I don’t even know if I want answers or not, but I’ve got to tell someone the idiotic mistakes that I have made before I go mad.
I am a teenager. I hate to say it, cause I don’t fit into the mould, but I’m still 17 and I’m still an idiot. I don’t like parties; I go to church; I like school; I don’t swear all that often. I’m not an outcast and no-one as far as I know hates me or thinks I’m weird or whatever and bullies me. But I am still a teenager.
I’m not sure how well I can cut a long story short…but here goes.
I’m in the choir at my church, along with my mum and my little sister. We’re a very strong family; none of us have ever been any trouble- mum always jokes about that; the fact that she never had to do anything, we just never bothered with the ‘teenage’ years. There aren’t just the three of us, mind. My parents are married, and I’ve got two elder sisters as well as my little sister. There’s an age gap between the pairs of sisters, so although we’re all close, our elder sisters share a bond, and my little sister and I share a bond. Of the elder two, one is married and just become a mum and the other happily partnered; and both on the first attempt. Neither of them had met anyone before the one they’re sticking with, both at about 18. So obviously I got fake jealousy thrown at me when I started going out with a boy at 13- the likes we’d never seen before! This wasn’t a problem- eventually about a year later we grew apart and broke up. The problem started last year, when a man at choir
offered to give me some driving tutoring cause I was so keen to drive. From there, we hit it off- the lessons dwindled out cause with so little time on my hands, I barely got time with the family as it was, so we just chatted, and became really good friends. This didn’t surprise me; mum got on with him really well, so I knew he’d be a funny guy. Bad news is, he’s not quite 3 times my age.
So the closer we got, the more that people worried; and we did too. Neither of us had done anything of the like before, and ignored it for a while, but eventually he came out with it, and we started trying to be together. And the twits we were, we kept quiet about it because we still didn’t know what we were doing. We very, very rarely got time alone and when we did it would be at church, so didn’t, obviously, get that close physically.
I can’t say that I wholly trusted him- I’d be even more of a fool to say that I did. Anywhere along the line he could have raped me or buried me under his patio, to be blunt. So occasionally, when he’d find ways to meet up in places that I felt uncomfortable with (e.g. when no-one knew where I was) I would make an excuse. One day, very recently, he caught me lying to him, and we stopped and talked. I told him that I couldn’t hide this much longer, so he agreed that we should reveal things a little more and stop worrying my family and friends. So we did- we’ve told my mum first, as she was visibly the most worried. We caught her one evening and said we’d like a chat when we had time. She managed to take him aside and talk to him the next day when I wasn’t there, and he fed a little back to me- not much, cause he said she’d want to talk to me without knowing what she’d said to him. But she wanted to tell the Vicar, cause he’d know much more about what to do, and our Choir-master,
cause we’d screwed up in his choir and he was our friend.
So I waited for when she and I would have time to talk alone, and we eventually did. Well, when I say talk, she talked at me. She didn’t need to hear my opinion, and in my family, that has never happened. She had also already talked to the Vicar and Choir-master, and I had assumed that she would ask me first before she did that. So basically, I started to get confused.
Still, she asked for him to go and talk to the Vicar, and he did so promptly. The Vicar said that we hadn’t strictly done anything wrong, among other things like suggesting we all sit down and talk, and said he’d pass the information along to my mother and father.
About 2 weeks later, and I found out that the Vicar had, in fact, done no such thing. I was assuming that he was looking for a time to be alone with mum to talk it over, but was still irritated.
In all this, all the way through, there is one person I did not tell, and that was my younger sister. I was waiting for a chance to tell her gently, because I knew that I would deeply hurt her. If I had told her, and only her, from the start, what sort of burden would that have been on a 14-year-old girl? That she was the only witness to a relationship between the only two people who really shouldn’t be together…
Tonight, she has told me the blunt truth, and I just don’t know what to do. She was so worried about me that she went behind my back to read my text messages. She knew right from the point of us going out that we were. She’s lost all faith in me because we’ve never kept secrets from each other before, and I’ve scarred her so much deeper than anything else I could have done.
She told me about all the comings and goings between my parents and the church, and my friends, and everything that has gone on behind my back that, worryingly, no-one else would dare tell me.
The thing that hurts me is that all of this seems to be being arranged without a word from me- I don’t actually seem to have any say in the matter.
The thing that breaks my heart is that I have failed in the one thing that I tried to do the whole way through- protect my own sister, and my family, and be a role-model to the young woman my sister’s turning into. I don’t know how long it will be until any of them can trust me again, or if I can trust them. This is the sort of thing I read in books and joke about how simply stupid you would have to be to make such a horrible mistake. But I don’t even know if I have made a mistake- I don’t even know for sure if I love him, or whether I’m just in love with love.
I’ve always burned to be a mother, and a teacher. But if I can’t even sort my own relationships without destroying everything, how can I ever be fit to help children?
I can see two choices, and both of them are yelling at me. One, I could watch this through to the end and show that I really mean it, knowing that my family hates it. Two, I could drop him and apologise to everyone, start again and know that I gave in.
Please, help me- anything you can think of to help me- I’ve done everything so wrong and I don’t know where to turn.