Former teen moms faced hardship. Now they strive to impart their
hard-won lessons to a new generation.
n By Melania Zaharopoulos
Staff Writer
Angela Jacobs was just days past her 18th birthday when she got pregnant, fueled by the desire to hold on to her wandering boyfriend and be loved by someone, anyone. At the time, she didn’t understand that the decision would lead to years of heartache and desperation. She just wanted an anchor.
“I thought (Darren’s dad) would never leave me as long as I had something that was part of him,” said Jacobs, now 32. “And there were other reasons. I didn’t feel loved. I thought if I had a baby that it would love me. I didn’t realize at that age that a baby just takes from you. They don’t know any other way.”
Just five months after the birth, Jacobs, a Gilroy resident at the time, found herself alone. Her boyfriend, who was 20 years old, had walked out, leaving her with a child who suffered from severe attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and no idea of what to do.
Each year, nearly 1 million teens in the United States find themselves in Jacobs’ place, although three-quarters of them don’t plan to get pregnant. As a nation, America has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the developed world, with some 97 out of every 1,000 girls ages 15 to 19 becoming pregnant each year, according to data collected by Planned Parenthood. Studies also show that teen pregnancies are more likely to produce low-weight babies with disabilities and health problems, and to propel mothers toward dropping out of high school.
Teen moms face not only the daunting task of raising a child, but one born while they are still seeking their own place in the world, according to Cecilia Clark, spokeswoman for Community Solutions in Gilroy and Morgan Hill.
“They’re going through this discovery, and they’re young,” said Clark. “They can have a hard time asserting themselves as parents, and a lot of times the adults in their lives sort of step in. But in terms of their peers, they’re in two worlds. They don’t have the freedom and the unencumbered life of their friends, but they also don’t fit in with the lives of mothers who may be more mature or have more stability.”
Teen mothers are often ill-prepared to deal with the responsibility of caring for an infant while trying to meet their own needs. For Jacobs, having a child with behavioral problems was overwhelming.
“I didn’t know how to control it,” she said. “I would cry and scream or just tune him out because I didn’t know how to deal with him. I was young and I wanted a kid, but I didn’t. I was trying to have the life as an adult that I’d never had when I was younger. I wanted to go out and do things, but I had to think about what I was going to do with my kid.”
Abused physically and sexually throughout her childhood, Jacobs had dropped out of school in the seventh grade and become a ward of the court by age 14. When she went back to school for another try, she got pregnant, and dropped out again. Soon, she was a single mother constantly worrying about how she could keep a roof over her head.
“I ended up being on welfare and renting rooms from people, but they didn’t want me to stay long because I had a baby,” said Jacobs, who would later have two more. “Welfare would only help so much. Rent was too high and a lot of times the rooms would take you, but not a kid.”
Jacobs slept in a car with Darren. She cleaned houses and worked at a gas station, but her son’s behavioral problems made it tough to hold down a job. He was kicked out of daycare and preschool centers throughout the area. Jacobs, who sporadically received child support from Darren’s father, wound up homeless and on edge.
Locally, many teen mothers never marry the often 20-something fathers of their children, but do receive child support either by the father’s choice or via a court order, Clark said. But things couldn’t have been more different for Morgan Hill resident Cori O’Brien at that age. At 18, she too became pregnant, but unlike Jacobs, she quickly married the father, a 19-year-old she’d known since junior high.
“As for the younger years, I really liked being a mom,” said O’Brien, who quickly had her second child and had her third at age 30. “I was stable. He had a good job, and I think I enjoyed my kids more. Maybe it’s because I was still a kid myself in a lot of ways. I liked playing games with them, and now I just don’t feel like it.”
The bliss of marital life didn’t last, though. O’Brien, who is now 43, ended up divorced, lost custody of her children to their father for five years and had to start over. She had also dropped out of high school, unwilling to tolerate the teasing of her classmates any longer, and when it was time to enter the job market after the divorce, she barely scraped by.
Like Jacobs, she cleaned other people’s homes, and following whatever work she could find, also worked as a bookkeeper and bartender.
“I supported a child or two or three on it, but I could have lived a different life if I’d stayed in school,” said O’Brien. “I wouldn’t have had to scrub other people’s toilets. I would have been able to actually choose a profession, but when I had Donny, I fell in love the moment I held him in my arms, and it hasn’t changed. I’m so in love with all my kids.”
Now both women are attempting to impart their hard-knock lessons to a new generation.
O’Brien’s son Donny, now 25, is expecting his first child in August, and her daughter Julie, 20, is a Gavilan student who is already a single mom of two.
O’Brien hopes that her daughter will finish school, get a good job and have a steadier life than her mother, but she fears for the future.
“I go back to when I was 18, and I think I would rather be a mother then than now,” said O’Brien. “We didn’t have the stresses that girls these days do. My daughter can’t afford to move out. She stays with me. It’s just different, and when I was 30, it was different. I watch my (13-year-old) daughter growing up in a world that is completely different than when my 20-year-old was growing up.”
Jacobs holds on to her optimism. Her eldest, Darren, is now 13, and she prides herself on the fact that, despite her shortcomings earlier in life, her son knows he can talk to her about the important things.
“I didn’t have a mother who I could talk to, but Darren’s able to talk to me, and he’s able to open up to me,” she said. “We have a mother-son relationship that I never had. That makes me feel good.”
Jacobs makes sure to show her love, too, remembering to hug and kiss her son, but she’s able to relate to him in other ways, too.
“We’re able to relate a little more than if I was 45 and he was 13,” said Jacobs, who now lives in Los Banos. “I like the same music he likes. To him, I’m still kind of young and hip.”
And now Jacobs feels she has the benefit of experience to pass on to her other children, ages 9 and 2-and-a-half. She knows how to discipline her children without going over the line, how to talk to her youngest about behaving in a grocery store.
“I still yell, but I don’t scream and cry like I used to,” said Jacobs. “I’m more open and I listen because I’ve grown up. I don’t go to the extremes I used to.
“If I was talking to a girl who was in my place then, I would tell her not to go through what I went through. Before you go laying down and having a baby, think about 10 years down the line when you still have that baby. Make better choices than I made.”
