A PATH FROM DESTRUCTION (THEN + NOW)

In 1975-1976 they had a lot of racial riots in my school.  Gangs of white boys beating up on black and had no regards for their lives, black boys beating up on a white person and had no regard for their lives.  Every day it was the same thing over and over, and I felt like a dummy playing along with the game.  I could have gone somewhere else.  I used that as a excuse to drop out of school. I pretended to go to school until the end of 1976.  I became pregnant with my daughter.  So I didn’t tell my mother until I was almost 4 months pregnant.  I told her I couldn’t go back to that school pregnant. I knew of a maternity school in Jamaica N.Y. because I wanted to keep my baby.  I didn’t have a job and neither did my baby’s father.  I said I wanted somebody that I can love.  I wanted my baby and I wasn’t getting rid of it, I don’t have any regrets having my daughter but a lot of people make mistakes having babies too young.  They say they need someone to love and someone to love them back.  We don’t realize that you can’t take care of a baby by just loving it.  You have to be ready financially and mentally.  That’s the most important reasons for having babies.  After she came into the world, I didn’t know what to do to care for her because I was a child myself.  I wanted to go dancing and couldn’t go, hang out with my friends and I couldn’t go.  I would go out and don’t come back and I didn’t call So when I really wanted  to go my mom wouldn’t let me go.  My mom took me to my new maternity school in Jamaica N.Y.  The school’s name was Ida B Wells.  When we walked in every body was walking around with big bellies.  It seemed so horrible to me to have to go there every morning with my big belly also.  I went for about three months and then I quit.  I would stay home and smoke weed all day.  I had hooky parties in my mother’s house.  I would always get caught.  My mom came in the back and I’d try to run my friend’s through the front.  She would open the door and the smoke would slap her in the face.  She came in and I would get yelled at big time.  I didn’t understand why I couldn’t party in my mother’s house.  She could have lost her house and I never thought about it here or there.  That’s why my mother tried to catch me all the time.  I though I was doing something slick.  In which I was fooling myself.  That’s why my mom wanted to move.  I believe because I was going down the wrong path.

‘On that day you will know that I am in my father, and you in me, and I in you’
--John 14:20

My mom then married a man that thought he was a pimp.  He was a big man.  There was always in my mind something was wrong with that man.  He tried to portray himself as a lover.  He played my mom for a few years.  He tried some obscene things with me so living with them was out of the question.  I was pregnant and afraid.  The baby’s father wasn’t worth two cents.  I then moved with my father in Jersey City, N.J.  I stayed with my father until I had my daughter.  I just turn seventeen years old ten days after I bored my daughter. My fathers’ wife didn’t like me very much.  I think she thought I was trying to get my dad &mom back together she couldn’t have been so wrong, I just wanted to be near my father.  My dad would wake me up every morning to comb his hair.  I didn’t mind because I wanted to be close to my daddy.  One morning after I did his hair and he left for work, I went into labor.  I thought I just had to go to the bathroom.  I tried and I tried but I couldn’t go. My back was hurting so bad I had to call my fathers wife to help me.  She was rushing me to the hospital when we saw a police man.  I was transferred in the police car.  We then went to the hospital.  When we got to the hospital the hospital was on strike.  They then transferred me in an ambulance. We had  to go across town to get to Christ Hospital I was young and dumb.  The doctor never checked me.  Too many other things were going on in my life.  The consequences were my daughter was breached birth, coming out feet first.  The navel cord was rapped around my babies’ neck.  The doctor told me they would have to do an emergency C-section.  They did and thanks to God my daughter came here very healthy.  When I got out of the hospital my step mother seemed to start with me all over again, just picking.  After a few weeks I decided to go back to N.Y. because my step mother and I were about to throw blows.  My daddy said, “the first one to threw the first punch, I will knock you out.”  I then moved in with my sister.  She had her own place in Astoria Queens off of Astoria Blvd in N.Y.  My sister had a one-bedroom apartment.  She lived with her h