What does love look like?
Australian student Tommy Connolly, 23, worked extra shifts in order to adopt his 17 year old homeless cousin. She was pregnant, and he wanted to help her and her child have a better life.
Tommy Connolly, an aspiring athlete at the University of the Sunshine Coast, said he hadn’t seen his 17-year-old cousin for more than a decade when he moved to resume his studies and decided to get in touch.
He found out that his cousin had been sleeping rough on the Gold Coast, was 32 weeks pregnant, had no shoes or phone and was almost illiterate.
With the baby’s father in jail and her parents not on the scene, Mr Connolly said he took his cousin in “to make sure she’d keep the baby, stay off the streets and have a better life”. […]
Mr Connolly admitted he had taken on “the father role as you’d imagine,” but added: “[My cousin] does 90 per cent of the work – and if it’s one or two years of my life I have to put on hold to make sure two lives are going to be saved it’s nothing at all.”
Was it a sacrifice? Yes. Will his immediate life be harder and more challenging? Yes. In fifty years, is he likely to look back on this period of his life and regret giving of himself to help a girl and her baby make it in this hard world? I doubt it.
Love and support for women facing unexpected pregnancies can take all kinds of forms. Connolly proved that self-sacrifice and love, even from someone without extraordinary means, can and will change lives. It might even save them.
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It’s totally inspiring, both sides. Because he could have offered and she might have said no. (Something I have encountered.) Both sides have to want to work together, and so often I find we are told to be generous, but not encouraged to accept generosity. So she is very brave in this, for the obvious reasons, but also for the less obvious reason that she is allowing someone to help her. That takes courage, all by itself.