It took time for me to feel the other girls out. Some I clicked with, others I simply could not. Being all teenagers, girls, and moms, we had enough in common to start conversation anyway. I was young, some girls were even younger.
I will always carry precious memories of these girls and their beginning steps into motherhood. The thirteen year old who lived on Popsicles and candy..who gave birth to teeny tiny baby boy. When she brought him back to St. Agnes he weighed only four lbs. She was terrified to even change him and passed him on to me for help. Very early on, taking on the senior mom role amongst the girls, as if I'd been a veteran super mom for years. I later learned this young mom eventually abandoned the baby when he was just about a year old at the home in pursuit of a boy.
There were three moms who were seventeen in the home when I arrived. Both with toddlers, and both transitioning onto independent living programs. Most of us ranged in age from 13 to fifteen, some pregnant and some had babies. At the time I was there all mother's planned on keeping their children. Although there were moms that left before I arrived and moms after I left that gave their babies up for adoption. At the time I was there that wasn't the norm. Not unheard of for teenage moms raising twin infants to reside there but again that was not in my time there.
When I first arrived I attended school in the downstairs classrooms with the girls who were pregnant. I was eventually enrolled in the public high school, Conard High School.
We all ate meals together in the dining room, served buffet style and mostly cooked by an elderly woman (Swedish?) chef who put too much butter in everything. I was mostly vegetarian still and had a difficult time with the meals served. I ate a lot of rice, collards, and salad.
There the occasional teenage outbursts. I remember one time biting my tongue til it bled because a fourteen year old pregnant girl stood screaming, crying and hollering that someone got her sandwich wrong when they'd ordered us Subway as treat on lunch time.
There were the success stories. There were the potential failures and the teen moms who flat out flunked at parenthood. There were cliques. Smoking was still allowed outside of the building ( this would later change) and there was the usual smoking clique of pregnant and not pregnant girls of which I was not apart. There were girls who grew up in the same school systems, ones who had lived in the same area as the home. There were city girls and those who were not. The usual high school cliques shaped and formed within the home.
There were girls who stayed in trouble or who caused trouble. A thirteen year old who dealt an amount of drugs that rivaled quantities I'd see in dealers twice her age in later years. A thirteen year old kleptomaniac who would be thrown out of the home when her huge haul of everyone else's belongings was discovered. A young mom who let her baby scream for endless hours and kept her radio blaring to tune him out and refused to let any of us girls in to help her with him because she didn't want him spoiled.
There was a definite issues of favoritism among the staff too and because I wasn't your typical teen mom that came through the doors, I don't think most knew what to do with me.
I had my group of friends, I had my group of staff I could turn to. I was horribly home sick, but went home on weekends. My friends would page me on my beeper and I would call them back from the pay phone. I stayed in touch with everyone. Plenty of people from back home came to visit us too. My dad, step mom, mom, step dad, step sister, step brother, lots of friends and even my baby's dad and family came. So although I was about an hour away, it never seemed too far.
We had a tightly scheduled day, yet still found little ways to be teenagers together. Walks with the babies in the park, bus trips to the mall, shopping, and walking home from school together. Blasting Selena or Faith Evans from the stereo in the livingroom and singing at the top of our lungs. Most of us also had boyfriends or at boys from school we talked to. We still found ways to feel normal.
These next two pictures were taken in a bedroom at St. Agnes
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