I was eighteen when I told my mother I was pregnant. She gave me two hours to pack and get out. She said I had chosen to be a mother, so I could figure out the consequences alone.
Then she changed the locks while I sat on the front step with two garbage bags of clothes and nowhere to go. My daughter’s father had been a one-night thing during freshman orientation at college. I did not even know his last name.
I only knew he went by Alex and that he was visiting from Switzerland. I never saw him again after that night. I did not have his number.
I did not know his school. I had nothing. I dropped out, moved into a shelter, and had Janna alone in a county hospital while my mother told everyone I had run off to be a stripper in Vegas.
Five years of absolute hell followed. I waited tables at a diner where customers grabbed at me for two-dollar tips. I lived in a studio apartment with black mold in the bathroom and roaches that scattered when I turned on the kitchen light.
Janna slept in a dresser drawer because I could not afford a crib. There were food stamps, WIC appointments, and mornings when I walked four miles to work because the bus did not run that early. My mother lived twenty minutes away in her four-bedroom house with the white porch swing and the neat little flower beds she watered every evening.
She never called. She never visited. She told family I was dead to her.
My sister Denise would secretly meet me at parks and bring Janna clothes from consignment shops, but she was too scared to do more. Mom had threatened to cut her off too if she helped me. I made it work, though.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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