Excerpts

Here are six excerpts from You Look Too Young to Be a Mom.

Waiting Room Lesson
—Elizabeth Strater

My daughter’s hand patted my arm softly and her wide baby eyes looked up at me as I paused between photos of Great-grandmother and Auntie Kate. Next to me in the waiting room sat a well-dressed woman, her body still swollen from pregnancy. Her hair was a salon-expensive shade of blond, smoothly pinned up. The setting in her engagement ring would have paid my rent for years. Her face, beneath the makeup, was showing the laugh lines of a woman in her late thirties aging gracefully. I thought idly that she was old enough to be my mother.
......In a car seat at her feet slept an impossibly small newborn. I had seen that beribboned cashmere outfit in the window of a high-end baby boutique on St. Claire Avenue. As I looked at the little red face, my own daughter suddenly felt large, substantial in my arms. The baby began to stir, tiny mouth opening and closing like a fish. Soon a nasal squall began to rise.
......The woman carefully unbuckled the straps of the car seat. Her husband began poking around in the designer diaper bag while she sniffed at the baby’s fist-sized bottom and decided it must be hunger that had roused her. She looked around the small, cramped waiting room. I could see a wet stain spreading across her breast, leaking through her ironed blouse. She looked briefly at her husband and began to unbutton her shirt, starting at the collar. By the time she had unfastened enough to unhook her nursing bra, most of both breasts were exposed.
......Blushing furiously, her husband draped her with a blanket, then his jacket. The baby arched her back and screamed. Her tiny tongue protruded from her lips, and I could hear the desperation in the woman’s whispers.
......"John, she won’t latch on! I can’t see what I’m doing with that blanket in the way!"
......The husband protested over his wife’s absence of modesty, but even when he removed the jacket, the hungry baby cried on. I could see tears well in the mother’s eyes.
......I cleared my throat. “Would you like some help?"
......Startled, she looked at me, and her husband's expression mirrored hers. My face burned, and for an endless moment I knew what they were thinking: Who was I to offer her help? My hair slid into my eyes, reminding me I had not had time to wash it that day. My daughter was picking at the fringed hole in the knee of my jeans. My face, bare of makeup and pinched from sleepless nights and early morning feedings, made it clear that I was barely out of childhood myself. Who was I to help anyone?

Mom in Boots
—Lennon Sundance

I spent the morning feverishly tearing through my closet; my different identities lie lifeless on the bed, the chair, the floor. Striped socks and a polka-dot dress? Nah, too Ringling Brothers clown-like. Velvety black dress? No, too Morticia. Knee-high boots and a skirt? Did I want them to think I was working the streets after midnight? I wanted to find an outfit that was cool, yet not too embarrassing. I settled on a cherry ballerina skirt, the color of my hair, and a lace top. It was as if I was preparing for an important date. And in a way, I was—a date with a classroom full of eight-year-olds.
......I was trying to be the “good” mom volunteer. Astera’s eyes had lit up like carnival lights when I’d signed on to help with her class’s art activity. I hopped in the battered station wagon and chain-smoked the entire way to school, checking my reflection in the rearview mirror at stoplights. Smoke curled throughout the car. Not wanting to smell like a smoky barfly —I needed to be a proper role model—I stopped to buy mints. I pulled up in front of the three-story brick castle of knowledge and checked my hair, my makeup, my composure. Please, I begged God, don’t make them think I’m too slutty or weird. Just this once….

The Great Pretenders
—K.J. Steele

I received my first bra in a brown paper bag, smuggled across the bed to me by my mother as if it contained some risqué contraband.
......"Here," she whispered. "I bought you something."
......Something. Not a bra. Not a brassiere. Certainly not lingerie. Just something. Some thing.
......We stood a moment soaking in embarrassed silence as her eyes darted around the room, frantic as two birds looking for an escape. Seizing upon the door, she fled, leaving me alone in the turbulence of her emotion. Me and the thing. The first straightjacket of womanhood. Needless to say, sex wasn't a big topic of conversation around the dinner table in our house. We simply pretended it did not exist.
......The only problem with this was that it did exist, and when it made its inevitable visit and came knocking at my door, I was wholly unprepared either to greet it or turn it away. I didn't even realize I had a choice. Drowning in a situation beyond my control, I just pretended I could swim and was quickly swept along with the current.
......We were so good at pretending in my family that when my period ceased and my belly began to balloon, I pretended they hadn't. Pretending entered a whole new dimension—denial. I was six and a half months pregnant before my subconscious brain let the rest of me in on its little secret. How do you hide six and a half months of expanding baby? You don't. You can't. At least, not on a skinny kid like me. I looked like a toothpick that had swallowed a grape. Yet in my family the physical signs became something that simply could not possibly exist and therefore didn't. Even my mother, who had already borne four children of her own, chose not to see my pregnancy.

Growing Up Too Soon
—Latisha Boyd

Those first six months of my son's life I spent homeless, living with one relative after another. I was always packing clothes and cans of milk and pushing them around in the bottom of the stroller, not knowing where we would sleep. Instinctually I had certain things organized: I knew what days my son needed to go to the clinic and when to pick up his milk. When I visited them, my mother and my friends didn’t have a clue what I was going through, and most days I ended up at M.T.’s relatives’ homes. I spent most days in the welfare office trying to get an income so I could then get an apartment. I had to gain some independence for my son and me; I didn't want him to grow up seeing his father abuse me.
......Finally, M.T.’s aunt helped me get my first apartment. This was my first step toward empowerment, toward creating a new me—a woman who took care of her son's needs. I took care of him emotionally by kissing him and hugging him and telling him how much I loved him. I took care of him physically by making sure he had clean clothes and medical care. I took him to birthday parties with other children and made sure he always had food and a clean, comfortable bed to sleep in at night, not like the one I had as a child that broke just from sitting on it. Those were the things I'd always wanted my mother to provide for me.

The Letter
—Jennifer Lind

I stood in the unemployment line with tears streaming down my already puffy face. In my hand I clenched the list of places I had applied to and the check I had been sent for last week. Thirty-five dollars. My feet ached.
......"Date of birth?"
......Two weeks shy of my nineteenth birthday.
......Clickclickclick, never looking up. "Reason for meeting?"
......I thrust the check and the list, crumpled and slightly sweaty, in front of her. "It wasn't enough," I said. "It barely covered the gas I used in driving to all these places."
......The woman at the counter looked over her glasses at me and gave a cursory glance at the list. She sighed.
......"This check is based on last year's income," she said, looking back down at her keyboard. ClickClickClick.
......Tears ran into my mouth and down my chin as I explained to her, again, that I had been a junior in high school last year and that this check was based on my summer job, which was not even a fraction of what I had been making this year.
......She took off her glasses. "I guess you'll just have to get another job quickly then. Would you like to see one of our career counselors?” She handed me back my papers.
......I shook my head and turned toward the door. I recognized in line behind me the father of a boy I had once dated; he wouldn't make eye contact with me. In my car, windows cracked to air the fumes pouring in from the floorboards, I glanced at the list. Ten companies, ten interviews, ten different attempts to hide my huge belly. Ten times listing my boyfriend as emergency contact. No one would hire a girl seven months pregnant. I pulled a pen out of the glove compartment and signed the check. I had a WIC appointment and I needed to see about heat assistance—it was getting colder outside. Maybe, just maybe, thirty-five dollars would hold off the phone company another month...so that I could call my mom...try to work things out. My tears tasted like aluminum.

The Power of No
—Alice Campbell

When I gave birth to my daughter, the pain was overwhelming. The burning sensations as her head moved through the birth canal paralyzed me. I couldn’t speak, but I could hear my own silent screams. My family and my boyfriend were all there, the doctors and nurses running around. All this pain and the loneliness blowing through my chest collided as her head crowned. I was drowning in it all, losing all connections to what I was. I felt as if I was dying.
......They wrapped my daughter in towels and placed her on my stomach. She gazed up at me, and when we made eye contact, all the pain and loneliness vanished. My body filled with warmth I hadn’t felt since I was a small child, and I could breathe again. I loved her like I had never loved another person. I loved her simply because she had been born. I looked around the room at my boyfriend and my family. Nobody loved me this way, and I couldn’t believe what I had thought love was—suppressing my needs and fulfilling the needs of others.
......A few days later, I broke up with my boyfriend. I did it over the phone because I was too scared to face him, too worried that the small touch of resolve to do better for my child and myself would slip away. “Okay,” he said, and then he called the next morning as if I had not broken up with him. I told him again that I wanted something different for my life and my child. I needed a love he couldn’t offer either of us.