"I Was a Single Mom": Anita's Story
A sudden desire for dried apricots when she'd always loved black licorice might have been a tip-off. But cravings were the last thing on the busy high school freshman's mind.
The 15-year old cheerleader had math tests and gymnastics classes to think about. Anita couldn't have known that just months later she would give birth to a baby daughter, or that she would have two more babies in quick succession, or that she would be raising them on her own. The petite, fresh-faced athlete from a hardworking agricultural community and had big plans for her life. The college-bound honor student could not have fathomed that she would ever need welfare to support her family.
But that was a long time ago. Today she has a degree in managerial finance and is living the American Dream in a 5-bedroom home in a sprawling suburb, surrounded by a thriving family. She is grateful, but not surprised. She hurdled some painful obstacles along the way. But she always knew she would make it; she had to.
"When I was 7 years old … I decided to become an accountant." Well, that and a world class gymnast. Her drive was apparent even at an early age.
"I took school very seriously," she explains. She was also dedicated to her sport. "I attended school an hour from my house, so I could be near the gym where I trained. My mom would drop me off, I'd study, go to school, afterward walk a mile to the gym, do homework for an hour and a half, then teach class in exchange for waiving tuition for my advanced gymnastics class." Like most teenagers she spent evenings talking on the telephone. In those days there was plenty of time. And it passed slowly.
"It was a small town. There was nothing much for us to do."
She spent weekends hanging out, going to the movies, or trying to find a ride to the mall.
"I had a boyfriend," she recalls without the least bit of wistfulness. "He was a lot older than me and in college. He would meet me for lunch. Drive me home sometimes. We would hang out with mutual friends on weekends."
She discovered she was pregnant. Then the calm waters of her life began to churn. She found herself in the eye of a perfect storm that lasted not days, but years. She had no choice but to navigate as best she could with the tools available to a 15-year old. She had to make urgent, life-changing decisions with frightening speed, or be swept way off course by the current.
"There are only three options," she says when dealing with an unplanned pregnancy. "I don't agree with abortion. My mom would never let me give a child away; and I wouldn't have wanted to. So I planned on being a mom."
From the beginning she knew she had her work cut out for her. The school district's policy would not permit her to return to high school. She balked at the idea of continuation school. It was very remedial. "I had already taken more advanced courses," she explains. So, after her freshman year she passed the high school proficiency exam—in effect packing three years of learning into just months. Then the hard work would really begin. Motherhood.
"I didn't want my parents to take care of her," she says of her baby. "It wasn't their responsibility." But her dreams of a happy family unit with her boyfriend evaporated.
She quickly realized during the pregnancy that her boyfriend wasn't what she thought he was. He couldn't keep a job. He smoked weed, which was unacceptable to her. He lied.
"I thought I could change him."
Her mother disapproved of her contact with her boyfriend. But Anita wanted to maintain a relationship with the father and his family. And, as a white mother, she wanted her daughter to one day have a link to her African-American cultural identity.
So she continued to see him though the relationship clearly wasn't working. Young and headstrong without means to support herself, or a baby, she moved in with his sister.
Her mother filed statutory rape charges against him.
"We weren't allowed to see each other until I was 18," she says. "He was arrested and went to jail."
While he was there, she found out she was pregnant again.
"I knew, but didn't want to know," she says of those fragile times. "I didn't know how to handle it. It wasn't real." She finally had to tell her mother what she had managed to hide for eight months. She was able to move home. But she was still not allowed to see the father.
Still breastfeeding, she enrolled in classes at community college when her second daughter was 8 months old.
When she turned 18 she was legally permitted to see the children's father. But her mother forbade it. She met him at the mall so he could see his children. Small town tongues began to wag and the news reached her mother before she even got home. Her mom threw her out again.
"I was not promiscuous," she states earnestly. "I had a Christian upbringing. I didn't ever want to sleep with more than one person. I felt that I'd already made a choice to be with him forever."
"We got married." She worked and went to school and kept up her end of the bargain. But he did not change his ways. And he grew controlling.
"Being in that marriage was worse than being a single mother." But her moral compass didn't allow her to consider divorce.
She believed that Biblically there was no way out. He hadn't broken a vow. She laughs remembering that sometimes she wished he would cheat.
They tried counseling, but were still locked in a curious dance of separation and reconciliation.
When she found out she was pregnant again, though she had been taking birth control pills, it validated her decision to stay. She thought it was a sign that they should be together. She was committed to making the marriage work.
That spring she had to put her nose even further to the grindstone and study to take her community college finals early—before the baby was due.
She was eight months pregnant when she hit an all-time low. "I had to get the girls ready. I didn't have clean clothes to wear. I had no maternity clothes at all. I sat in my closet and cried for an hour. I missed two of my classes. I couldn't even get my girls ready," she says, her voice cracking. "That was the last straw."
She notes that online education would have been a benefit. "I wouldn't have had to worry about getting us all ready to leave the house." But at the time there were few offerings and, in any event, she had no home computer.
"I sat there telling myself I had to go to school. It didn't really matter what I looked like. Everyone would understand. I had to keep going." She willed herself to stand up. "I didn't want the kids to see me in the closet naked and crying."
She did get out of that closet. She sat for the final exams and graduated. That summer she took out a loan and moved her two daughters and infant son away from the only home she'd known. Her husband moved, too. She enrolled at a California State University. Taking classes while her children were in daycare, and at night when her family and friends could babysit, she plugged along. She got a job at the JC Penney call center to make ends meet. Then, with characteristic moxie she went to the campus career center and applied for an internship with the county's accounting department. In short order she joined the Investment Society and landed an internship in the asset management group of a major financial services firm.
The job was meaningful. The senior vice president was so impressed with her work that he hired her. She worked full-time before graduation.
She never considered giving up. It took 2½ years to get her associate's degree; and another 2½ years to earn her B.S. in Business Administration, but she stayed the course. "I always felt that a degree was my only way out. I just knew that I just had to push forward."
She chose not to consider a less demanding academic discipline. "I've always been good at math. I also knew that to get a degree [in business] would boost my income." She was motivated to improve her children's life.
"I had independence," she declares of the triumph. Her first taste of true self-sufficiency was quenching. For the first time the thought became real that she could support her young family without any help from the government, her parents, or her husband. "I knew I could do it all without him." She wasn't ready to make a move... yet. But the watershed moment was just around the corner.
"I'd earned a bonus. He spent it on himself," she says. "I realized he was always going to bring me down." She filed for divorce.
She took the next several years to pick up the pieces, build her life, and focus on her children.
Now at 29, her life resembles any of the other moms in her subdivision. She is approaching her third anniversary of marriage to Chris, a man she can depend on. He was also the custodial parent of a daughter close in age to Anita's son. Their blended family has figured out a way to make it all—school, sports, dance, homeownership, and jobs—work.
After what she has been through, raising four children—while not exactly a piece of cake—is not daunting. She brings sanity to their hectic schedules with a spreadsheet that outlines all of their responsibilities and activities. She completes it every Sunday night and posts it on the refrigerator.
Chris leaves for work early in the morning. Her own long day begins at 6 a.m. when she awakens her eldest daughter (now taller than she and perilously close to the age when Anita herself became a mother) for school. She then readies for work before awakening the other three children. One takes the bus, she gives another a ride by car, and the two little ones aged 9 and 10 ride their bikes.
Weekends are full of gymnastics meets, soccer tournaments, and ballet recitals. She handles ballet class for her two older girls on Tuesdays. Her husband handles getting the two youngest children to soccer practice on Wednesdays. On Mondays and Thursdays they share drop off and pick-up of her daughter, a Level 5 competitive gymnast who devotes 10 hours a week to her sport, to the gym. On those nights Anita doesn't get home until 9:30pm. Husband and wife both share the duties of checking homework, making sure that teeth are brushed, and showers are taken.
Then finally, at around 10pm she can open her laptop computer and get down to her own homework from the office.
Her job as a software quality assurance analyst has a high level of responsibility and it is a challenge to manage the workload. Surprisingly, motherhood was good preparation for the corporate environment.
"I'm constantly meeting everyone's needs," she says of her role to support the financial and budgeting developers. For large scale projects the users need a customized piece to add a new functionality. She works with the finance team and the developers to figure out the best way to design. "I'm a liaison. I can talk finance and IT. I sit in meetings and translate."
Her multi-tasking skill comes in handy on a daily basis. "I can be interrupted and go back to what I was doing," she affirms with confidence. "It's very similar to trying to get homework done while kids are running around."
It can be difficult to juggle the high level of accountability at work and at home. But, to her, it beats standing behind a register at a big box store—one of the few ways she might have been gainfully employed had she not completed her degree. She contemplates that scenario for a second. "I'd be stuck to whatever schedule they handed me. I wouldn't have as much flexibility. But I wouldn't have the responsibility either. And I wouldn't have to take work home," she says considering the upside. "I also wouldn't be getting the salary," she is quick to note. "The trade-off is worth it."
She credits earning her degree in 2001 with opening up a world of options for her. Job offers after her internships were contingent upon a four-year degree. Every job she has applied for since has required a four-year degree. And any position to which she would like to advance in the future will require at least a four-year degree. Not to mention, it has been her steppingstone to the middle class.
Now she can finally afford the life she always planned for her children—a real home, a back yard, good schools, enriching activities and classes, and normalcy. She feels proud that she is able to provide for her children some of the little luxuries—brand name clothing, cell phones, computers, iPods®—of this new teen world so different from her own. Occasionally she can even treat herself to a weekend getaway with her girlfriends, or a vacation with her husband.
One luxury she does not permit herself is self-indulgence. She knows that her achievements were a team effort—her mom babysat whenever she was needed, her friends provided moral support, her managers were accommodating. But she also knows that none of it would have been possible without her strong inner drive.
"I couldn't lie in bed in the morning and think about whether or not I wanted to get up," she says with conviction. "I never allowed myself to question whether I wanted to or not. I knew I needed to. I couldn't think about the other options."
It would have been easy to get mired in self-pity, too. But she tried not to view herself through the lenses of other people. She knew she was more than what she appeared at first glance. "I didn't want to be the cliché teenage parent that lived on welfare for the rest of my life."
She advises other single, working moms to keep that same tunnel vision. "Stay focused on your goal."
"There were days, years actually, that went by that I really could only get through the day. I lived just getting through the day but with the focus on years out," she reflects. "I knew I had to get through "today". I couldn't think about next week or next month."
She gives the same advice on goals to her children.
Her eldest daughter, surprisingly, is her toughest critic. She is old enough to question her mother's choices and pass judgment on them. On more than one occasion she has blurted, "I'm not going to end up like you." Anita, with her trademark pluck, replies "I do want you to end up like me. I just don't want you to take the road I took to get here."
Patricia Ryan Thomas is a freelance writer based out of Seattle, WA.
Comments for "I Was a Single Mom": Anita's Story:
1 comment(s)
Jada On Tuesday, May 04 2010
What huge accomplishments you overcame and still came out on top! Wonderful testimony!
Jada
www.sheowns.com