I have written once before about living with a pregnant woman. In that column, I talked from my own point of view but now I am going to talk about what it is like for my girlfriend to become a pregnant woman.

She said to me that before she realised that she was pregnant, she was feeling strange and somehow different. She wasn’t in control of herself or her emotions. She said that she was feeling more sensitive and cared about things around her more than usual. She started to think too much, making a big thing out of something small and crying very easily. She didn’t know why until we both found out that she was pregnant.

Over the next few months there were lots of changes with her body. First she started to get fatter and then started to have eating problems. She couldn’t eat some things that she liked before and she started to eat things that she never really liked! Sometimes she felt sick and couldn’t eat at all so she had to take some medicine that the doctor gave her. She was puking a lot when she came into the fourth and fifth month but after that she got better.

Then when the fifth month had passed, her stomach started to get really big and then she started to have some more problems. Backache was one; she can’t really sit down with her back straight for a long time like she used to do. Also, when she lies down on the bed, she can’t just get up. She has to first roll on her side because of her big stomach and then get up.

She has now been pregnant for eight months and she said to me that these physical problems sometimes made her not really want to be pregnant again! But, I don’t think she regrets it. Keep reading to see what she had to say about how her life has changed.

"At first, I wanted to go back to the time when I was still a teenage girl at school the same as my friends. I really didn’t want to leave school but what could I do? There isn’t any school in Thailand that is going to want a pregnant student. So I had no choice. I left school to stay at home doing nothing apart from housework. I then had plenty of time to think about life.

"Everyone knows that it’s way too early for me to become a mother. I agree with them. Tell you the truth, at first I was scared and was thinking about going to have an abortion. I jumped down the stairs a couple of times trying to get the baby out but luckily it didn’t happen. It was really stupid of me to do that. I realised later that running away from my problem is never going to help get it better. I have to accept the consequence and move on.

"Also, I think that in some way being young parents will be good for the baby. It’s because our age difference won’t be that different. I think we will be able to understand our kid more than adults can.

I don’t think that I should call this a "mistake" any more. What I know for sure is, I am now happy with my life with Gor. We are going to have an incredible daughter and we are going to do more than our best to make us as a happy family."

Wow! I didn’t know that my girlfriend is growing up. It isn’t easy for teenagers to handle this kind of challenge. Not many teenagers are able to give up on their carefree life to live in the adult world. I am so proud of my girlfriend that she can handle it. I was worried once when she said that she wanted to play with her Barbie dolls. But now I understand that she was just preparing herself to look after a real life Barbie!

This story was originally published in the Bangkok Post.