Children Don’t Come with Instructions
As a thirty-something with a good job and benefits, a caring partner, and safe, quality housing, I have rarely had to worry about my child’s basic needs. I had the luxury of considering things like, “Was organic formula better with breastmilk or would good old-fashioned Similac do the trick? A Montessori daycare or a “mom and pop” kind of place?”
When you’re in your late teens or just barely out of them, life as a mother/parent-to-be is likely to be much tougher. This was certainly true for the following women’s stories, one of who is my own mother.
Yvette
It was 1990, and Yvette was living a young, budding artist’s life as a singer in Las Vegas.
“Before knowing I was pregnant, I could do whatever I wanted that pleased me. Every now and then it crossed my mind…I knew I didn’t want to get pregnant, but I was in love, so I didn’t really think about it.”
Previously, Yvette was on birth control, but after an abnormal pap smear, her doctor stopped her prescription. The transition off of the pill opened her up to pregnancy, and “I wasn’t as conscious about my birth control choices since I had just come off of it.”
Yvette was 19 when she found out she was pregnant; and she was totally in love with her partner and happy to be carrying a new life. Soon after, Yvette began wondering about the sex of the child, and which sex would be the most amenable to her current lifestyle and career path.
“A little boy would be less altering; I could leave the boy with his father if I had to go on the road, and the guilt would be less. I was praying I would have a boy.”
Four months into the pregnancy, Yvette found out that she was going to have a girl. She named her right away so that the baby ‘became a person,’ and although she was happy to have a girl and wanted to have a healthy baby, she was disappointed. “I had made up my mind that a male would work out better with my lifestyle as my first child.”
Yvette’s pregnancy was complicated, but not due to physical ailments of her body. With a new child on the horizon, Yvette’s family made sure that she had everything she needed for the baby; but the spirit of celebration just wasn’t there. The family matriarch, her grandmother, was fighting cancer, and that hung like a cloud over her loved ones.
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We have to remove the shame and communicate. We have to be open and honest about our feelings because we own those. –Yvette
“I felt strange. I stopped going out completely. I stayed in the house. Didn’t feel good in clothing. There was no such thing as cute maternity clothes 20 years ago. Being a heavier set young lady, they barely had cute plus-sized clothes.”
Yvette was in muumuus and a lot of Hanes jogging pants, and she didn’t feel good about herself.
“When those things happen, when we start to feel bad about ourselves, that energy transfers to the child. Nine times out of ten, if you aren’t feeling good about the body, you’re not feeling good about the child. You start to place blame on the child.”
It is important for women to find as many positive things about pregnancy as possible, Yvette says. Women need to get together, encourage one another, and keep up the positivity, either through social media or in person. If you have that ongoing communication, then you don’t feel alone. In Yvette’s circle, she was pregnant and away from all of her other friends who were in college, and she felt bad about that, too. Everything around her life that was associated with the baby was negative, so she couldn't help but feel some negativity toward her unborn child.
Illustration by Ella Byworth
Yvette’s daughter was due July 7th of 1991, but as life would have it, that turned out to be the day that her grandmother passed away. Seven days later, the baby still had not come on its own. She went to the hospital, concerned, and the maternity staff broke her water. After three days of labor, and hope that she would still have a natural birth, Yvette’s daughter was still resting in the womb, not yet ready to enter the world.
“They [the doctors and nurses] were hoping I would dilate enough to have a natural birth, but my mom wasn’t having it. She refused to lose one baby for another.”
Yvette had to have a caesarian section. That Wednesday, July 17th, her daughter, and only child, Jasmine, was born.
“I was coherent but not feeling anything. When they pulled her out, she was the most beautiful piece of work that I had ever seen. Coal black hair that spiraled off her head. And she was super light, crying, turning red. Then they took her to wash her. I remember thinking, ‘If they don’t bring me back a baby whose hair is spiraled off her head, that’s not my baby.’”
The c-section was brutal on Yvette’s body, and it wasn’t until June that she really began to feel better. She was going through so much physically, that breastfeeding Jasmine felt like another burden. She took a pill to dry up her milk.
In the months after her daughter’s birth, Yvette reminisces about how good she felt, finally, about her body. Her hair was gorgeous, healthy, long, thick and beautiful. She started to shed some of her pregnancy weight, and by August, she remembers being in her best physical shape.
“If you don’t take maintenance,” she starts, “your body can think it’s still pregnant and hold onto all the calories.”
Yvette looked forward to returning to work, but she needed to get back into shape first. She did entertainment locally for the first year, but did not go on the road as an artist until Jasmine was six. By then, she had landed a national role that put her on the road for 2.5 years, and as a singer and actress, she was largely away from her daughter—and the primary responsibility of raising her—until she was 12 years old.
“The hardest thing for me was leaving my daughter and being gone, knowing I was entrusting someone else to raise her, even if it was my mom and great-grandmother. I signed my rights away by going on the road, and I felt like I put her up for adoption.”
Yvette believes her absence is the reason that she and Jasmine are not as close, and she still has regrets. Singing and acting are her gifts, she says, but she could not have more children and put them through that, or herself.
“Every story has a beginning, middle, and an end,” Yvette tells me. “By the beginning, you can judge what’s going to happen in the middle and the end, especially when you have a rough start.”
For the first time, Yvette has seen the effects of her actions, where her daughter is just like her. She laments that Jasmine seems more concerned with her own career (which is also in entertainment) than she is with her son. And every time she wants to say something to her, Yvette thinks about the choices that she made.
But overall, Yvette says, everything turned out okay.
She suggests that people consider their village, which is something many other parents spoke of as well.
“How does having children benefit the village? And how does the village give back to you? The village can be your family, community, religion. That’s how we have made it as far as we have.”
Mama
"I'm not going to call you an accident, but it was unplanned. That was something that me and your father talked about, that we would deal with whatever happened. And we dealt with it. I didn't care about gender, but I wanted a set of twins, a boy and a girl, and I would be done! I knew I wanted to have two kids early on."
But I don't think that my mom wanted kids quite as early as it happened.
“At the time, your father was military, and I was supposed to go join him. But whatever was going on, I think he was having a lot of fun and ended up staying away, and we never joined him.”
My dad and I have a great relationship now, but at the time, my parents were both in their late teens—just barely adults, only at the start of experiencing life outside of school and home. They were newly married, and on top of that expecting a child.
“Gosh, this was a long time ago. I was hurt over what he did, but you were the first grandchild. So needless to say, everyone was super-duper excited. And they're still excited."
When I was young, one of my favorite pastimes included looking at high school pictures of my mom: in old year books, family photos, and friends’ photos. I couldn’t get enough. I knew that my mom must have been different before she had me, someone other than a strict, “because I said so!” kind of parent. She was a whole person. Even as my mother she was still a whole person, but when you’re a kid, you only see the fun-blocker side of the adult that shapes your life. Those pictures, and hearing friends and relatives share stories about her and how much people loved her, helped me see the full humanity of my mom. Even more, pre-Vanity mom seemed so glamorous to me. Her hair was often plaited into a thick, luscious braid that draped over her shoulder, was on the pompom squad, smart, and she was tiny. After she had me, she was still a babe, rocking a great bob and looking fashionable all the while. I remember hoping to be as beautiful as her one day.
"I didn't start to show until I was 7 months along and wore all of my regular clothes until then. I was probably 100 pounds [before pregnancy], and when it was time to deliver, I was around 130. Around my 6-week [post-partum] check-up, I was around 120, and quickly went down to my starting weight of 110 pounds."
Like I said, she was tiny.
While she was pregnant, my mom worked in a military base office doing secretarial work and knew it wasn't what she wanted to do long-term. She could have continued her job, but she wanted to stay home with me for nine months, and then place me in childcare and start college.
"Your granny didn't want either of us to go anywhere. I don't know if she and your father made a pact and that's why he didn't send for me, but she was happy we didn't leave. You were pretty much hers when you came along."
My mom, her mom, and her godparents all came together and helped with preparations and she had a "very good support system" even though my father was absent from our lives. Two of my paternal aunts also stepped in and played an important part in my life and upbringing. Even a close family friend played a critical role and getting my mom and I to my newborn medical appointments. It really takes a village.
"I knew this [relationship with your father] was a really bad lemon, but I turned it into a really good glass of lemonade."
Illustration by Ella Byworth
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My mom was due mid-December, but she doesn't remember the exact date, because as she said, "you were gonna come when you were gonna come." She went into labor at home and knew that she had to wait until contractions were five minutes apart before calling the doctor. She had read all of the books about childbirth and labor and felt prepared.
It was a Sunday evening, and she grabbed her bags, which had been packed a month before, and went to the hospital on the military base.
"I was in labor for 14 hours, which begins when you start dilating. The doctors check you and you don't deliver until you're about 9 centimeters dilated."
And then my mom, in her hilarious off-beat delivery says to me,
"you know when you have to go boo-boo, and you're like 'If I don't get in there, this turd is gonna fall in my drawers,’ it was like that. They gave me the numbing agent in the vaginal area, and it did not hurt. But what would have hurt, was something the size of a baby's head and shoulders coming through the vagina. But the female body is designed for this by nature."
Apparently, I was ready for my world premiere, and "slid right on out. They showed you to me, and I was frustrated, because everyone was down there by my yoo-hoo. Then, they took you and cleaned you up, and after that we were BFFs."
When my mom returned home, her body began its healing process. The obstetrician had performed an episiotomy to help my mother's delivery, and the area, now stitched with alert nerves, was throbbing. She used a sitz bath to keep the area clean, and after several weeks, she began to feel pretty good. She later practiced kegels to strengthen the vagina, and generally felt pretty lucky that she had such a good support system.
Sticking to her plan, mama stayed home with me for nine months, and once she returned to work, and subsequently trade school, she only entrusted my care with select family and friends, because "you can't trust everyone with babies."
Additionally, to boost her independence as a newly-single mother, my mom learned how to drive and purchased her first car. She was 19.
Ultimately, my mama made a lifetime of sacrifices so that I could have a healthy and prosperous life, particularly as a doctor, but "you started hanging with the artsy kids and well, there was that." For the most part though, she says I turned out alright.
"For the most part?" I ask towards the end of our interview. "Yeah," she responds, "for the most part. Despite the economic circumstances and hardships, [and me eschewing a career in medicine], you turned out alright." I'll take it!
