cw: unhealthy lifestyle, drugs, abortion
Bellamy Beatrice ‘Bebe’ Hickham [22] is Cassio’s biological mother. Born as the second child to a wealthy family she spent most of her adolescence partying and shirking her responsibilities whenever she could. She went to college but just for the social aspect and ended up dropping out after a year as her grades were extremely lacking. Her parents and older sibling never really cared about her hectic lifestyle as they were busy with the family business, they rarely spoke to one another outside of Bebe asking for more money for her rent after spending what was supposed to go towards her bills on cocaine and booze..
Due to her heavy drug and alcohol use she was very familiar with her period being late or even skipping multiple months. So when it suddenly stopped it was not out of the ordinary for her. It wasn’t until she was seeking treatment for a UTI that she discovered she was pregnant.
Being young and, to put it simple, dumb, she knew she was not ready for a baby and decided to have an abortion. The appointment was set, she had her best friend agree to drive her home and take care of her afterwards, but when she went in the doctor discovered something during the preprocedural ultrasound. Bebe was nearly six months pregnant and past her state’s cutoff for abortion.
Finding out that she would likely have to have this baby was beyond shocking. She spent the next few weeks holed up in her room thinking about what she would do, considering traveling somewhere that would allow late term abortions without medical reasons. Her best friend was her rock during this time and ensured that Bebe was eating and drinking, or otherwise taking care of herself, even helping her friend shower during this time. Eventually she came to the decision to continue her pregnancy, she was already entering the third trimester after all. Though she made her friend promise not to tell a soul as she wanted to ensure that her family didn’t know about the baby. There was no point in reaching out to the father either since she didn’t know who he was. The plan was to rent a house out of her homestate to ensure that no one from her life would know under the guise of a ‘girl’s trip’ with her friend.
The last few months of her pregnancy were anxiety inducing, both from the fear of her parents finding out as well as the medical testing that she had to endure. Considering that she continued to drink and use party drugs while unknowingly pregnant made the chances that her child would be effected by her lifestyle much greater than zero. Waiting on all the results were nerve-wracking, and the guilt that her own choices to abuse her own body could’ve resulted in damage to someone else’s weighted on her heart. Most of the tests came back negative thankfully, but the only way to be sure was to examine the baby upon their birth. Everyone waiting on bated breath to find out definitively.
When the time came that Bebe went into labor she chose to labor without pain relief, it was both a self punishment and the beginning of her choice to cut out narcotics and other drugs from her life for good. Her best friend was there with her during the entire eighteen hour labor supporting her, and even being the one to cut the baby’s umbilical cord. Initially Bebe didn’t want to hold or even look at her baby, but in a last minute decision she asked to hold him. Looking into his face she felt the love and connection that parents always talked about, but she knew that she shouldn’t keep him. They stared silently at one another, the peace only broken by Bebe uttering his name. Of course she hadn’t intended to bestow upon him a name, but in the moment it felt more right than sending him out into the world without one. A second later she passed him off to the nurse and hasn’t seen him since. She did end up learning from her doctor later on at a follow-up appointment though that he is a perfectly healthy baby despite her drug abuse.
In the years that have passed she continued to pursue sobriety and is now nearly three years sober. She’s an active sponsor in NA and AA meetings and has returned to college to get her degree in psychology so she can one day become an addiction counselor. In the meantime she’s volunteering at a women’s shelter and spends a lot of time aiding single mothers as well. While she doesn’t necessarily regret her choice to place her son for adoption, it has lead to a lot of unpacking to be done with the therapist that she’s begun seeing in the last few months. She doesn’t really want to try and find him, thinking it would be too invasive and intrusive for his family. As well as being too emotionally draining for her since seeing him would only cement the fact in her heart that he is not her’s. Instead deciding that if he someday wants to try and find her when he’s older will be the only way that she would ever see him again. Largely she lives as if she had never had a child at all, attempting to move past the dark time in her life full of drugs and other bad choices.
Recently however, a woman she was working with complimented her on how she handles their cases and asked if she herself was a mother, for the first time in her life Bebe replied: “Yes.”