Nicole Lynn Lewis - Pregnant Girl: A Story of Teen Motherhood, College, and Creating a Better Future for Young Families

To Pooh Bear, Papaya, Pumpkin, Bean, and the tiny bit of magic that is growing inside of me.

May your adventures be the things that dreams are made of.

CRACK SMELLS LIKE a soul melting on hot pavement. Crackling. Popping. Hissing. The burnt stench sticks with you. No scrubbing can wash it away. It is an instant and irreversible invitation into another worlda dark worldthat will forever change the way you look at life. The first and last time I saw a crack pipe I was nineteen years old and five months pregnant. I was sitting in the passenger seat of a black Ford Explorer, watching trees and stores blur by. Stacey was drivingdriving and smoking crack.

By then, Id mastered the survival mechanism of avoiding the things that scared me the most. Facing those things, I determined, made them more real and gave them a credibility that required action. To avoid them, to look at objects that were connected to them rather than the very thing, veiled the ugly truth of a person or situation.

So, I didnt look at Staceys face. Besides, I knew what I would find. I had seen it before. It would be a sunken, hollow, ghostlike mask. Her brown eyes would be vacant, her pupils dilated. Instead, I glanced at the one hand she used to move the steering wheel, red chipped nail polish and pipe burns on every other finger. I found the other hand. With unwavering determination, she was using it to steady the crack pipe to her lips. In seconds, she would be a euphoric burst of energy. This would be the not-so-bad side of Staceys high. Energetic and exuberant for five to ten minutes as the drug traveled from her lungs straight into her bloodstream. Later that night, I might see the bad sideher insomnia, her screaming about the bugs crawling under her skin, or her incessant phone calls to find the next tiny bag of small, pale-rose-colored rocks.

Shed asked me if I wanted to ride somewhere with her, and even though I didnt know where we were going or if I would be safe, I said yes. I was convinced any place would be better than her dark apartment, where I spent most of my days alone. Now we were riding around Norfolk, Virginia, while she got high and the cops could pull us over any minute.

At a red light, she closed her eyes and rested her head back against the seat. Her shiny brown hair hadnt been washed or combed in days, her lips dry and peeling. She was enjoying the sensation traveling through her body.

The burnt stench filled the car and seeped into my clothes and hair. I held my breath, but it crept in through my nose anyway. My belly turned, the nausea making me shift awkwardly in my seat. I rolled down the window to take in something normalthe baby-blue sky, the green grass sprouting through the cracks in the sidewalk.

A tall Black man on the median selling bottles of water for a dollar caught my eye. His T-shirt read Jesus Saves, and there were small patches of silver hair on his unshaven face. The two circles of sweat underneath each arm showed hed been standing in the hot sun for a while. He raised a bottle toward me and then slowly lowered his arm when he saw my face. Then the honking cars behind us woke Stacey up, and she sped off.

This was it. There had been horrible moments before this when I hardly recognized myself, and there would be more to come. But right then, in that car with Stacey, this was the most crushing departure from who I was and who I wanted to be. Worst of all, my unborn baby was along for the ride. This was unquestionably rock bottom.

But even in that moment, I looked at Stacey and thought I was at least better off than she was. Id never even smoked weed or cigarettes or drank alcohol. I was still young, and even though I was going to be a mother, there was still a slim chance I might go to college and do something with my life. I was an honor roll student. I was smart. There was just this pregnancy. That was it. Thats the one thing I had to overcome.

Now I understand this was a naive, simplistic view of the world and the places that Stacey and I occupied in it. Even as an addict on the verge of being homeless, Staceys prospects were far better than mine. As a White woman, her chances of accessing the supports needed to survive her addiction, go to college, and work in a well-paid, fulfilling career were pretty high. If she didnt want to go to college, she could always work for her father and maybe one day inherit his successful car dealership. If she decided to have children, she would be three to four times less likely than me to die in childbirth. No one would ever know by looking at her or reviewing her resume that she had once been addicted to crack. In fact, she would generally be able to move through the world with people assuming the best about her.

Things would be different for me, as a pregnant Black teenager, even with a White mother. Regardless of how smart I was or how hard I worked, supports that could really make a difference for me and my child would be guarded by unnecessary barriers, and a college degree would be an evasive ever-moving target, meant for someone else. The idea of not going to college and still being able to provide for my family wasnt a viable one, yet even a degree would not erase the glaring wealth gap handed down from generation to generation in my family. In the hospital, when it was time for me to give birth, nurses would assume I had a history of drugs because of my age and the color of my skin. When my daughter arrived, there would be no hiding the fact that I was a teen mother. Her existence would be an invitation for peoples judgment, scrutiny, and disdain, even after I earned two degrees, and no matter how bright and full of light my child would be. Unlike Stacey, I would move through the world with people assuming the worst about me, constantly wanting me to prove my worthiness. Was I worthy of resources? Was I worthy of opportunities? Was I worthy of an education? I would see this play out for me and the countless young mothers and fathers I would work with in the years to come.

I would learn that we have much to overcome.

When I was little, maybe eight years old, I would lie down in the back seat of my parents red 1979 Chevy Monza and look up through the window. Underneath me and draped across the seats were bright colored, striped towels that were first used to protect our legs from the hot, black leather that would sear our skin in the summer but were now there to preserve the cracking, old leather beneath. This was the plan until they could afford a new car. I could hear the two of them immersed in some philosophical conversation about my mothers artwork or a new jazz musician as they drove along. Fleshing out metaphors for the human struggle, debating the deeper meaning in a painting or a song.

Their words usually danced through the air to the crescendo and downswing of a saxophone while my mind raced. I was a dreameralways a dreamer. Id picture myself as a grown-up, wearing a business suit and clutching a briefcase. I was thin with long flowing hair. Sophisticated. Or maybe I was on a stage in front of thousands of adoring fans, singing so passionately into a microphone you could see the raised veins on the side of my neck, just like Whitney Houstons. Other times, I was in another countryAfrica, maybereading to little children in a village. My dreams were big.