Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 6, 1994 TAG: 9401050060
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
She was making $1,072 a month in the Army training to be a medical supply specialist. She had plans to travel, to party at Mardi Gras on her winter break.
She spent most of her money on clothes, sending monthly stipends home to her mom, a working single mother of four. She bought baby clothes to mail home for her youngest brother, Malcolm, who is 2.
Now all her party clothes are milk-stained. Her 7-month-old son, Anthony, is wearing her little brother's hand-me-downs. And she can't find time to do her hair - without the constant interruption of her needy son.
Worse yet, she says, trying to live off the $231 a month she receives from Aid to Families With Dependent Children is next to impossible.
"Mama said I act like I'm in slavery again, always whining baby-this and baby-that," Thomeka says. "Well, I feel like I'm in slavery.
"Before I had a baby, my life was living up; I had plans. Now it's like all I do is cry every day."
She cries because she misses the military, she says. She cries because she hates being broke. She cries because having a baby is the hardest, most demanding job she's ever had.
"These girls out here, they get pregnant on purpose because they want that love," she says. "But what kind of love is this? It's like, `There's the lady who feeds me every day. She's there when I cry.'
"Sometimes I cry on Anthony's shoulder, and he pushes me away like, `Get outta here.' I mean, I knew it was gonna be hard," she says, starting to cry again. "But not like this. This is so hard, I can't even tell you."
Anthony's father is in prison - "for being with somebody who stole a truck," Thomeka says. She got pregnant right before she left for the military in the summer of '92, but because of irregular periods didn't find out until she was six months along.
The Army sent her home because she was still in training - with the promise she could come back if her mother, Linda Bentley-Childress, took custody of her child while she finished training.
"All their friends are having babies," Bentley-Childress, 42, says of her daughters' peer group. "It's so in, it's like wearing the right clothes."
Whereas Thomeka was remorseful about becoming pregnant, her 17-year-old sister Kia was arrogant last month when she told her mom she was pregnant, Bentley-Childress says. An honor-roll student at William Fleming High School, Kia Childress was being recruited by several colleges before she "got messed up with a thug," her mother says.
"Thomeka didn't know what was going on, but Kia wanted to get pregnant," Bentley-Childress said. She required Kia to sign a contract before she could continue living in her house promising to finish school, to show respect, to go to college, to take full responsibility for her baby.
Bentley-Childress is surprised her daughters didn't get pregnant sooner. "I used to work nights all the time, and there's nothing you can do - short of being with them 24 hours a day.
"We had family meetings galore. But you could just tell Kia was gonna do it. She was starting to rebel."
Bentley-Childress resents being a grandmother already. "I wasn't sure if I was done having kids myself," she says. Though she is divorced, she had her 2-year-old via artificial insemination from a sperm donor.
After Thomeka's long and complicated labor, she was too sick to breast-feed her son. So her mother - who was still breast-feeding her own son - breast-fed them both.
Thomeka says she'd do anything to trade places with Kia - to be three months pregnant again - so she could have an abortion.
"I used to just be one person, but now it's me and it's him," Thomeka says. "It takes patience, so much patience.
"When he screams and I don't know what's wrong with him, I get upset. I hit him sometimes - not hard, but I tap his leg and then I say, `What am I doing?' And then my cousin or my mom takes him and tells me to go for a walk.
"It's not that I don't love him, but I just hate doing all this, it's so gross," she says, wiping his runny nose with a wet wash rag. "When he had his circumcision, I cried every day because he cried 'cause his pee-pee hurt."
With custody of Anthony transferred to her mother, Thomeka went off AFDC and back to Army training at Fort Lee last week. She plans to send for her son as soon as she is permanently assigned, probably in four to six months.
"It'll still be tough," her recruiter, Sgt. William Westmoreland, says when he picks Thomeka up for training. "They have to be ready to move on a moment's notice. And without day-care plans, that can create problems."
"You got your driver's license?" her mother asks her while she packs.
"You got your pocketbook? Your papers?"
Thomeka starts to cry again as she says goodbye to her mom, her sisters, her cousin, her best friend. She rocks her son in her arms, kissing him, then wiping away her tears.
A van load of trainees is waiting for her at the recruiting station, but Thomeka takes her time saying goodbye. She kisses her mother and son again on the front porch in the freezing rain.
She hugs the family dog. She hugs the post on the porch.
Finally, she gets in the recruiter's Jeep and leaves. She wants to get her career back on track - for herself, for her son. She wants her life to be "living up" again.
She knows the alternative.
"There's nothing to do here but sit at home by the phone," she'd said earlier. "All the guys have cars, and you get so bored you wanna go out with 'em. And they're not calling you for conversation, either.
"There's nothing to do here but hang out on the streets. And what for? Just to stare at everybody else who's staring back at you?
"Nuh-uh," she says. "Not this girl."
by CNB