When you are first on your own you have to make a lot of choices. Some of these choices come when we are still in high school, but that is not true for everyone. When I was old enough to know what sex was, I was old enough to decide what I wanted to do about it. Though a lot of my friends were sexually active before I was, I tried to avoid the temptation altogether. I held out for a while, but there came a time when I had to decide what I wanted to do. My cousin helped me make the decision. She took me in to get my first pack of contraceptive pills even though I was not ready to have sex.
She was a few years older than me, and she had been having sex since she was fourteen. She never got pregnant and that was because she was on the contraceptive pills the entire time. She told me that she was not encouraging me to have sex, but she did want to know that I was protected in the event that it happens. She knew that the first time is usually not planned, and when it happens, most people aren’t thinking about things like condoms or contraceptive pills.
My mom didn’t have a problem with me going to get the contraceptive pills, though she did make sure we had a long talk ahead of time. That was one great thing about growing up with my mom. She was good about keeping me in line and punishing me when I needed it, but she was also very open and I knew I could talk to her about anything. She warned me that contraceptive pills were not a license to have sex, but she would like to think that I was in the habit of taking them each day before I went off to college the next year.
She told me that though it might strike fear in some of the other moms that she knew, she thought the contraceptive pills were a good idea before sexual intercourse started. She knew that kids were going to do what they wanted and it didn’t matter if the girl was on contraceptive pills or not. She’s not dumb, and she remembers what it was like to be a teenager full of hormones and curiosity. Taking the pill did not make me have sex earlier, and I think it even helped hold it off for me. It made the possibility of getting pregnant more of a concrete thing because I was taking a pill to avoid it.
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