Priceless Inspirations Page 5
At other times, the fact that my mother was still my legal guardian had been a real problem for me, especially when it came to registering for school and things like that. Only my mom could sign the papers that would allow me to start going to class, and to get her to sign them, first you had to find her, then you had to get her off drugs long enough to understand what you needed her to do.
This time, it worked out in my favor. Since she was still my legal guardian, only she could give consent to end my pregnancy, and it was impossible for her to give her consent anytime soon. She was in jail for a drug charge and wouldn’t be out for another year.
I was going to get to keep my baby.
My aunts wanted me to have an abortion, so I knew I didn’t have their support. Dream’s career was growing and he was going to be away from me more and more, so his support was uncertain. I was still in high school and had no idea what I was going to do or how to be a mother.
I was scared, alone and terrified about everything that had to do with pregnancy and motherhood. More than once, I wished I could go back and make a different decision. I love my daughter dearly, but I for her sake and my own, I wish she had been born when I was older, more mature and had more family support to offer her. Instead, when I found out I was going to be a mother, I had nothing, not even a place to stay.
Toya’s Priceless Gem: Wait for sex if you can, but when you know you’re going to be sexually active, protect yourself. Don’t expect the guy to do it. Always look out for yourself! After all, you’re the one who will have to have the baby, and that will change your life forever!
PREGNANCY AND MOTHERHOOD
There’s an old saying “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”, and it’s supposed to mean that people who come from the same family are kind of alike. In my case, it isn’t true.
I’m the apple that fell from the tree and rolled-and rolled and rolled. At least as far parenthood goes, I’ve done everything I could to be as different from my parents as night is different from day.
I’ll never forget it. When the nurse put Reginae in my arms after she was born, I looked into her tiny face and I made her a promise that, whatever else I did wrong in life, I wouldn’t make my mother’s mistakes. I knew I’d do better by my daughter than was done by me. I’d do everything I could for her to have everything I never had and more.
From the way she’s turned out, I think I’ve done okay so far. Reginae is about to turn 12. She’s nearly at the age I was when my anger made me stop listening, when I discovered boys, and when I wanted my freedom, no matter what anyone said.
Already she says to me, “Mom you’re too mean! You’re too strict.”
I tell her, “Mama loves you. I want what’s best for you. Right now, you are still a kid. Stay a kid as long as you possibly can.”
I know what I’m talking about. I was in a hurry to be grown and it didn’t do me any good.
I don’t know what I’ll do when she starts sneaking, or when she rebels against my rules and wants to do things her way. No matter what, though, I’ll be here for her. I can’t imagine ever turning her away. I can’t imagine her having to go through what I went through being fourteen, pregnant, feuding with my family and all alone.
My pregnancy was really hard and I made a lot of mistakes as I tried to learn how to be a mother. I think I also did some things right. By telling you, and Reginae, my story, I hope you both can take a lesson. Do what I did right, and avoid what I did wrong.
Someone to Love Me
When I first found out I was pregnant I was scared. I wondered, “Who’s going to help me? How will I do this?” I didn’t have any idea how to be a mother, and I wasn’t sure I could do it. I was still a kid. I wasn’t ready for motherhood and I knew it.
Another part of me was very calm. “It’s time to grow up”, this part of me said. “It’s time to get yourself together. You’re gonna have a baby. You’re going to have someone who loves you, who depends on you. You got a chance to do this right.”
I wanted to grow up. I wanted to be as mature and responsible for my daughter as I hoped I could be, but at fourteen, I still had a big mess on my hands.
I didn’t want to live with my aunts. By trying to force me to have an abortion, they had sent me a clear signal about what they thought about me and my baby. While I didn’t think my Uncle Nat would turn me away, I really didn’t want to go to him. After all, with all his rules, he’d tried his best to prevent me from being a child having a child, and I’d rebelled against him. Now here I was, a child having a child. I was embarrassed and ashamed of myself enough without having to go back to Uncle Nat and prove to him that he’d been right after all.
I wasn’t sure where else to go. My mom was in jail, so living with her was not an option. Then .I thought of my dad.
He was now married and living good. He had a house not too far away, where there looked like there might be room for me. I had hoped that perhaps he’d let me stay with him and his new wife for a while. Since I’d never asked him for anything, I thought he’d say “okay.” It seemed like something he should be able to do.
I went over to his house and talked to him and his wife about my situation.
“Can I stay?” I asked. I don’t remember if I told him how long I would need to stay there, but I hoped that it would be enough for him to see me, his daughter, pregnant at such a young age, with so little support from my mother’s side of the family. I hoped he’d think about all the years that he hadn’t been there for me. I hoped that he would see it as only fair, a small payback for the years I hadn’t spent with him.
He didn’t answer me exactly. Instead he and his wife just looked at each other. My dad said something about “having to talk about it” and it was clear they wanted to do that in private. I got up to go take a shower. I guess I should have been concerned when they didn’t say “yes” right away, but I really thought it would be okay. I thought he would persuade her. I thought he was going to explain that this was important to him. To both of us. I thought he would let her know it was something he needed to do, for both of us.
When I came out of the shower, my Dad’s wife had left for work.
“She says you gotta go,” my dad said.
I couldn’t believe it. I just stared at him. A million angry words bubbled up out of my mouth, and I threw them in his face. I just couldn’t keep them in. I think that was one of the experiences in my life that hurt me the most, realizing that even then, when I really needed him, he wasn’t there for me.
Years later, he and I would talk about that day and I would find a way to forgive him. However, at that moment, I was through with him, and it would be years before we spoke again.
I went back to one of my aunts, Aunt Grace. The whole time I was there, she was talking about me, dragging me down.
“Had to be so fast, in such a hurry to grow up. Now see what you got! Knocked up by some little nigger at fourteen,” she’d say, shaking her head and turning up her nose. “It’s a shame. A damn shame.”
Or she’d start in with, “What you gonna do when that baby gets here? You don’t know nothing about raising no child. You still a child yourself!”
It was bad enough that she said this to my face, but she said this and more to anybody who’d listen. She was constantly running me down, and I knew it. Here I was pregnant, getting bigger and bigger, trying to take care of myself and my growing child, but I felt like I could never rest. Her eyes were always on me and she was always talking and talking. Everything she said was negative. Everything she said dragged me down lower than I already felt. The stress of the situation drove me out of her house. Over the next few months, I bounced from home to home yet again. From Uncle Nat and his wife, to Dream’s mom, back to Aunt Grace, back to Uncle Nat, then back to Dream’s mom.
All the while, I felt that Aunt Grace was right. It was a shame. I wasn’t in school in anymore, so I was no longer doing the things the other girls my age were doing like going to the talent shows, doin
g the dance team and just kicking it after school. I saw Dream less than I used to because he was traveling with his new album and hadn’t been home much. When he was home, I could tell he didn’t like how big I was getting. He’d spend a little while with me, then hurry out to chill with girls who were still small, shapely, and not pregnant.
There were plenty of girls for him to choose from. He was starting to become really successful, and I felt like I didn’t have anything much going on. It worried me. I felt the distance growing between us and remembered the warnings I’d heard.
“After you sleep with him, he gonna change.” That’s what my aunts and older cousins had said.
They were right.
It had taken a while, but he had changed.
My biggest worry was about being a mother. I hated to admit it, but my aunts were right. I was a child having a child, and I didn’t have any clue how I was going to do it.
When I first felt the baby kick inside me, it terrified me. I knew I was pregnant, and I knew that meant the baby was in there, growing and getting stronger, but there was a part of me that didn’t believe it until I felt that first kick. All of the sudden it was for real for real. There wasn’t any getting around it. In a few months, I’d be responsible for another person.
I was big. Really big. I had a lot of complications. I had anemia and I had to get blood transfusions because of a problem with the placenta. I got real high blood pressure and had problems with fluid retention that made me swollen, sick and heavy. I kept thinking about something my grandmother said once, “Having a baby means you have one foot in the grave and one foot out.”
It was true. The bigger and the sicker I got, the more I realized the limits of my body. Before, I had felt like I would live forever. I didn’t believe anything could hurt me. I was used to taking chances and risks and having everything come out okay. Being pregnant made realize that, if I didn’t learn to take care of myself, I might die. I realized for the first time that I wouldn’t live forever.
I learned that it wasn’t anybody else’s responsibility to make sure that I followed what the doctors told me to do. I tried to take the medicines they gave me. I tried to eat as well as I could and to rest. It was my job to take care of my health for the baby’s sake. I had to take care of myself.
It was hard. I was worried all the time about the baby, about being a mother, about Dream, and about what people were saying about me. The stress made me sicker, but I just couldn’t stop worrying.
The months passed. I got bigger and bigger. My due date was November 28 and I had Reginae on November 29. Dream took me to the hospital. He had to leave a concert he was doing, but he came and took me. He hadn’t seen me in a minute, and by then, I was swollen like Professor Klump in The Nutty Professor movies that Eddie Murphy made. I looked terrible.
The delivery went awful, too. While I was labor, Reginae turned around inside me. She would have been born breech, feet first, and the doctors thought that was very dangerous. I really didn’t know what they meant. I just knew I was scared. I ended up having an emergency Caesarian, and that scared me too. I really didn’t want them to cut me, but I understood that they had to so that Reginae could be born safely. By the time they put her in my arms, I was exhausted and weak, but I was happy, too.
She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
The day after she was born, Dream came to the hospital to see us. He took one look at me and said, “Is she gonna stay like this?”
I didn’t know what I looked like, but I saw the look on his face. I guess I must have looked pretty bad.
“You’re beautiful,” Aunt Kris said firmly and gave Dream a disapproving look. “You just had a baby. You’re beautiful.”
The look on Dream’s face said something different. The look on his face said I looked fat and ugly and that he wasn’t attracted to me at all anymore.
That scared me, too. In the beginning, we had talked marriage. I didn’t want to be a single mother. I wanted a family. I wanted a husband. Now, marriage wasn’t something Dream seemed to have much interest in. He told me that he’d always be there for me, but he felt like he was too young. Of course he was. So was I. The reality is that for me, “being young” was over. I had a baby to take care of.
He gave me three rings before we actually got married. I waited because I knew he was getting the player out of him, and having his time with all these other girls. I was miserable about it.
They kept me in the hospital for two full weeks. I had to learn to walk again from the days of bed rest and waiting for the swelling in my legs and feet to go down. Finally, they let me and Reginae go home.
This time, home was at Uncle Nat’s and Aunt Kris’s house. Auntie Kris fixed a room for me and the baby, and friends and relatives threw me a baby shower. We did our best to settle in.
I was in love with my baby. She looked like her father, and while I had finally accepted that I was in love with him, too, my timing couldn’t have been worse. He was drifting further and further away from me as he became more and more famous. I was so lonely and so sad that I poured all the love in my heart into Reginae.
She made it easy. She was a good baby and when she started talking and calling me “mama”, just hearing her say my name could make my day. “Mama, mama, love you, love you,” she’d say in her little baby girl voice. It always made me laugh. It made me forget how hard I was struggling at school and how lonely I felt.
I took her all the places my mother didn’t take me, like the zoo, Celebration Place, Chuck E. Cheese and things like that. When she was very small, she’d sleep next to me and give me kisses before she fell asleep. As she grew older, we talked about everything under the sun. I answered her little questions and explained the world to her in words she could understand. All the love in my heart belonged to her. It still does.
I was in awe of her. It was all about her. Nothing else mattered. I felt myself changing again. I wasn’t worried about the things I had been worried about before her. I forgot about friends, clubs, and partying. I wanted to be a great mother. From then on, that was all I wanted to do. I didn’t want her looking for a place to belong. I wanted her to always feel like she was wanted, cared for and loved. I felt like I had finally found someone to love me and I was going to do everything I could to keep her love.
Money Matters
Babies are expensive. You’ve got to have some money coming from somewhere if you’re going to raise a child. I had no money of my own. Nothing. Dream would give me money every now and then, but it wasn’t anything I could depend on. When I asked him for it, he would give it to me, and give it generously, but it was getting harder and harder for me to reach him. His career was hot, and by now he was famous. Things started to change things between us. I had to go through his mother and his friends just to talk to him.
It was depressing to find myself so low on his list. It was hard to remember the sweet, kind guy that I used to talk to on the phone for hours. It was hard to remember the guy who had told me, “I’m your family now.”
I was 15 now and I had a child. I needed a plan for how I was going to take care of her with no high school education and no skills. I talked it over with Uncle Nat and Auntie Kris and other family, and we decided that I should go back and finish school. With my high school diploma, I’d have a better chance to get a decent job and to take care of myself and Reginae. I was also going to look for a part-time job.
I went back to high school. It wasn’t easy. I was worried all the time about my daughter. Since everyone was at work or school during the days, Aunt Edwina was watching her. I couldn’t think of anyone better for the job. Even though she was getting up in age, Aunt Edwina was still the closest thing to a mother I’d ever known when I was small. She taught me everything I know about diapering and feeding, then potty-training and other parts of child care. Without her, I don’t know how I would have made it. I always felt like I could ask her anything, even something silly, and she wouldn’t laugh or think I w
as dumb. When she passed away in 2005, I was devastated.
Even with Aunt Edwina watching little Reginae, I found it hard to concentrate in school. People were talking about me and Dream. Girls who were trying to get with him were always trying to fight me. I sometimes felt that I’d lost myself. Everyone was always whispering “that’s Dream’s baby mama” or “that’s the one who says she’s with Dream” and blah, blah, blah. Hardly anyone thought of me as just “Toya” anymore.
Dream made it worse. He’d sweep into town and go and be with a bunch of girls, making them think they were special to him. Then he’d come back to me, tell me he loved me and that we were gonna be together, and then leave again. Those girls would come after me thinking that if they could fight me and win, they’d get Dream.
It was terrible. When I finally got a car, girls would come and spray paint nasty words on it. This one girl wanted to fight me every time she saw me. Once she put it out on the public address system at a basketball game that she would be fighting me after the game. I didn’t want to fight. I was looking cute that day in Gucci shirt and a fresh hairdo, but I had to fight her. She had told everyone, and I couldn’t let her punk me. I lost that one and ended up going home with my face all scratched up.
Young girls think it’s cool to date popular guys, rappers and bailers. You’ve got to know that dating those guys means you gotta deal with a lot of envious girls. I’m still dealing with that, passing comments people make out of the side of their mouths like they don’t want you to hear, but they really do. Really negative, hurtful stuff. Even now that I’m making my own money and doing my own thing, people still connect me to that one relationship and have something ugly to say. Sometimes it seems like no matter how hard I try, people won’t give me credit. It feels like I’m still fighting haters, and still losing.