Touching Base

Now the thing about having a baby-and I can't be the first person to have noticed this--is that thereafter you have it. ~Jean Kerr

I was just poking around on Facebook and stumbled upon the profile of a former student of mine, a sweet girl, eager to please, who always did her work and liked to read and wanted to get the hell out of Dodge (Dodge in this case being Oconee County, SC). I taught her when she was 15, a sophomore. She had the highest grades in my class. She shouldn't have been in my class really. She would have been better off in an honors class. She was about 5 months pregnant before I figured it out (unsuspecting me...). I volunteered to do her homebound. I really liked her and I wanted to make sure that she had an advocate. Obviously her life would not be the same and school would change its shape in her life, but I really wanted to see her through it.

She went nearly full term and was a real trooper as we plowed through mounds of busy work until the last week. She had a her baby, which was mostly cared for by the grandmother. She looked at me like I was growing bean trees out of my ears when I asked if she was nursing (silly me). I think her mother occasionally let her hold the baby, and when she did, she looked overwhelmed and unsure of herself (as many new mothers do). I, however, took great joy in holding him while she took her Biology tests and made her U.S. History project. We finished up and I left their bewildered home and flew to England where I had my own adventures, free and unencumbered, while this child of a child of a child grew into little person over the summer.

My student returned in the fall looking fabulous. She had probably starved herself into her old jeans and compensated for weariness with impeccably applied mascara and eyeliner. I know this because I ran into her and her mother and the baby in K-mart buying school supplies a few weeks earlier and all party members looked ragged and frustrated. She wasn't in my class anymore, but I kept up with her. Her straight As had turned to Bs and Cs, but she kept her head above water. I let go. I was dealing with my own troubles. And then one morning as I fussed at several of my students for being late to class, I was given the ultimate legitimate excuse: "But Ms. Capps, there was this awesome fight. [Former Student] just beat the sh...("ahem") crap out of [Other Student]!" I couldn't immediately envision such a scenario out of my sweet, reluctant, quiet pupil. As I told my students (in a totally professional way) to mind their own damn business, I knew that it must have been about her baby. My intuition was right. The other girl had said something derogatory about the baby and, being a child herself with typically teenage impulse control, she had flown off the deep end and evidently really hurt the offending girl.

By the end of my second year, I was too preoccupied with my own future to worry too much about hers. Over two years, I taught 300 kids or so. If you kept up with all of them, there would be nothing left of you. But I clicked on her profile today and read that she had another baby around Halloween, which means she would have been pregnant around the time of that fight. Accept this baby was born in a storm. The latest pictures show her little baby at 4 months, still intubated and in hospital. I'm afraid to ask. My stomach hurts thinking about their lives, what the years will bring, what I might have been able to do. Maybe because she was the first student who I thought, with first year teaching hubris, I could really help. I thought that maybe if I showed her enough attention and supported her amidst all the judgement and drama, that she would be able to pick up the pieces of her life and move forward and overcome the odds of so many other teen mothers out there.

In two years I taught seemingly countless teen moms, most of whom were surprisingly enthusiastic about their pregnancies, unlike their adult counterpart. All these girls just want to be loved. They have sex (bad sex, most likely, given the skills of teenage boys) because they think they might be trading the use of their bodies for real love. And, in turn, they have babies that will love them unconditionally. It's what we all want, right...to love and be loved in return.