Life Is Not a Fairy Tale by Fantasia (books for students to read .TXT) 📗

move back to High Point and stay with my grandmother. When I got back to High Point, I never went back to school. But I went back to B.’s arms. I had officially dropped out of school in the ninth grade. My mother was depressed and she knew that whatever she said, I wouldn’t listen. The fact that I had stopped going to school didn’t even come to her attention for a couple of months. My grandmother was too involved with her church, and what I didn’t tell her, she didn’t know.

My grandmother had given up on me and decided to let me see what life was really about.My mother had given up on herself. Things with my parents had gotten rough. None of us were getting along. At my parents’ home, there was always fighting. I was arguing with my father, my mother was arguing with my brothers, my mother was arguing with my father. My parents were fighting every day about money and the fact that they didn’t ever have enough. My mother was accusing my father of being with other women and he just kept saying that he wasn’t cheating on her.

My mother had once been a very vocal person with a lot of spunk. As their relationship got worse, my mother said less and less to my father and everyone else. I moved out of my grandmother’s house and was staying with my friend, Tonya, who was living in the projects. Tonya was thirty years old at the time. I wasn’t really doing anything with my days, except for watching TV and hangin’ out with older women. Tonya didn’t work; she was receiving assistance, so we were home together a lot, watching her child. I no longer wanted to listen to my mom, although she wasn’t ever really strict with me. She never tried to pressure me. She let me make my own mistakes. But what she really did was let me go.

My mother’s mounting depression allowed her to let me go so easily. She was frustrated because she couldn’t be a role model herself, so she had nothing to show me or tell me about doing the right thing. She had married too soon, had children too soon, and didn’t have an education or a way out of the situation she was in. She had done everything I was doing, so I guess she felt like she couldn’t judge me.

At the age of seventeen I started going to clubs. I was drinkin’, smokin’, and partyin’. I wasn’t even old enough to be drinkin’, and I was already partyin’ like an adult woman. When I should have been getting ready to graduate from high school with other kids my age, I was hanging out with these older women who were supposed to be my friends. These older women friends were buying drinks for me and I was drinkin’ them.

I was still seeing B., off and on, and having sex with him. Although I thought I wasso in love with him, we weren’t even a couple.

Pretty soon, my period didn’t come. I realized that I was pregnant. I was still living with Tonya. She was already a baby mama with one child of her own. She knew that I was pregnant without me even having to say the words. One day I woke up, ate breakfast, and threw it all up on Tonya’s kitchen table. Tonya said, “Girl, what is wrong with you?” I was so embarrassed looking at the mess that I had made on the tabletop. I said, “I threw up,” and as soon as I said it, Tonya and I both knew. Tonya came over to me, shook her head, and said, “Girl, you may be pregnant.” I knew I was.

I couldn’t call my mother because she would have either gone crazy or just said nothing at all, which is how she had been responding to me for the last year. I called my brother, Tiny. He and I were both party animals. He took me to the health department for the free pregnancy test. If you are pregnant, the health department counselor asks you some simple questions:Do you want to keep the baby? Do you want to have an abortion? Or do you want to have the child and then give it to someone else?

It wasn’t a hard decision. I looked at the light green walls of the clinic and I thought:I am not getting rid of this baby. This baby was my own doing. I was out there being “grown” and left school, the church, and my family. I made my bed, and I am going to lie in it. I also couldn’t help but think that my mama could have gotten rid of Rico or Tiny or me, and I wouldn’t be here today talkin’ about it.

I told the counselor that I was going to keep my baby. The counselor sent me off to become yet another baby mama.

I dreaded telling my friends and family because I knew they would be mad at me. Most of them already had babies who were missing daddies. Because of my singing, people would be shocked that I fell into the High Point baby trap. People don’t understand that singin’ in the church doesn’t make you free from curiosity—or sin. Maybe it makes you even more curious—and more likely to experiment with the things that we were taught to avoid.

Tiny and I went to my grandmother’s house to break the news to my mother, who was living there at the time. My family members were in constant motion due to the marital problems that my parents were having.

Tiny walked into my grandmother’s house in front of me. He went over to my mother, holding the papers from the health center in his hands, and said, “Mama, I took her up there.” The high teen-pregnancy rate in High Point made the reference to “taking her up there” obvious. Every mother in High Point knows that “going