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

ending. I was an outcast. My mother wasn’t talking to me. My father would sometimes come and take me to the all-you-can eat restaurant, just so I could eat a solid meal. It was the worst time in my life. Everyone seemed to be looking at me and shakin’ their heads. The emptiness inside caused me to simply stop trying.

I started to look different. My head hung down regularly. I had no clothes and no money. I would wear my regular jeans and, as my stomach grew, I would put a rubber band in the waistline to expand them to make room for my baby. I hadn’t purchased any baby stuff, although my child was due to arrive in only a few months. The only effort I could make was to get signed up for Medicaid benefits. My mama finally went with me to do that, because she saw what a sad case I had become. I went to the doctor only a few times during my pregnancy. I was too depressed about the coming of this baby to go to the doctor every few weeks.I was tryin’ to forget.

My family wanted me to move to Winston-Salem to be with them. My mother wanted to keep an eye on me. Winston-Salem was a slightly bigger city than High Point. I had gotten a job at a daycare in High Point at the suggestion of my grandmother.

I took a job at a local daycare in Winston-Salem. I started trying to save money for the baby. Because I was still staying out late at night, I couldn’t really hold a job. Although I wasn’t drinking because of the baby, I was just tired and irritable. I used to fall asleep on the kids while I was supposed to be watching them. I was working so that my baby would have things. It wasn’t much, but it was all I could do.

My father was mad because I was seeing B. again. I was happy because I thought he loved me and he had really come back. One day, he called me and said, “I need you to give me some money. I’m going to take it and make some money with it.” I never asked what he was planning to do and reluctantly gave him the little money I had, thinking that by doing what he asked I was showing love. I was hoping that he would stay.

I didn’t hear from B. for the next two days. He had spent all of the money. Needless to say, he didn’t make anything with the money except for another good time with his friends. He didn’t even think about our baby when he was spending the money. I was so hurt by his doing that with my hard-earned money that depression seized me and started to invade my heart.

I ended up having to quit my daycare job. The stress of no job and no money again led to me having problems with my pregnancy. The doctor just kept tellin’ me,“You have to stop stressing or you will lose this baby.”

At home, my parents’ marriage had been deteriorating for a long time. My mother was deeply involved with Addie and the church, and my father was into the ladies in the church. My father’s mean streak was hurting us all. He would call me, his own daughter, “a little whore” and tell me “you are not going to beanything. ” The stress at home and the stress within caused me to have contractions that felt like premature labor, and I still had about four months to go.

I decided I had to leave my parents and this stress behind, so I went back to Tonya’s and the projects. My anger at my father and his treatment of my mother and myself was causing me to feel hatred for him. I didn’t want to hate my daddy. Mama begged me not to leave her. She didn’t want me to leave her alone with my father. I gave her the only advice I could offer:“You could leave, too.”

My daughter, Zion Quari Barrino, came into the world on August 8, 2001. My mom and my little eight-year-old brother, Xavier, came to the hospital. I named my daughter Zion because that is the place in the Bible where the disciples went to pray. Her middle name, Quari, was a name that I had heard somewhere and I thought it was pretty.

The girls I grew up with used to spend hours trying to create a name that they thought was unusual. Girls from the ghetto strive to give their babies unique names, like Destiny, Shanaya, and Marquita. Often that is all they have to give.

During the labor, I remember, I didn’t scream. I was saying to myself,I did this to myself. I didn’t say anything else. I just cried.

B. had come to the hospital to see me, only because I asked him to. We were sitting in silence in my hospital room, trying to figure out what to do with this baby that we didn’t have a cluewhat to do with. The phone rang an hour after Zion was born. B. picked it up and it was his mother. I heard him say, like only a country boy could, “Yes, ma’am.” When the time came to sign the birth certificate, Zion’s daddy refused to sign. He didn’t sign his own daughter’s birth certificate, and his parents didn’t even come see to see their granddaughter.

When I looked at Zion, all I could see was the hole in her heart that would be permanent because there was no daddy in her life. It made me so sad and all I could think about was how I was determined to fill that hole with all the things that I could provide her. First, I needed a job.

Zion and I moved back in with my parents when we left the hospital. As soon as I got home from the hospital, B.’s parents sent him away to