Teen Mom Confidential: Secrets & Scandals From MTV's Most Controversial Shows (26 page)

Since her episode aired, life has gotten better for Alexandria, who has moved back in with her mother, and is teaching at a dance school. Her baby's father, Matt, is no longer involved in Arabella's life. (In February 2013, she posted on her
Facebook
page that it had been over a year since Matt had seen his daughter.)

In December 2012, Matt was with friends at a local Pennsylvania party spot known as “The Knob,” when he walked off a cliff and broke his neck and back. After a stay in the intensive care unit, he made a full recovery.

What We'll See On
Teen Mom 3
:
Alex struggles to raise her daughter alone, while dealing with Matt's antics. Although they are no longer together, Matt continues to make life hard for Alex. His rumored continued drug use will make Alex pursue - and get - full custody of their daughter. Alex tries to balance work, school and single motherhood.

Katie,
Teen Mom 3
Girls Can Turn the Franchise Around

Producers were wise to pick girls, like Katie, that are on “the right track” for
Teen Mom 3
. Their past decisions to choose the most volatile and provocative girls (Hello, Jenelle!) pretty much backfired if you ask me. Although a good smack down or custody battle is great for ratings, they also create heaps of legal problems and bad publicity.

Katie seems like a girl that could have gone off the rails, given everything she has been through. But she managed to keep her head on straight and make a better life for herself and her daughter. I don't believe the girls on these shows should be looked up to as role models, but we can't pretend that young girls don't watch these shows and look up to their stars. I'm happy to see that MTV finally realized this and appears to be attempting to bring the brand back to its original purpose-showing the trials and tribulations of young motherhood.

EBONY JACKSON HAS A MENTAL BREAKDOWN, THEN A BABY!
Ebony Jackson-Rendon
didn't have much to say after her shocking September 2011 arrest for endangering the welfare of a minor, possession of drug paraphernalia, maintaining a drug premise, and unauthorized use of another's property to facilitate a crime. Her daughter
Jocelyn
, just two, had been hauled off by Child Protective Services after the young mom and husband
Joshua
were discovered living in a house reportedly covered in flies and feces. “Many people wanted to do an interview with us,” she remembers. “But we didn't want to.” Until now.

For the first time ever, Ebony is opening up about the dark times and personal demons she faced in the years after her appearance on
16 and Pregnant
. “I was diagnosed with manic depression,” she reveals. “I am fine now. They have me on medication. I was on depression medication for a while and it just made everything completely worse. It was just a downhill spiral for me.”

Things began to unravel in May 2011, when Ebony developed an ectopic pregnancy and suffered a painful miscarriage. “We were trying to have another kid at that time, so losing the baby was really hard on me,” she admits. A month later, Ebony and Josh - a member of the United States Air Force - held a small, private funeral for their unborn child, “but it wasn't the closure I thought it would be,” she says. Ebony continued to grieve privately for months, becoming more and more despondent and neglecting simple tasks like cleaning the home they shared on a Little Rock, Arkansas military base. “What my doctor explained to me is that when I would have a manic episode, everything in my day-to-day life would just not seem the way that it was,” she explains. “I just stopped doing the dishes every day.”

Eventually state health investigators came knocking. Per their official report:

“During the search, Detectives located approximately 1 gram of synthetic marijuana along with several empty packages of synthetic marijuana. Paraphernalia in the form of a variety of smoking devices (pipes) and deplorable conditions in the house. Every room inside the residence had human and dog feces on the floors, walls and clothing. The house was full of flies, and in some areas, maggots. Animal control was called to retrieve 3 dogs that had been inside the house.”

“There was just a lot that was on our plate at the time,” Ebony admits. “But nothing that was said about our daughter not being taken care of... that was in no way true.” Ebony insists that media reports were strongly exaggerated and says her daughter even got a clean bill of health from her doctor the very morning authorities arrived at the home. She also offers some new and more detailed insight into the what the family's living conditions were really like. “The fact that they said there was dog feces everywhere on the carpet was not true,” Ebony tells us. “There was stains from the puppies. They said there was human feces on the wall. In part that was true. But it was because my daughter was a toddler and she had taken off her diaper. I don't know what her fascination was with pooping... Of course we did clean it up. What they did was they pulled her dresser away from the wall. And we put it there for a reason. Because she had dug [her poop] into the wall with a stick or something. Like a popsicle stick. And it was just... We didn't have the paint to cover it up and we tried to wash it away, but it was taking off the paint on the wall... And they just made it seem way worse than it actually was.”

Ebony says her story was leaked to the media by someone who was pretending to be her friend. “She wanted to get everything she could out of the story,” Ebony says. “They ended up finding the synthetic marijuana in the house - it was actually hers! She brought it over to our house because her husband came home from Korea and she decided that 'I am just gonna leave this over here.' The paraphernalia that was in the house was hers too. It ended up all on our plate. We couldn't really say it was hers, though [because] nobody would have believed it.”

Despite Ebony's objections and explanations, Jocelyn was sent to live with a foster family 30 minutes away for the next six months. “Everybody thought the worst of us - that we were just awful parents,” she remembers. “But in fact, we were such good parents to Jocelyn, we had her back in six months. Even Jocelyn's lawyer said she was so proud of us for how we had grown up and taken responsibility for our actions.”

But the road to recovery wasn't easy. Just weeks after Jocelyn was taken away, Ebony hit rock bottom. “I was in a hospital for having a mental breakdown,” she admits. “It wasn't for drugs. My father said that to a newspaper for some reason. I have no idea what his problem was. But it was a real hospital. I just needed to feel better and what they were giving me just wasn't right, so... I got the counseling I needed and I am still seeing a counselor to this day.”

Now, one piece at a time, Ebony's life is slowly coming together. In October 2012, she welcomed another baby,
Jayda Jewell
. “It was kind of an accident that we got pregnant again,” she confesses. “I was very scared at the beginning. We had a scare because my stomach started hurting like it did when I had the miscarriage. It just felt like it was going to happen all over again. I started crying, but then they did an ultrasound. And they said the baby was exactly where she was supposed to be and she was a very healthy little girl when she was born. Very healthy. I think she overcooked! She came out eight pounds, two ounces.” The couple were hoping for a boy, she admits, but Jocelyn has quickly grown fond of her new baby sister. “The next time -- which will be in like five years -- it will be a boy,” she says.

Ebony, Josh and the two girls left the base in 2012 and currently reside with Josh's family in New Mexico. Jocelyn began pre-school in January 2013. Josh has left the Air Force and now travels from state to state working as an auto detailer. And, in a twist of irony, Ebony recently completed a program to become a certified dog trainer.

“Whenever things get really hard, me and Josh get closer together,” she beams. “A lot of couples would fall apart in the situations we have been through. We have been through quite a lot in our five years. We don't just give up. It is easier to leave than to stay together. We are a really good couple. With our friends, we are the “old couple” in the group. We are three years married now. I think we are just really compatible with each other. We have our kids to keep us sane. Two kids can make you fall apart too, but even if we fight, we don't go to bed mad.”

JAMIE McKAY CHOOSES ABORTION

Jamie McKay
had just about gotten her life back together. The pretty North Carolina teen - who shared the journey of her pregnancy with daughter
Miah
during season three - had graduated high school, bought a car and finally moved into a place of her own. Then, just days before beginning her first semester of college, Jamie found herself pregnant. Again.

Just 18, she knew it would be next to impossible to support two children while juggling classwork and working a minimum wage job as a sandwich artist at Subway. It was lack of money, after all, that she blames - in part - for the unwanted pregnancy. “I kept forgetting my Depo shot and couldn't afford to pay $30 for it,” she says. “So I was going to get the Implanon [contraceptive implant]. I got pregnant right after I missed my Depo appointment.”