Free Never Too Late by Amber Portwood, Beth Roeser Page B

would get out his acoustic guitar, and I’d sit there and hold onto her and help her dance while he played guitar and sang little songs for us. Her eyes would just light up when he was playing—you know, that perfect face babies make when they’re surprised and their eyes get all wide with excitement. When she started to crawl, she’d crawl on over and reach for the guitar strings, and he’d stop and let her play with them.
    They were really happy times. We had such a beautiful little family started. Sadly, though, the cracks were already starting to show. Those wonderful hours started to feel fewer and farther between as he and I got more and more stressed. When it came down to it, we really didn’t know how to handle everything that was going on.
    Filming with MTV was no problem for us. We liked the crew we worked with, and the money was nice. But when the show blew up, it brought things with it.
    All that attention was the last thing we expected. Leah’s dad started getting all of these messages on MySpace, all of these girls talking to him. I don’t know how many times I saw messages on his account from girls, risqué pictures from all these randos, and him writing back saying, “Ooh, sexy” and things like that. That shit was the basis for a lot of the fights we started having. Of course I replied to some of the people who messaged me sometimes, too, but never like that. He took it to a completely different level.
    It started out slow, but we would end up losing ourselves in the money and that weird kind of fame we had landed in. Leah’s dad wound up becoming someone who was far, far away from the person he used to be in my memory. But I got away from myself, too, in my own way, with the pills.
    Still, I’ll say this until I die, and you can ask any honest person. I have never cheated on that man in my life, and he knows it. No matter what life I was living, I never cheated on him. I was always loyal to our relationship. I wish he could say the same.

6
Falling to Pieces
    P eople always ask me how exciting it was when I realized
16 & Pregnant
was making me famous. Well, let me just remind everybody what kind of “famous” that was. I wish I could quote one of the stories directly, but you’ll just have to trust me when I go over some of the things the tabloid writers said about us. Or you can see for yourself. It’s all over the Internet. The gossip reporters called us schlubby and fat, made vicious fun of our lifestyle and how much money we had, and mocked our relationship relentlessly. It got meaner and meaner as time went on, to where it really just felt like bullying. I’m not even talking about the many times we were criticized in the media for our behavior or our mistakes. I’m talking about the many stories that served absolutely no other purpose than to call us fat or ugly or stupid.
    That side of fame wasn’t fun for either of us. It was pointless and cruel, and it took a toll.
    It didn’t happen all at once, but the first signs of what was to come were bad ones. I instantly knew the reality TV thing was out of control the moment I saw myself on
The Soup.
That was a truly shocking moment for me. Like I said, we never thought
16 & Pregnant
was going to turn us into household names. We just thought it was a funny thing that happened one time, and after we cashed that check we were totally ready to fade off into the MTV archives or whatever. We weren’t prepared to reach late-night joke status.
    It just so happened that
The Soup
was one of my favorite shows at the time. So one night I was sitting around watching Joel McHale cracking jokes when all of a sudden, boom! I popped up on the screen. I didn’t even have time to think about whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. It was obviously a bad thing. They went right into it, showing clips of me eating all of this food and making fun of me.
    It was the first time I experienced that kind of negative media attention, and all I can say is it