You don't say!
In the past seven seasons of 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom we've seen the girls of the show grow up in front of our eyes. Some, admittedly more than others, but most of them have come a long way from their teenage years. In our opinion, the woman that's made the biggest positive 180 is Amber Portwood. We were there for her drug addiction, prison admission and release, and all of the dramatics surrounding her and Matt's relationship but she's cleaned up her life and attitude and we are so proud of her for it.
There are a lot of events in her life that the MTV cameras weren't around to catch however. Amber covered a lot of them in her book Never Too Late and after we read it, we had to share these details with you all!
Happy Childhood
We met Amber on 16 & Pregnant when she was pregnant with Leah, but never really learned about who she was before her pregnancy. She wrote that she had a normal and happy childhood until her younger sister Candace tragically died at only two weeks old of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
Downhill
"After Candace died, my family started to deteriorate. That was the start of the bad times that turned everything into a blur in my memory," she wrote. It continued to say how her parents developed drinking problems, and her parent’s relationship soon turned into one big fight.
Unsuccessful Suicide
Amber’s admitted that as a young child she “just felt wrong,” and was battling depression before she could even understand what depression was. The poor elementary schooler attempted her first suicide when she was just 11 years old.
Chills
"No one was home when I did it. I just took a cord into the bathroom and hung it on the fan in the ceiling, and I looped it around my neck […] I just leaned into it and picked up my feet. It’s so hazy that I only remember certain details, like feeling tons of pressure behind my ears and then waking up on the floor.
Failure
[…] I didn’t try again, I just kind of chalked it up to a failure. And I couldn’t get the fan back up right because the screw was stripped, so after that it was always kind of messed up and made this weird sound when it was on.”
Meeting Gary Shirley
We vaguely were told how Amber met Gary on 16 and Pregnant but Amber explained their relationship in greater detail. She knew he was her older brother Shawn’s friend, but first met him in the school library after being sent there to catch up on homework.
He's Huge!
"I didn’t even see his face, but I remember thinking to myself, ‘Oh my god, this guy is huge. He’s gotta be the biggest guy in the school.'" A week later, they were officially introduced when Amber was home sick from school and Shawn and Gary came over.
In the Beginning
One day, Gary "came looking for Shawn" which was really just an excuse to come see Amber (Gary had just dropped Shawn off at work). This part of the book really shows how in love the two were.
Something Special
Fans on Teen Mom only see the estranged relationship between the two but, "He played the guitar for me. I love a man with a guitar, but he was very, very good. He’s probably the best guitar player out of any of the guys I’ve been around. The way he plays is just so gentle, and he has a beautiful singing voice. […] We had something special.”
Amber also admitted that the two were both virgins before meeting each other.
"Leah's Father"
One thing we noticed about the book is that Amber made it a point of never saying Gary’s name. She only refers to him as “future-fiance,” “fiance,” and then “ex-fiance,” or “Leah’s father.”
The Pregnancy Test
After dating for three years, the teenagers were as responsible as you could expect... and then some. Gary was working to become a nurse’s assistant and Amber was on her way to a management position at Wendy’s. That's when she found out she was pregnant.
Taking the News
Gary handled the news really well, but the parents? Not so much. "I called up my mom to have her come over so I could tell her what was up. I think it was actually her birthday the day I found out. She came home for five minutes, which was long enough to sit down, hear the news, freak out a little bit, call my dad, and leave with her boyfriend. Pretty smooth, Can’t say I blame her." Her dad didn’t handle it well either: "I’ll never forget his reaction. He was so pissed he just slowly turned away and went into the kitchen to get away from us for a minute […] Both of my parents were seriously shocked. They thought I was a virgin. My bad."
Pivotal Moment
Early on in her pregnancy, Amber heard about MTV’s new show 16 & Pregnant and decided to apply, but had no idea how it would change her’s and everybody in her life's lives forever. "We had absolutely no idea the show was going to turn into the huge thing it is today. We [thought] we were going to be on TV for a little while and everyone would forget about us afterwards," she remembered.
Attention
"All that attention was the last thing we expected," she continued. "Leah’s dad started getting all of these girls talking to him. I don’t know how many times I saw messages on his account from girls, risque pictures from all these randos, and him writing back saying, ‘ooh, sexy’ and things like that.” She added, “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."
Pill Parties
We know somewhat of Amber's drug addiction, but not too many details about it. Before her pregnancy and Gary, Amber started taking pills recreationally at parties. She stopped using when she found out she was pregnant, but it didn’t take long for the addiction to take over after Leah's birth. “For six months after she was born, I stayed sober. But I was already reaching my limit with unhappiness and stress, and I was almost begging for something to come along and offer me a way of escape.”
Blissed Out
She received a Klonopin prescription for her anxiety, "but almost right away, I started eating them all up, and that was the beginning of me becoming an addict." Shortly after getting the prescription, MTV producers came by to reveal Amber had been picked to star on Teen Mom. “I was so blissed out on my new pills I had to think kind of carefully about how to say ‘Yayyy… woohoo.'"
Worst Valentine's Day Ever
While their fame and Amber's addiction was increasing, Gary and Amber’s relationship began worsening. On Valentine’s Days, Amber found out Gary was cheating on her. He had left to go to the mall to find something for her for Valentine’s Day and after not showing up for a couple of hours, Amber called him and heard girls in the background. Gary said he met them at the mall and gave them a ride home, which started a huge fight.
Cheating
"Before long, he called me up crying, or at least acting like he was crying, and saying he had something to tell me," she wrote. ‘"I cheated on you.’ Those weren’t girls he just picked up at the mall. He didn’t even go to the mall to get me a present for Valentine’s Day. He went to hang out with those girls because he was messing around with one of them […] Nothing between us was ever the same after that…I look back on that day as the day everything completely changed."
The Fight
Any fan of the show knows that one of the biggest moments of season one was when their fights turned physical, and Amber actually hit Gary. In the book, she explains how things got so bad and reveals that the girl Gary had cheated on her with actually appeared on the show. "The whole thing was kept under wraps. He actually filmed with this girl one time, and people who were watching didn’t realize he’d cheated on me with her. It was kept covered up for a long time."
Working it Out
Despite this, Amber wanted things to work out with Gary, and she described the fateful night. “I got up and sort of quietly went down the hallway to listen. And there he was, on the phone, talking to this girl. In my freaking house, he was sitting there talking to the girl he cheated with." She added, "I know people might think they know how bad it was from that they saw, but what was inside our world, what we did keep from showing other people, was even worse. There were times we’d physically fight, both of us. He’d spit on my face and I’d spit back in his face."
Going Insane
Unfortunately, that wasn't the worst of it. She had to sign over custody of Leah which made her depression and anxiety worse which led to more self-medicating with pills. "I can tell you that the day I signed over custody rights to Leah’s father was the day I completely broke […] Everything that happened around that time is a complete jumble, because after I lost Leah I literally went insane."
Second Suicide
Amber attempted suicide for the second time in her life after that. "I went into the bathroom of my house and tried to hang myself. Before I did it, I called up Leah’s dad and told him I love him […] I took a bunch of pills and tried to get a rope around my neck. I can’t even remember clearly exactly what I did. When the police came, I was unconscious, just moaning."
Life of a Sex Addict
Between signing over custody and her trip to rehab, Amber went a little (a lot) crazy. "It was a bad time. I started going out, fighting, and partying […] I finally got to a place where the attention and money started getting to me, too. I was always extreme when it came to partying and sex. When it really got down to it, my life at that time was nothing but pills and men […] Looking back I think it’s obvious I had a bad sex addiction along with the pill addiction."
Crazy Fights
She continued to write, "I used to get into fights with boyfriends over how much sex I wanted. If they weren’t in the mood or they were too tired, I would go off. How insane is that?" She also wrote that the whole time Gary was trying to get her back and he “would come over and dig through my trash can for condoms, even though we were completely broken up.”
Pap Party
As Amber’s reputation as a partier began to define her, she wound up in situations that the MTV crews never documented like partying with the paps. "I was pretty good at avoiding them, usually. I’d just sneak in and out of my house through the back. But there was one time when I’d just gotten out of the shower and I heard a knock on the door. I went and answered in a towel, and so of course there were four guys standing there. One of them was a guy from a pretty well-known publication who said he’d heard I could party […] so I went along and partied with him at the hotel where they were staying. You think teenaged reality TV stars are crazy? Well, listen up: paparazzi are crazy."
Crazy Nights
“We went to the hotel and stayed the whole night hanging out and partying," she continued. "There were people there who were trading pills and getting all messed up. We got crazy in the hot tub, rocking out and acting wild, and early in the morning we went back out and these guys stole a bunch of balloons from some store parking lot and handed them to me. There were pictures online of me walking down the street with this big bunch of balloons while they were just taking photos of me."
Lost Loves
“Never Too Late” makes it abundantly clear that Teen Mom only shows a small portion of the girls' lives. For example, Amber opens up about one of the loves of her life Dan, who Teen Mom has never mentioned. "One night, I dragged my friend Sallie out to this bar called Jimmy’s, and we were talking and drinking and having fun when these two dudes walked in with a girl," she wrote. "One of these guys was f–king hot. He was just chiseled to the core. Like a country boy with the body of a Greek god, I swear to you, and these beautiful blue eyes!"
Dan + Amber
She and Dan got together and had an awesome relationship. “We were so happy. We never fought. We made love five times a day, whenever we could. It was insane. Perfect, really. The amazing thing about Dan was the he stuck by my side as long as he did. In another life, I think we could have had something special. Unfortunately, we weren’t cut out for making it together in this one."
Jail Jail Jail
Dan found Amber passed out with a bottle of pills next to her one night. She woke up and reassured him she was ok but unfortunately didn't wake up again for her appointment with her probation officer the next morning. The probation officer showed up, found Amber’s stash, and sent her to the courthouse where she was sentenced to a jail for three months— this meant a with drawl from her pills.
So Many Drugs
"I weighed about 115 lbs, and every day, about every four to six hours, I was taking eight or ten of my 1o mg Hydros, which is an unholy amount of those to take. Then I was rounding that out with three Klonopins, two Valiums, and a Soma.” After getting out, things got worse when she started using Fentanyl patches to get high, which are not only dangerous, but don’t show up on regulated drug tests. “I fell in love with those things so hard I became an addict on a completely different level.” After another near death experience, Amber made the decision to go to jail to get clean for good.
Never Again
Her jail time was the first real positive turning point of Amber's life. Despite everything they had been through, when Amber was in prison, she and Gary were trying to “working things out.” They decided they were getting together when she got out, and she sent him $1000 to help him get a place for the two of them and Leah. Unfortunately, Gary turned out to be a skeezball of a boyfriend and had another girlfriend on the side. That was the last time she tried with him.
This definitely makes us see Amber in a completely different light! Let us know your thoughts and be sure to SHARE this gallery!!