Mary Bonnet Says Pregnancy at 15 Made Her Feel She Had ‘Scarlet Letter,’ Was ‘Mortifying’ for Family (Exclusive)

The 'Selling Sunset' star, whose son is now 27, opens up about teen motherhood in her new memoir, 'Selling Sunshine'

Mary Bonnet opens up about what it was like to learn she was pregnant at age 15 — and her parents’ reaction to the news — in her new memoir, Selling Sunshine.

The Selling Sunset star, real estate agent and vice president of Oppenheim Group, 44, recalls her best friend driving her to a drugstore on the outskirts of her small Indiana hometown to buy a pregnancy test, which she took in a gas station.

“My parents were devout Catholics and didn’t believe in premarital sex,” she writes, explaining she didn’t have easy access to birth control and hadn’t used protection when she and her boyfriend of a few months had sex “a handful of times.”

When she worked up the courage to tell her parents about the pregnancy, she says her mother responded, “What?!” before she “lost her s---” and asked, “How could you do this and be so irresponsible?!”

Related: Mary Bonnet Says Memories of Night She Was Sexually Assaulted by an Acquaintance ‘Still Haunt Me’ (Exclusive)

However, her mom’s anger didn’t upset her as much as her father’s disappointment.

“It was when my dad stared at me blankly, tears pouring down his face, that I died a little inside,” she writes. “His intensely visible disappointment nearly tore me apart. I knew I’d broken his heart. And, in that moment, I started to cry too."

While Bonnet was relieved once her parents knew the secret she’d been keeping, she says she still felt “scared and ashamed.”

Initially, she says her parents pushed her to give up the baby for adoption.

“My mom was much more vocal about it than my father was, but neither of them wanted me to ‘ruin’ my life by becoming a teen mom,” she writes. “And as others began to find out—like the parents of kids at school—they weren’t very kind about it. I had a huge scarlet letter emblazoned on my chest, which was mortifying for my family.”

Bonnet welcomed her son Austin, now 27, in 1997 and calls him “the biggest gift and accomplishment of my life” in the book’s acknowledgements.

She tells PEOPLE she hopes sharing her experience with teen motherhood will inspire readers to “keep moving forward.”

“We don't really know why things happen when they happen, and it feels like it is just unfair and it's hard to get through,” she says. “Later in life now, I've realized that it was something that was just setting me up for having a thicker skin and to not care, just keep moving forward and not care what people say or think.”

Related: Selling Sunset’s Mary Bonnet is ‘Reliving My Past’ in New Memoir (Exclusive)

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She adds, “Most likely, whatever that situation is will have taught you a lesson or will have made you a stronger person or made you ready for what is yet to come.”

Bonnet says the process of writing her first book — in which she also shares deeply personal experiences including a sexual assault, two divorces, and a miscarriage after becoming pregnant with husband Romain Bonnet — was “very difficult.”

“I had to really put myself back in situations that I never want to be back in again and really think about it to describe the situations properly,” she says. “I had to talk to my therapist quite a bit to make sure I was handling it okay.”

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