My maternal instinct was strong. So strong I pushed against the grain of what was expected of me. Some people might say that's what saved us. I don't know. Was it the fact I'd planned my entire childhood on being a mother? Was it something chemical? A super charged increase of serotonin when I looked into my baby's eyes, or any baby for that matter. Was it because I had strong family support and a super supportive group of friends to fall on? A higher I.Q.? A stubborn streak to defy any limitations set before me? Was I just born under the right set of stars?

I will never know. I will never know why I succeeded why my peers fell into the statistics trap. The statistics that say teen moms just cannot and will not be the kind of moms others are. I was and am a good mom, and I beat a lot of odds. Not that the challenge wasn't great, that I didn't occasionally fail or fall or just plain old fuck up. I did. The truth is I got back up every time fighting. They say the proof is in the pudding and I made one heck of a pudding then.

There were a few other teen moms at St. Agnes who did amazingly well, I am not the only one. I am the one telling my story. I have been lucky, seventeen years later, to still get occasional updates. Blessed to still count two of these girls as my friends, and one of the two doing a super job of raising a house full of children. They were two of three girls I was closest to while living in the home.

The girl recognized as super mom by the staff, the girl with the calmest baby, the prettiest and cleanest room did well for years and years. Sadly at one point a couple years ago I was contacted by this same girl's second daughter, a child I didn't know. She was wondering how I knew her mother, because her mother had abandoned her the year before with family and she'd not heard from her since. Broke my heart to pieces.

I am positive that some of the moms who struggled early on, later turned their lives around. I wish I knew how it all turned out but I think of them too. I can remember their names and faces, their babies. Some of these girls had no families to speak of. Most came from some kind of heavy dysfunction. They all had stories. I carry those stories in my heart.

We all had a baby's father somewhere out there. Some were lucky enough to have the father in their life. That wasn't my story but it was beautiful when it worked. Most of us just had broken hearts and babies left from our broken dreams.

My nurturing instinct was always strong. I was always offered to take a cranky baby for a while so the mom could have a break. It wasn't uncommon to see me up in the middle of the night rocking two babies at once. The 12 year old mother who moved in next door to me flat out refused to get up with her little baby boy. She was immature even for being twelve years old. She was bratty and selfish. I tired to teach her and she had no interest in learning. I would knock on her door when her baby newborn would scream unfed for hours in the middle of the night, and she agreed to let me come in and feed him. I was up all night anyway between DeAna and hearing his cries was torture because my milk would rush and I'd have to wake up to see if it was DeAna or him crying. Most nights I had him too. She arrived a few months before we moved out. Within a few months of my leaving her baby was taken.

Without a lot of support, I do believe there are some ages where it is near impossible to raise a baby with out massive 24 hr. side by side support and girls 12 or younger just can't do it. The ideal situation for a pregnant child like that would have been in a foster home where a foster parent would parent them both together. Even in a teen mother home, there is just not enough hands on learning or supervision.