Walking on Eggshells: Discovering Strength and Courage Amid Chaos (15 page)

We had gotten to the hospital at about eight in the evening. When the doctor finally came in to examine me just after midnight, he said two words that no one in labor ever needs to hear, “Uh-oh.” Apparently I was fully dilated and my baby was coming right now! The anesthesiologist had arrived, as had my mother and Danika, but my baby’s heart rate dropped dramatically and there was no time for an epidural. Instead, someone found a suction cup and the doctor pulled my baby out.

Abbie Mae Chapman was born eleven minutes after 1:00 a.m. on June 11, a little more than an hour after my fifteenth birthday was over. I’ll always remember how completely beautiful Abbie was, and still is. I had hoped for a girl, and the few baby clothes I had gathered together or been given were pink. When Travis was born, he had gotten too cold right after his birth. That may have been because he was a preemie, but I was so worried that would happen to my little Abbie, too. But it didn’t.

Right after the birth I breast-fed Abbie, and I watched in the nursery as my baby was cleaned up. When they handed her back to me I realized that once I left the hospital no one was going to help me take care of her; Abbie’s every need would have to be filled by me, and me alone. Even though a social worker had visited me in the hospital to try to prepare me, I had no idea how daunting that would be.

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Back at home in Anderson I found that with Travis and Abbie so close in age it was almost like having twins. They even pooped and napped on the same schedule. I was so in love with them both. I was sad that my mother was not there, as I would have loved to have my baby’s grandmother closer.

That fall I tried to go back to school. I was too young to get a driver’s license so I walked back and forth. No one initially told me about pumping and storing my breast milk. When I finally did learn about that option I thought it was such a great idea that I stole a breast pump. If I could store my milk, then maybe Barbara could feed Abbie while I was at school. Unfortunately, the pump seemed to be missing the suction part. I felt bad about stealing the pump, but there was no money for one in our meager budget. It quickly became too hard to leave school several times a day to go home to feed Abbie and still get in enough class time. After those first few sporadic weeks of tenth grade, I never went back.

During this time life was quiet and somewhat routine. In fact, life was as normal as it had been for me since the time I lived with Dad and Tawny before Dad started taking drugs. That is, life was normal if you consider two young unwed girls, their younger brother, and their babies living in a trailer in Alaska normal. Yes, our mother had left Nick with us. Apparently there was not room for him in the one-room construction barracks she and John lived in.

As much as I adored my sister, I understood that Barbara was as unreliable as the men in our lives and that she had her own struggles. I often think about why people become addicts, and there are about as many reasons as there are people. Many individuals, however, have an underlying mental illness such as depression or bipolar disorder that is not being treated, and sometimes they drift toward alcohol or illegal street drugs. Barbara may have been one of these people. While she partied less than usual during this time, it was still too much, and Travis’s care still fell to me. Parenting is time-consuming and takes a lot of dedication and responsibility. I know Barbara loved Travis with everything she had, but she was not ready for motherhood on a day-to-day, hour-by-hour basis. I still don’t know how I was able to care for two newborns while I was still so young.

Today, in spite of my love for both of my daughters, I do not recommend teen pregnancy and willingly offer up my story (the part you’ve already read and the parts to come) as a cautionary tale. I feel strongly that our media and television programming
glamorize the idea, and allow lost young women like me to fantasize about creating their own perfect families. I’m here to tell you that the fantasy is never close to reality, and raising a child while you are still a child yourself is the hardest thing in the world to do.

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A
s an adult, I
gladly take responsibility for my life. I pay the bills, get my children to school, and make sure dinner is on the table every night.

Recently I attended a Smart Business Hawai’i dinner and found myself in a room with the owners of many successful independent businesses in the state along with a Honolulu mayoral candidate. I was there because my business partner and I had just opened up No Tan Lines, our new tanning salon that features red light therapy. Earlier in the day I had been busy designing fliers, budgeting our next few months, and dealing with an electrical problem, and that evening I felt I could completely relate to business talk that surrounded the dinner tables.

One thing that came up over and over was my age—or lack of it. Even though I am just twenty-five, I feel that I have the experience of someone who is thirty-five or forty, because even though it is a shoulder load of adult responsibility to open a new business, it is hard for me to remember a time when I haven’t had that kind of obligation.

When my mother left, full responsibility for the mortgage on the trailer had fallen to Barbara and me. Until that point I had been paying rent to my mother so Abbie and I could live there. The mortgage was right at $500 a month, plus there were expenses for electricity, diapers, and other essentials. I don’t know what we would have done had Barbara not qualified for both welfare and food stamps. Plus she was able to get these benefits for our babies, Nick, and the two of us. Otherwise we would not have had either food or shelter.

Even though Barbara and I were now moms, we were still kids, and unsupervised kids at that. After a big party we threw, one of the neighbors called our mother to tell her what we were up to. The trailer was so messy after the party that our mother told us we needed to find a new place and that she was locking up the house.

Barbara and I moved a few blocks down the road to Second and D Streets, to an even more run-down trailer. This trailer didn’t even have any working plumbing, and only part of the house had heat. Plus sewage backed up into it. We struggled along for a few months and barely kept our heads above water before Barbara threw in the towel and called Dad. Almost before I knew what was
happening Barbara and Travis moved to Hawai’i and in with Dad and Beth, while Nick moved back with our mother in Fairbanks.

That’s how I found myself at fifteen with the responsibility of paying the rent and providing food for Abbie and myself. Because I was not yet eighteen I did not qualify for food stamps or other such services on my own. Plus I had essentially been abandoned by both my mother and sister, the two women who could have provided things that I needed. Not yet sixteen, I could not find a job, and in a little town like Anderson, Alaska, there were few options for child care. I should have been panicked with terror. How would I pay the rent? Feed us? Keep us warm? By this time it was winter and I don’t have to tell you how cold winters are in Alaska. Instead, I was resigned. I just felt that this was where life had led me, and in a way I had part of the life I had wanted—I had the house to myself, and it was quiet.

Looking back I should have been angry—at my mother, at Barbara, at Brendan, even at myself. But there was no time for that. I was in full survival mode, and I was determined to do just that.

I knew I had to live by the equation of a job + money = rent. I also realized that if I had trouble finding people to care for Abbie while I looked for a job, others might have trouble finding people to watch their children while they worked. The next morning I went to the Dew Drop Inn and was thrilled to find several people in there drinking while their kids tagged along. Great! I thought. Instant kids to take care of. I obviously wasn’t a licensed day care provider, even though some of the children spent time in my trailer,
but I loved kids and took good care of each one. All my playtime nurturing my dolls when I was younger finally paid off!

In addition to taking care of all the kids, I found there was a lot of work involved in living in that run-down trailer. I washed our clothes in the sink and hung them to dry on a string I had run in front of the woodstove. I used the woodstove a lot because the trailer had a furnace that ran on diesel gas, and gas cost money that I didn’t have.

Fortunately, Jimmy had dropped off several cords of wood in the form of logs, so every day I chopped up those logs and fed them to the woodstove. I have to say that chopping wood just to stay warm changes your priorities in a hurry. What’s on television that night no longer matters, nor does whatever the current hit song is on the radio. Politics, current events, even local gossip, none of it is of any importance . . . except for the weather. I kept up on the weather because if a blizzard was headed our way I needed to stock up on more wood. In short, whatever time I didn’t spend taking care of Abbie or the other kids, I spent keeping the trailer (and us) clean, warm, and dry. Poverty would have been a step up.

I am very proud that I was always able to pay the rent, in spite of the hustling I had to do to get it. Abbie never missed a meal, and our clothes were as clean as they could be, considering our limitations. I was constantly on the lookout for ways to become more efficient in my daily chores, and after a while I had them down to a science.

This kind of life was not what I expected when I found out I was
pregnant. No teen can possibly look into the future or consider all the challenges one has to conquer when you have to support a baby. Did I think my mother and sister would leave me? No. Did I think I’d have to find my own heat and food? No. Did I ever possibly consider that I’d have to pay rent or that I wasn’t old enough to get a job? Of course not. I’m not sure what I thought other than a vague notion that Brendan and I would be together with our baby, but I had none of the details or contingencies worked out in my mind.

Adult pressures rained down onto me, but I held my own quite well until the day Abbie got sick. I breast-fed Abbie for the first year or so, but she had acid reflux and one day began projectile vomiting. I couldn’t get her to keep anything down and was so scared. I took her to the hospital but rather than focusing solely on Abbie, the medical staff there wanted to run drug tests on me. The next thing I knew a representative from Child Protective Services was in the room, and I had immediate flashbacks to the horrible time when CPS tried to separate me from my dad. I grabbed Abbie from the nurse and turned to leave, but the CPS representative said that while I was free to leave, I had to leave Abbie there. There was not the remotest possibility that I was going to leave without my daughter, so I squeezed past them through the door and went home.

Three days later a different CPS representative knocked on my door. I knew if I didn’t let him in nothing would ever get resolved, so I opened the door, even though my heart was about thumping
through my chest. He looked around the trailer, then spent a little time with Abbie while I watched. I was so afraid that I don’t even remember breathing.

Eventually he said, “You’re a good mom. Your place is clean, and your daughter is well fed and has a good place to sleep. You’re very young and I wish you had more help, but you and your daughter are both doing okay.”

When I heard those words my knees began to shake and I wanted to cry with relief, but somehow I held my emotions together until he left. Then I grabbed Abbie and hugged her long and hard.

I remained in a state of increased anxiety from the caseworker’s presence in my home long after he went away. I also remembered that Dad’s anxiety was so strong after the CPS struggles we had in Hawai’i when I was a child that he kept me out of school for a year. He was that afraid that they’d come back and take me from him. Now I knew just how he felt.

Dad, however, had the option of sending Barbara and Tucker away and of moving me to a different home so that I would be harder to find. I didn’t have those resources or options and instead held all my fears tightly inside me. Eventually it all became too much and I am sorry to say that I began hanging with friends who used drugs. Before long I was using cocaine again and having a lot of casual sex.

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I was so relieved when Barbara returned not too long after this following yet another fight with Dad and Beth. Thank goodness Barbara applied for and received Section 8 housing, and we all moved into a three-bedroom town house in Fairbanks with our babies, who were now more than a year old.

I was so glad to be moving from the worn-out trailer into a much nicer home, but sad that I had to leave a lot of our furniture. We had recently purchased a van, and the only way we could move any of the furniture to Barbara’s and my new home was to put the smaller pieces of furniture in the van. We had to leave the bigger items, such as the mattresses. Between the two of us, we had enough gas money for only two vanloads. We packed the most important pieces and left the rest. By the time we came back for the second load later in the day the trailer had gotten so cold that our beloved pet birds had frozen to death.

That was in 2003, and no one has lived in that trailer since. The trailer is just not livable. In fact, all of the stuff we left is still there. A few months ago a friend went in, found some photos we had left behind, and sent them to me. While I appreciated the gesture very much I tore up all the photos. They were just too depressing.

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Once we settled into Fairbanks I got my very first job. I was a cashier at a McDonald’s. I say first job but this really is the only “job” I ever had for any length of time. I worked days while
Barbara took care of the kids. Barbara had found a job waitressing at a bar, so she worked nights while I took my turn caring for Abbie and Travis. The problem was that Barbara often drank away any money she made waitressing. In fact, there were many nights when she left her shift owing the bar money for all the alcohol she drank. I frequently was mad at my sister because of this. After all, we had tiny mouths to feed and bills to pay and we needed her paycheck as well as mine to make those things happen.