You don't say!
Since we first met her on 16 and Pregnant, Kailyn Lowry has continually impressed us with her maturity as a teen mom. If you're a fan of the show, you might have seen her name in headlines a bit more often these days. She's becoming more candid about her difficult childhood and sharing shocking memories with the world — sharing things even her closest friends haven't known. We get a better understanding of who Kailyn Lowry is in her first autobiography, Pride Over Pity. She reveals parts of her life that the show has never covered and we wanted to share them with you!
Alcoholic Mother
Viewers of the show vaguely know of Kailyn's parents' problems with alcoholism, but her book delves more into it. She explains how she couldn’t partake in school activities she was younger because her mother “had enough trouble just remembering to pick me up from school.”
She remembers a time her mom came to pick her up after drinking, and Kailyn had to try to hide it from everyone at school. When her teachers asked about it, she told them her mom was just upset and “really shook up” about 9/11 (which had happened the day before). "I’d like to pretend my mom never hurt me, but the truth is she did. It felt like a bottle of liquid brought her more joy than spending time with her own daughter,” she wrote.
Unruly Rebellion
Because of the alcoholism, Kailyn's mom eventually signed temporary custody over to her neighbors, the Hopwoods, which led to Kailyn turning into an crazy rebellious teenager. “I was getting into fights at my high school […] occasionally, I got physical and would throw a punch,” and she ended up getting both in-school and out of school suspensions. Kailyn also said that to “escape from loneliness,” she often turned to weed.
Outside Pressures
Without parental supervision, Kailyn experienced a lot of life in an uncharacteristic manner. She lost her virginity in the eighth grade on a “concrete sidewalk” because they had nowhere else to go.
Her next relationship was with a boy named Toby. They weren't actively having sex but one night when they were alone, he was annoying enough that she eventually gave in. She wrote, “I believed Toby loved me so I decided I could give him this one thing as long as he wore a condom.” Unfortunately, Toby was a skeez ball and took off the condom.
Worst Birthday Ever
Earlier in the night, Toby whispered to Kailyn: “Let’s have a baby so we can stay together forever,” in attempts to convince her to give in. That night, at only age 15, Kailyn became pregnant. She told her mother, who immediately got concerned about her own reputation for being the mother of “knocked up teen.” Her reputation couldn't be tarnished and forced her daughter to get an abortion.
On her 16th birthday, instead of celebrating with the rest of her friends, Kailyn headed to the doctor to get her abortion. “Toby’s parents forced him to sit through the entire procedure with me […] The experience added a weight to my feet, a few extra pounds to the already heavy sack I was dragging around,” she wrote.
First Impression
After Toby, and the horrific ending of that relationship, Kailyn met Jo at McDonalds. She wrote, "... it isn’t the classiest place you can meet a significant other, but I guess I could give myself half a point for not meeting him at a dive bar where contracting hepatitis is a given."
"I wasn’t impressed by him. I wasn’t instantly attracted. No sparks even ignited, let alone flew. First impressions truly mean very little.” She admitted that there was no interest in him but because a mutual friend had a crush on Kailyn, the three hung out a lot. Spending the extra time with him let feelings between them develop!
Rocky Relationship
According to the book, the couple “broke up every other week…our personalities clashed…I don’t know why or how our relationship lasted, but through thick and thin our bumpy path continued right up until May of Jo’s senior year (my junior year).” At the end of the year, the two fell into a stereotype and on prom night, Jo lost his virginity and Isaac was conceived.
Kailyn kept it simple and told Jo by handing him the pregnancy test. He immediately told his mom. Jo’s mom, Janet, was a teen mom and sat down the couple to talk about Kailyn's options but Kailyn knew “an abortion was absolutely off the table.” The decision was made to keep the baby and during Jo's graduation party, Jo announced the pregnancy to the family.
“To my surprise, congratulations echoed from every corner of the room. His family’s genuine support made me feels so much more confident I could actually have this baby,” Kailyn remembered.
Getting on the Show
Kailyn's mother, however, was extremely unhappy about their decision to keep the baby so the teens decided to live in his Jo's parents' basement. Right before the move, Kailyn noticed that 16 & Pregnant was casting for a second season. She applied and was eventually picked for the show!
Like most of the rest of the girls, Kailyn had no idea what she was in for. “The first few hours of filming were the most awkward. I wasn’t used to having a lot of attention directed at me and now I suddenly had cameras following me around […] The impact on my life of being a part of a reality television show was overwhelming and I was’t sure if I could handle it.”
Absent Father Figure
As you probably noticed, Kailyn's father is extremely absent in the show. According to her mom, he stole Kailyn, taking her from Pennsylvania to Texas when she was a baby. Her mom eventually found her with the help of lawyers and detectives. They haven't heard from him since.
Then out of the blue (or not so out of the blue because Kailyn was on the show), Kailyn was contacted by her father’s sister. The MTV crews coordinated the trip to visit him, but it was a huge disappointment. The pregnant mom wrote, “The man who greeted me had a mullet, missing teeth, and was at least a foot shorter than I thought he would be.”
While the damage was too far gone between her and her father, she did learn that she had a sister and cousins, whom she eventually became close with.
Cheater Cheater
One of the most admirable traits Kailyn has is her work ethic. She made sure to finish high school. Things seemed to be going as well as they could be for the mom. She was on track for graduation and Jo had been working hard at Taco Bell to provide for his family and his baby.
However, Kailyn started becoming suspicious when Jo started missing classes at his community college and "picking up" late night shifts. While at a doctor’s appointment, Jo admitted he was cheating on Kail and had “gone so far as to put his uniform on when he went out and bring his regular clothes in a bag so I would think he was working when he was really meeting up with her.”
Baby Problems
They tried to mend things and stayed together, despite the rocky relationship. The world watched as Kailyn went into labor and welcomed her first son Isaac to the world. What we didn't see was the problems that came after the delivery.
Isaac was born a month and a half early; his liver wasn’t fully developed, which led to him suffering from jaundice. At four months, “Isaac was on my lap and I was trying to play with him and bond as usual. He’d laugh here and there but I couldn’t get much out of him, which was a tad on the unusual side. Was he getting sick? Suddenly, Isaac’s movements came to a halt. He went limp and his eyes rolled back. Then he threw up. I immediately dialed 911.”
He had another seizure while in the hospital, but fortunately, it was a freak accident, and he hasn't had one since.
New Boyfriends
Jo proposed to Kailyn on Valentine's day with his mother’s engagement ring, but the relationship ended three months later. While trying to make enough money to get out of Jo's parent's house, Kailyn learned she had been selected for Teen Mom 2.
It was around this time that she met Jordan. She hid their relationship for a while, but Kailyn knew she had to move on from her life with Jo. The people in her life weren't ecstatic but most everyone accepted it. When the time came for her to move out of Jo's house, Kail had no where to go. She found Valley Youth House, a housing program for single mothers, but had to spend two nights in a shelter in order to qualify. To hide her nights at the shelter, she claimed she was doing community service.
The Nightmare
Kailyn admitted that the constant attention in her life was getting to her, and at one point cheated on Jordan with Jo which essentially ended their relationship. She soon met a boy named Caleb; they had a casual relationship but weren't sexually intimate with each other.
One night, a drunken Caleb showed up at Kailyn’s apartment, saying they needed to talk. He pushed his way in and raped her. “I screamed and tried to shove him off, ordering him to stop touching me, but I was no match for his tall, muscular frame. His strength was so overpowering, I could barely move. I felt a tear and knew I was bleeding. When he finished, he left me in tears, screaming for him to leave,” she remembered.
Kailyn called Jordan, who rushed her to the hospital. She wrote that her insides were so torn up, the nurses had to stitch her with the thickest thread they had. Kailyn continued to write that she never reported Caleb to the police, but he never contacted her again. Until this book, Kailyn had only told a handful of people about it.
Meeting Javi
Kailyn continued her education by attending college, which is when she met Javi Marroquin. They met while Kailyn was working at a clothing store.
She convinced "a young man who looked 15 to buy a really expensive shirt," but he brought it back the next day as an excuse to ask her out. They started out as friends, but when Javi drove all the way to New York to see Kailyn film the season three reunion show of Teen Mom 2, she “couldn’t deny his attraction to her" any more.
She point blank told Javi she didn’t intend to be with him and after an appropriate amount of time to emotionally recuperate, the two became friends. Jokes on Javi though because when they became friends, Kailyn told him she wanted to be with him.
Lesbian Relationships
Kailyn's anger problems proved to be a big problem in Kailyn and Javi's relationship, but they managed to work through them. One of the biggest things to get over in their relationship was Kailyn’s old friend, Aria. In her book Pride Over Pity, Kailyn remembers that in middle school, she and Aria "kissed and touched each other. At such a young age, I didn’t stop to analyze what this meant about my sexuality, even though I knew we had a unique friendship […] looking back, I realize that I thought of her as my girlfriend even if we never officially acknowledged it. Years later, she came out as a lesbian."
While Kailyn was still living with Jo, they hooked up one more time. "There was a deleted scene from Teen Mom 2 where we discussed the nature of our friendship and if it would ever go further…Aria was convinced I was gay like her." When Kailyn didn't listen, Aria told Javi that Kailyn would eventually leave him to be with her, which caused Javi to leave.
Javi and Jo
Since Pride Over Pity was published in 2014, it doesn't cover Javi and Kailyn's drawn out break up and divorce. At the end of the book, however, it seemed like the two were extremely happy with each other.
One day, Jo approached Kailyn to ask for her back and "went on to say he couldn’t sleep straight for a year. I almost gasped at the serious tone his voice had taken on. As he spoke, I couldn’t help but notice he didn’t mention his girlfriend once. He didn’t even acknowledge the fact that he wasn’t single. Why? I think she had no idea what his true feelings were because he kept them buried deep. He never admitted any of this on television.” Kailyn turned him down, but this explains the weird relationship Javi and Jo have with each other.
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