Jessica (Yessi) Lundin hasn’t lived the most conventional life.
“I was 20-years-old. Technically homeless, jobless, and spiraling out of control. I had a boyfriend who I had only known for one month. I visited him for my birthday and did not expect things to last much longer,” she told Love What Matters.
And things only got more unconventional from there. Lundin ended up getting pregnant.
“My situation was no different than thousands of other women suddenly enveloped in a ‘crisis pregnancy,’ however my story is unique for a few reasons,” she explained. “I placed my son for adoption, married the birth father, and now have two more children who are full blood relatives of my birth son. CRAZY.”
Things didn’t go exactly how Lundin planned. She never pictured herself as”that girl that got pregnant.” She always figured that she would marry young and raise a family with one special guy.
But since that didn’t happen, Lundin found herself having to make some pretty big decisions.
“But here I found myself, pregnant by a boy I barely knew with no clear future ahead of me. I had so many questions, but first I had to tell my parents,” she said. “I may have been 20, but the pregnancy news showed me that I was unprepared for what lay ahead. I was barely raising myself, how could I raise a baby? These were thoughts I wrestled with daily.”
Lundin had to decide between three options: abortion, adoption, or parenting. Since she didn’t have a job or a place to stay, she decided on adoption.
“I wanted this stranger in my stomach to have a chance at life. I didn’t pick adoption, I picked life,” Lundin explained. “If you are reading my story and are in a similar situation, please know that you have choices and don’t write off adoption. With faith, trust, and hard work on both ends, placement can be incredible.”
Though she didn’t take on the responsibility of parenting, her pregnancy helped her grow.
She got a job, enrolled in beauty school, and grew her relationship with her boyfriend.
Lundin says that within those nine months she and her beau went from “idiocy to responsibility.”
“It was a wakeup call for both of us individually and as a couple. As rocky as it was, we made it to what we thought was the end of the process: labor, birth, 48 hours in the hospital, and days later… placement. That’s right, I said 48 hours. That is how long our son was ours,” she explains.
When their son was finally born Lundin remembers having a strong love for him that she did not expect to have.
She kept apologizing to the baby boy for not being able to care for him.
But she knew she was doing the right thing in order to give her son a better life. Though she and her boyfriend no longer shared an obligation, they chose to stay together and eventually got married.
But they soon found themselves in a similar position as they once were. Lundin got pregnant again. Except that this time she was married to someone with a great job as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps., had a home, and steady income.
They went on to have two children, but Lundin struggled with feelings of guilt and anger during her pregnancies.
Eventually, she was able to come to terms with her choices and even gets to see her birth son.
“We see our birth son about twice a year. Not because of legal constraints but because of the physical distance between us. He knows us as his birth parents. He knows his birth story. He knows that he has full blood siblings,” she explains. “This is all due to the graciousness of his parents. We don’t feel we owe them anything, and they feel the same. Our relationship only exists because of a mutual love we all feel for our little boy.”
She hopes that her story will remind people to look for the “good” in a situation, even if that situation isn’t perfect.
“I don’t want you to live my story, I want you to know there is hope. If you are in this situation, I want you to know that you have options and that you can make beauty from the ashes.”
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