Learning to be mothers

A shadowy orange form comes into view.

Thump, thump. Thump, thump. A heartbeat.

A tiny hand sweeps by a tiny cheek.

“I see the nose! It’s got a really big head. It’s a really big head,” says the girl in the recliner.

“That’s my baby,” she whispers. “It’s kicking!”

Her dark hair with blond streaks is pulled into a high ponytail. Her red-lined lips are filled pink.

She strains her neck to see the shadow on the sonogram monitor, the shadow that is part her.

Is it a boy or a girl?

“Let’s go take a look between the legs,” says the woman moving the wand over her belly on this late Monday morning in mid-January 2005.

It’s a girl, she thinks, because little girls at the house keep tuggin’ her hair and everybody knows how mean girls can be to each other. Maybe the girls are getting an early start on her baby.

She doesn’t care if it’s a girl or a boy, really.

Please God, just make it healthy.

She is just starting to show even though she is seven months pregnant. Her black stretchy pants hug her belly. She was halfway through John Casablancas modeling school when she found out she was pregnant.

“My sister’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re pregnant!’ She went off,” she says.

But her mom didn’t get mad at all.

“Me and mom are a lot together. She’s too nice. She’s too kind. My sister, she’s strict. She’s the one I look up to a lot.”

If she wasn’t pregnant, maybe she’d join the Army or at least ROTC.

She likes order.

She hasn’t had much in her life.

Order is something a child never realizes she has unless she has been without it. This baby may detour her life from order, but she is giddy to have it.

“I’m going to love it. It’s fun,” she says. “I love children and this will be mine. That’s even better ... I can’t wait.”

Meet 16-year-old Juanita Alejos, the latest arrival at Our Mother’s Home. The blue five-bedroom home with the long driveway and playground out back looks like any other in this San Carlos Park neighborhood.

But inside, girls are learning to be mothers.

•••

Once a mother sees her child, the world changes. Motherhood is selflessness incarnate, the ultimate humbling experience, a reason to live.

Love. Hope. Future.

“I analogize a good mother with the blessed Virgin Mary. The woman sacrifices virtually everything she has for the benefit of the child,” said John Ruehl, board president of Our Mother’s Home.

But for teen mothers, the soft lens on motherhood vanishes. They get stares. They get glares.

Which girls get pregnant often has more to do with economic position than race, experts say.

A child born to an unwed teen mother without a high school diploma or GED has a 64 percent chance of growing up in poverty in the U.S., says the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.

The goal at Our Mother’s Home is to break that cycle of poverty by teaching young girls how to live and rear their babies as good mothers should. The intent is to block babies from entering foster care and costing taxpayers more money.

“If we’re not breaking the cycle, we’re not doing anything else,” said Mary Lewis, executive director of Our Mother’s Home. “We can’t fix all those bad things in the past but it’s easier to raise a child than fix an adult, and we’re simultaneously trying to do both.”

Our Mother’s Home opened in 2000 and is one of only four programs in Florida that target teens in foster care and their babies. The faith-based organization shelters eight girls and their babies from around the state.

The girls arrive toting lifetimes of trouble.

Ready or not, they’re mothers. And most come without a clue how to be good ones.

•••

Oh yes, I was bad, Juanita says of her life before Our Mother’s Home.

Her own mother let her do what she pleased, she says.

Juanita ran around town, stayed out late. She cut school. When she was 15, she stole a car and fell asleep at the wheel. She hadn’t slept the night before. She and her friends led the po-po, the police, on a high-speed chase. She and her baby daddy, slang for father of the child she’s carrying, met in Daytona Beach, where they’re both from.

He was 14. She told him she was 13 when really, she was 11. Dark eyeliner, a flick of an eyebrow pencil and pink-splashed lips make her instantly appear older.

He chucked peanuts at her. They flirted.

“I was such a kid,” she says.

Their first date was at a skating rink. Young love. They’d fall asleep talking on the phone. She made him wait to have sex until she turned 13. Juanita thinks her mom knew they were having sex but never said anything or ever taught her how not to have a baby.

Juanita calls her 39-year-old mom her best friend.

But she led to Juanita winding up at Our Mother’s Home. Her mom got locked up for driving with a suspended license, carrying cocaine and auto theft in October 2004 and was sentenced to probation and community control. She lost custody of Juanita.

Juanita will only say her mom was driving on a bad license and that her arrest wasn’t fair.

Juanita says she never did drugs but people close to her sold crack and marijuana.

She ran away from one foster home to live with her baby daddy, but got caught three months later and bounced from group home to group home. She took a pregnancy test at one:

Positive — she was a mom-to-be.

Her caseworker referred her to Our Mother’s Home. She arrived Oct. 28, 2004.

She sticks drawings of Felix the Cat from the dad she has never met to her wall at the home. He’s in a California prison, she says. They hang next to sketches by her mother with Juanita’s nickname, QueenStarr, in the small room she shares with a Guatemalan teenager and her toddler.

She stows an album filled with photos of family, friends and her baby daddy near her bed.

On Christmas, she was one of two girls with no place else to go. She watched a movie alone. It didn’t feel like Christmas at all. Her eyes water thinking about it.

But she doesn’t like to talk about stuff that makes her sad.

Emotions and feelings are just not for her.

She only wants good thoughts in her head.

•••

The pointer in the sonogram pauses over what’s between the legs.

“Is that a boy?” Juanita whispers.

Florinda, her 16-year-old roommate, lurches forward, clasps her hands and lets out a belly laugh.

“I knew it! I knew it! It’s a boy!”

A pair of house mothers who are also at the sonographer’s office in South Fort Myers chuckle, too.

“I don’t have any boys’ names picked out,” Juanita says quietly.

Florinda, Juanita and the house mothers ride back to Our Mother’s Home in the home’s 12-person Dodge van.

Seeing the baby makes it real.

Girls at the house often take better care of themselves once they see the being floating strangely and peacefully inside, say the house mothers who went along for the sonogram.

In the kitchen at Our Mother’s Home, three girls and their toddlers cluster around Juanita for a glimpse of the photos of her unborn child. This cross-stitch hangs on one of the kitchen walls:

Recipe for a Happy Child:

1 FULL CUP OF UNDERSTANDING

2 CUPS OF RESPECT * 3 TBSP. OF GUIDANCE

A DASH OF PATIENCE

SPRINKLE WITH LAUGHTER

COVER WITH HUGS

BAKE IN A HOME

FILLED WITH LOVE.

Nearby hang portraits of girls and their babies. Soon, Juanita will add hers. Not exactly Norman Rockwell but a family — for now.

That’s a black baby all right, the girls who are black decide, flipping through the sonogram pictures. The approval makes Juanita smile. Juanita is part Mexican, part Filipina. Her baby daddy is black.

Juanita’s mixed baby inside carries clout with some of the black girls. Race can divide the house. White house mothers and volunteers have had to win the trust of black girls who bristled at their help. White girls, the house minority, often linger on the fringes of the social circles.

The girls plop on the couch to watch the sonogram tape Juanita pops into the VCR.

“He looks like he’s going to be bad,” says one girl. “He’s going to be badder than you, Juanita.”

“See his big nose! He’s got his daddy’s nose. He’s got his daddy’s lips. He be smilin,’ too. There goes his stuff!” Juanita points to the screen.

She pages through a worn paperback in search of the perfect name.

Her baby needs the perfect start.

This is her third shot to be the kind of mother she knows she can be.

Chapter 2: It's a boy! Juanita welcomes a son.

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