Former Student Embarks on Motherhood at Age 17

It’s Thursday morning. Former East student and 17-year-old Anna Ignatovich lifts herself out of bed, gets dressed in her loose pink T-shirt and her favorite pair of yoga pants and heads outside to her white Volvo. Ignatovich sees all of the blue East parking passes on the front windows of cars as she drives down Mission Road. She’s not going to school today. She hasn’t since May of last year.

Not since she got pregnant.

Today, Anna is on her way to one of the many weekly doctor appointments where they check on her baby boy that she’s been carrying for seven months.

Every day of those past seven months, Anna has reflected back on the circumstances.

It was spring break; Anna was staying at a friend’s house. Her parents were out of town. Anna and her friends had people over to the house everyday. She wasn’t dating anyone at the time. Things had been “complicated” with the same guy for a while. Anna doesn’t recall when they used protection and when they didn’t. It was all a blur.

Spring break ended, and Anna’s normal schedule resumed. Waking up early, going to school, and hanging out with her friends. But one thing was off. Her period was two weeks late.

“I didn’t think anything of it,” Anna said. “I was stubborn and just thought ‘it’s not going to happen to me, it wont, it can’t.’”

Later on that week, two of Anna’s close friends, junior Mackenzie Bridges and SM West junior Taylor Sheets, dragged her to the local grocery store to get a pregnancy test.

“She was really hesitant about it, and we wanted to be sure,” Bridges said. “At first we tried to make her go to a clinic, but she was really worried about that so we just got [a test] from the grocery store.”

They were worried, and Anna had mixed emotions flooding her brain. On the outside, she made it seem like she didn’t believe that she might actually be pregnant; on the inside, she was questioning herself. She didn’t know what to think; she needed to take that test to be sure.

She took the first one in the grocery store bathroom. The pink smiley face indicated it was positive.

“It came out positive so fast, in a snap, I looked at it and just started laughing,” Anna said. “I didn’t think it was true—I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen.”

She saw it and burst out laughing, but when she looked at her friends, their faces were lined with concern. She didn’t know how to handle it. Her friends were unsure at this point. They bought another test.

Positive again. There weren’t any laughs after this test. The only thing she knew to do at that point was cry.

“It didn’t even feel real because I didn’t have any symptoms, it was just like everyone was telling me this and that–and I had to believe it,” Anna said.

When all of the pregnancy tests Ignatovich took turned out positive, she struggled for a week and a half thinking of ways she would tell her mother. She didn’t want to have to watch her mom’s face as she broke the news to her. She didn’t want to see disappointment or anger. Later on in the week, Anna left her a note on her mom’s bed and then went straight to her friends house to spend the night.

Anna’s nerves were on edge when she saw her mom’s number appear on her cell phone that night. She answered it with trembling hands. Her mom wanted her to come home so they could talk in person about the note left on the bed.

“She was afraid to tell me in person about the pregnancy, because she thought I would scream and yell. It was shocking, but I was never angry,” Anna’s mother Olga Ignatovich said.

After the talk with her mom, the two decided to go to the doctors office to make sure the pregnancy was real. When they found out it was, Anna had to look at her options.

She never considered abortion; it was just something she didn’t believe in since she was brought up in a Christian household, and adoption was out of the question, too. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life thinking about all of the “what-ifs.” Olga was surprised to see Anna making such a mature decision to keep the baby. She took pride in the fact that her daughter was growing up.

“She wanted to keep the baby and take all responsibility,” Olga said. “She didn’t want to give him up.”

The pregnancy has taken a lot from Anna. Coffee: she can’t drink her number one tool to staying awake on early school mornings anymore because it’s bad for the baby. Appearance: It has transformed. Anna doesn’t fit into her snug shirts and skinny jeans anymore. Her stomach now feels rock hard, and it feels like she is always “full.” It hurts when the baby kicks, but it’s a good hurt. Relationships: She has had to realize who her true friends are after hearing some of her closest friends didn’t support her decision in keeping the baby.

“I cried at the beginning,” Anna said. “Everyone tells me ‘you’re not gonna make it’, ‘you’re gonna fail in school’ and I’m just trying to prove them all wrong.”

Anna has been through highs and lows. Some days she is very optimistic, she pushes aside all of the looks and stares she receives.

But there are other days. When Anna was at Price Chopper last month, an old lady came up to her and asked her all about the baby, but when Anna told her she is only 17, she rolled her eyes and walked away.

Those are the times Anna feels like she’s just been punched in the gut.

But Anna has proved to herself and the people around her that she is going to be able to handle this “pregnant teenager thing.”

Anna has been doing online school. It gets lonely though. It’s just her and the computer for five hours, four days a week. A friend or two will come visit on school days occasionally, but other than that it’s just her. After she finishes her classes, she will clean the house, do the dishes, and make a nice lunch for herself. She says she’s starting to feel like a “housewife,” something that she thinks will come in handy in a few months.

She is showing people that she isn’t just a kid anymore; that she has responsibilities now. She has to be careful about who and what she surrounds herself with, which means no more parties and no more sleepovers with all of her friends.

“She has definitely grown up a lot,” Bridges said. “She still jokes and has her same personality, but I can tell she’s learned that she can’t just party and be with friends all the time. She knows she has to grow up. She’s already gotten there and she hasn’t even had the baby yet.”

Anna feels as if her whole life is changing. She has to eat, breathe, and think for two instead of one now. She’s changed the way she treats her schoolwork. She used to push off homework to the last minute, but now she finishes up one of her online classes and studies and does her homework right away. She wants to try her hardest and do her best for the baby’s sake.

Anna is embracing the fact that her experience will help her become a stronger person in the long-run; she just wants to raise her son as best as she can and with all of the support she is receiving from her friends and family she knows that a lot of people “have her back.”

“I just don’t want people to feel pity for me,” Anna said. “I just feel like everyone thinks things like ‘why didn’t she give it up for adoption’, ‘why didn’t she get an abortion’, and I just don’t want them looking down on me. Maybe it was a sign from God, maybe it wasn’t. I just want to make the best of it.’”