Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 19, 1993 TAG: 9312170094
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It's not glamorous being a grandmother at age 35, she says.
But that's exactly what the Botetourt County resident became in May, when her 17-year-old unmarried daughter gave birth - forcing Jerrie to quit her full-time job to baby-sit her grandchild and sending the Eadeses' budget into a tailspin. But the family is managing.
So is Carolyn Saunders, a Salem housekeeper whose 17-year-old daughter is due to give birth April 14 - without insurance coverage or Medicaid. Carolyn doesn't know how her family will manage, just that it will.
Roanoker Catherine Ferrell will get by somehow, too. The 38-year-old drug-prevention specialist recently ended an abusive marriage - at the same time coping with the fact that her two teen-age daughters were following in her footsteps by becoming teen mothers themselves.
"I knew it, and now they know it. There's no glamour in teen pregnancy," Catherine says. "I had school, homework, I played basketball, and then I took a part-time job.
"There's no glamour at all, but there is glory - because that baby is a part of you."
These three families - all working-class, all struggling to make ends meet without the help of Aid to Families With Dependent Children or public housing - are making the best of situations that many people find unimaginable, let alone workable.
Until it happens to them.
They all fall slightly above the cutoff for AFDC. They all claim the welfare system encourages teen moms to quit school and move out on their own to qualify for AFDC - at the expense of breaking up their families, at the expense of the teens' self-esteem.
"There's just no support system for people like us," Catherine Ferrell says. "And we can't be taking it out on our children and grandchildren - not when you gotta shake everybody's piggy bank just to pay your light bill."
Here are their stories.
\ It took Catherine Ferrell awhile to get it through her daughters' heads that becoming a teen mother didn't automatically guarantee them an AFDC check.
"Young girls today, they think that welfare check is the end of the world," Ferrell says. "My girls, they just knew they were gonna get that check."
Instead, 17-year-old Ellen Ferrell learned that life as a teen mom looked more like this: Get up at 5 a.m. Get herself and her 9-month-old daughter Ty-Ieshia ready and packed. Drop the baby off at the $40-a-week baby sitter, go to Patrick Henry High School. After school, pick up the baby, then go to work at Taco Bell while Mom baby-sits. Get home at 11 p.m.
Catherine Ferrell is outspoken. She stretches her $17,000-a-year paychecks thin, while two older sons in the military send money home when they can.
She didn't want her children to go through what she went through as a pregnant teen in the '70s - "back when girls had to walk around in their coats trying to hide it."
So she preached the importance of birth control and responsibility. She's a firm believer that parents should have control of their kids.
Still, when girls today get it in their minds to become mothers, there's no stopping them, she says. "Ellen, all she talked about was she wanted a Cabbage Patch doll for Christmas. She walked around for two years with it. And you could just tell, it wasn't enough to satisfy her needs.
"My girls, all their friends are pregnant. That's the '90s, I guess. In the '90s, you have babies. They say, `Let me have my baby before the world comes to an end.' "
A few months after Ellen gave birth, Catherine found out her second daughter, Christy, was pregnant. "I was about to knock her brains out," Catherine says. "She knew I was struggling with Ellen. I thought my whole world was ending."
Fifteen-year-old Christy and her month-old baby go to Roanoke's Maternal and Infant Education Center for now. But in January, when Christy has to return to William Fleming High School, Catherine Ferrell's baby-sitting bill will double to $80 - the price she'll pay to keep both daughters in school.
Christy and Ellen share a bedroom with their babies, who sleep beside them in their twin beds. There are posters of rap stars and Will Smith from "Fresh Prince of Bel Aire," and a plaque about following your dreams.
Both babies are on Medicaid, and the family receives monthly Women, Infants and Children supplements of juice, formula and cereal.
"An AFDC worker told me to quit my job, and the family could be eligible," Catherine Ferrell says - not just for AFDC, but also for free baby-sitting, housing, food stamps and medical care. "And that's nothing to motivate a person. You can see why young mothers get pregnant with that attitude.
"That makes my child feel that's the way of life. They're getting raised to know they can live on the system, when instead they need motivation to get them away from the system."
Ferrell thinks the schools should expand their pregnant-teen program, offering day care throughout the mothers' schooling as well as on-site medical care. Ellen, for instance, will have to go to summer school because she missed a week of classes when Ty-Ieshia had an ear infection.
"There's enough teen-mothers in the valley to support a school like that," Ferrell says. "And the fathers, they should have to go there, too."
The fathers of Christy's and Ellen's babies have offered minimal help - a pair of baby shoes here, a box of Pampers there. Christy hopes her boyfriend will one day share custody of their daughter, Tim-Mera, so she can go fulfill her dream of joining the military.
"I keep telling her you can't count on no baby's daddy," her mother says. "I used to say that myself, and my husband, he was like . . . Well, you know that song, `Papa Was a Rolling Stone'?
"My mama used to used to tell me that about my daddy, but I said, `No, not me . . . .' "
While Ferrell does the best she can, working full time during the day and baby-sitting at night, she still finds unexpected grandparenthood nerve-wracking.
"It's hard for grown women to live in a house together," Ferrell sighs. "Christy tries to tell me, `She needs a bottle of milk.' But she needs to learn that one for herself. We're not being Hazel the maid here.
"I mean, they're not my babies."
\ Jerrie Eades was so scared to tell her husband their 17-year-old daughter, Beth, was pregnant that she drove all the way to Bedford to pick up his sister - so she could tell him.
"I was shocked," says Charles Eades, 37. "I mean, I'd mentioned something about her putting on weight and looking kinda sick. But when I found out, it floored me.
"It's something you hear about, but you don't think it'll ever happen to you."
Eades says his daughter's pregnancy has forced the family to confront the awkward subject of teen sexuality - something the Eadeses had never broached before in their three-bedroom trailer near Hollins.
"I was one of those parents, I didn't want to know what was happening," he says. "We say, `Kids are gonna do what they're gonna do - whether it's behind our backs or not.' And I know a juvenile doesn't wanna go to her parents and say, `I'm having sex.' But parents should be asking, especially now with AIDS."
It's been a trying six months for the family. First there was the baby's colic to contend with, then the hard task of convincing Beth it was her responsibility - not her mother's - to take care of the baby.
"She'd get up at night, but she didn't want to take care of her," Jerrie says. "She wanted the freedom she thought a teen should have."
"She wanted to go hang out on Williamson Road," Charles says.
Then the baby's father refused to accept - or even acknowledge - his paternity until a DNA test confirmed it for him. Since then, the boy's mother has offered assistance, both in money and care.
Perhaps the hardest burden of all has been financial. Although the baby qualifies for $131 a month in AFDC, Beth herself is not eligible - because her parents earn too much. Charles makes $25,000 as a police officer; Jerrie earns $10,000 delivering newspapers.
The couple's Blue Cross/Blue Shield policy didn't cover Beth's pregnancy, and the bill for prenatal care and delivery totaled $6,000. The Eadeses say they were paying as much as they could on the bill - $5 or $10 a month - but Carilion Health System still turned them over to a collection agency.
Beth, a senior at Lord Botetourt High School, applied for social services day care, but was told there were no funds available. "In the end, it was more cost-efficient for me to quit work [during the day] and do it myself," says Jerrie, who previously held a second job at a day-care center.
"They told Beth if she quits school she can get more money, and I don't think that's right," Charles says. "A 17-year-old can be so easily influenced. When I was that age, I couldn't wait to get out on my own."
Adds his daughter: "I have a friend on welfare, and for a while I thought it sounded good."
"Yeah, but you'd be living in a run-down housing project," her father says. "And I'm not gonna see my grandbaby grow up in an environment like that.
"You've got girls with three and four kids. They get pregnant so they don't have to work. When it becomes a pattern, something needs to be done."
Beth, who wants to study cosmetology and then work her way through nursing school as a hair stylist, believes more welfare money should go to the working poor, rather than the unemployed young mothers who exploit the system. "People like me, we're trying to finish school and get a job so we don't have to be on welfare," she says.
Working-class people fall through the cracks, Charles says. "I feel like I'm being penalized for working. It's the one time in my life I've asked for help from the state, and I can't get anything."
Charles says he's suffered a lot of sleepless nights since the baby arrived - and not because of the crying infant. "I worry about money, and I worry about Beth. She's so young, and her teen-age years have been taken away from her because of one foolish thing she did."
But the ordeal has made the family closer. For the first time, he says, he can communicate clearly with his daughter - about sex, about responsibility, about anything.
Asked if they have an ideal father-daughter relationship, Eades said, "Now we do - finally."
\ Carolyn Saunders is having a hard time resolving her guilt. As a church-attending Baptist, she's strongly against premarital sex.
But as the mother of a 17-year-old daughter who is six months pregnant, Saunders still feels guilty about taking her daughter's birth-control pills away from her last year.
"I thought it would encourage her to have sex," the Salem mother says. "All the while I was telling myself, `My daughter wouldn't be having sex.' I just couldn't imagine it."
Saunders says her daughter, Amanda, couldn't broach the subject "because of the way I brought her up in church - that you're not supposed to do things like that."
But the fact is, Amanda was having sex last summer - in her parents' house - while they worked. She was 16, in love for the first time, immature.
"I think she did it for love," her mother says. "She's always needed a lot of attention, but I can't be there every minute."
At 5-foot-2, Amanda looks more like 12 than 17 with her baby face and her constant hair-twirling and fingernail-biting. The sign on her bedroom door says, "AMANDA'S PARKING ONLY - ALL OTHERS WILL BE TOWED."
Although originally a sophomore at Salem High School, Amanda transferred to Roanoke's pregnant-teens school because she felt ostracized in Salem. "One of my teachers in Salem said, `I thought you were more of a lady than that,' " she recalls.
"That really hurts me. It's not like I'm proud of this, but I couldn't live with myself if I'd had an abortion."
Amanda says she's trying not to gain much weight during her pregnancy - because she's afraid people will look at her and think she's proud to be a pregnant teen. "A lotta girls at [the pregnant-teens] school do pride themselves on it - because that's all they have."
She's engaged to the father of the baby, she says, pointing to the wedding ring on her left hand - a gold band he bought because he couldn't afford a diamond.
When her mother talks about the financial hardship the family is headed for - the pregnancy expenses, which are not covered by insurance; day care for the infant - Amanda quickly cuts her off: "My boyfriend works at Moore's. He makes $100 a week. He's putting away money for things we'll need.
"Jim and me, we'll split the costs."
Carolyn, a housekeeper at Roanoke College, earns $1,000 monthly before taxes. Her husband, a plasterer, makes $1,200 a month after taxes. They were told they earn $700 too much to qualify for Medicaid, she says.
Carolyn had never thought to check her Blue Cross/Blue Shield policy - or she might have known the company doesn't cover the costs of dependent pregnancies. "You don't think of any of these things till they happen to you," the 42-year-old says.
Her advice to other parents of teen-agers: "Talk to 'em about sex, just do it." As for birth control, she says, "Use your head and make the right choice - a choice you can live with."
Amanda interjects: "Most teens, they're gonna have sex anyway."
Carolyn says the pregnancy has brought a lot of tension to her 24-year marriage. For the first few weeks, her husband wouldn't speak to Amanda, and threatened to kick her out if she didn't put the baby up for adoption.
"Amanda is our youngest, and he was looking forward to the empty nest," his wife says. "And now here we are, we're gonna have another baby at our house."
Things have calmed down since the initial shock. The family is trying to focus on the positive things they can do, renovating the extra room in their ranch house to use as a nursery.
"It's gotten a lot better," Amanda says. Four months ago, Amanda thought she was passing out from low-blood-sugar attacks when an emergency-room doctor at Lewis-Gale Hospital informed her she was pregnant. Amanda was so scared to tell her parents, she asked the doctor to instead.
"The doctor told me, `It's gonna be a long ride home,' " Amanda recalls. "And he was right."
by CNB