Chapter Eleven
Becoming a Mother
One evening, Mom looked at me and asked, “Have you and Richard been intimate?”
I nodded.
She told me to get in the car.
On the way to my sister's house, Mom stopped at Rite Aid and came back carrying a bag. At my sister's house, she pulled out a pregnancy test.
I already knew what it would say. I took it because Mom needed to see it.
Two pink lines appeared.
I was pregnant.
my sister began to cry and told Mom it wouldn't have happened if she had been home more. Mom told her to mind her own business, and suddenly they were arguing as if I wasn't even sitting there.
Later, Mom called Richard's mother. When she hung up, she told me Richard wanted a DNA test.
I didn't care. Our relationship was over.
Over the next nine months, something unexpected happened.
Mom became Mom again.
She drove me all the way to Lexington for my doctor's appointments and stayed beside me. Those months gave me back something I thought I had lost after Dad died.
Richard and I didn't speak during the pregnancy.
During the early morning hours of February 16, 1995, I couldn't sleep because of pain in my back. I went into Mom's room and climbed into bed beside her.
Within minutes, she got up and began getting dressed.
“Where are you going?”
“You're in labor,” she said.
My baby wasn't due until February 22.
Mom called my cousin next door and asked her to drive us to Lexington.
After the long drive and labor, on February 17, 1995, I gave birth to my first child, a beautiful baby girl.
Mom called Richard's mother. Richard and his mother came to the hospital the next morning. Once his mother saw the baby, the DNA test was never questioned again. She looked just like him.
I spent three days in the hospital, staring at tiny fingers and toes, trying to understand how I would finish school and raise a baby.
At seventeen years old, I was no longer just somebody's daughter.
I was somebody's mother.
And that little girl was loved more than I ever thought it was possible to love another human being.