I was eighteen when I told my mother I was pregnant. We were standing in the kitchen of her four-bedroom house, the same house with the white shutters, the clean porch, and the quiet suburban street where everyone waved at each other like nothing ugly ever happened behind closed doors. She looked at me for a long time, then told me I had two hours to pack and leave.
She said I had made my choice, so I could figure out the consequences alone. By sunset, I was sitting on the front step with two garbage bags of clothes beside me and nowhere to go. She changed the locks while I was still outside.
My daughter’s father had been a brief encounter during freshman orientation at college. I did not even know his last name. I only knew he went by Alex, he was visiting from Switzerland, and he had laughed at my terrible jokes in a way that made me feel interesting for one night.
After that, I never saw him again. I did not have his number. I did not know his school.
I had nothing but a first name and a memory I could not build a life around. I dropped out of school and moved into a shelter. I had Janna alone in a county hospital while my mother told everyone I had run off to Vegas and ruined my own life.
Five brutal years followed. I waited tables at a diner where people talked to me like I was invisible unless they wanted something. I lived in a studio apartment with damp walls, roaches in the cabinets, and a heater that only worked when it felt like it.
Janna slept in a dresser drawer at first because I could not afford a crib. There were food stamps, WIC appointments, and mornings when I walked four miles to work because the bus did not run early enough for my shift. My mother lived twenty minutes away the entire time.
She never called. She never visited. She told family I was no longer part of her life.
My sister Denise secretly met me at parks and brought Janna clothes from consignment shops, but she was too scared to do more. My mother had threatened to cut her off too if she helped me. Still, I made it work.
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