that had a 98% effectiveness. My mother having had eight children had clearly passed me her fertility gene, I was in the 2% and was pregnant when my daughter was just over three years old. In third year of my degree and adamant that the only option I had was to just do it! Just do the degree, have the baby, finish the degree, bugger what people said or thought, I was here to get an education and make a future for my kids not to be liked or find cliques to hang with. I had my future and my kids futures in my hands, bf was not qualified in anything, so I was determined to become an independent woman. ( I later contradicted myself wholly, but thats a story for later)

My degree was a practical degree, meaning that for approximately 10weeks of the year we were emmersed in the classroom as a student teacher. A time of the year we all loved and hated. Loved because we were able to actually teach and interact with learners as we all loved to do. Hated because along with weeks of classroom lessons and planning came the horrid CRITS! Crits were awful mostly, the teaching file had to be organised just so, the lesson plans had to have the correct learning outcomes and assessment standards in the correct places, so that on the day when the lecturer visited to CRIT you you would hopefully survive and pass the observation. Some lecturers were mild and even dare I say lovely, while others found no problem inpicking you out in front of a class to correct you or even take over your lesson and ask you to sit. As you may have gathered CRIT is short for CRiTICISE, and No one wants to be criticised ever, especially when you know the lecturers disscuss how you taught amoung themselves or used you as an example during lectures.

SO moving along, in third year I missed teaching practice and took it as a break to have my son, 3.1kgs born with bf again by my side even thoough we had broken up a record number of times that year. 4months later I was pregnant again, the injectable contraceptive that was now 98.5% accurate was no match for my fertility genes! This pregnancy was my most trying, if I thought the looks and stares I got in high school were bad they weren't anything from the looks I got on campus. I'm not going into detail about this pregnancy or the time surrounding it s it is still painful, perhaps one day I will, all I can say is a perfect baby on my 7month pre-natal check-up was called back to Heaven for as he was too perfect to live amoung us, he now plays on God's football team and I miss him dearly.

Bf and I got married that year as did my sister and her husband, they are married 5years this year and ours lasted barely a year.