A HELPING HAND FOR YOUNG MOMS
Milpitas nonprofit offers teen mothers educational and emotional support
It hasn’t been a very long life. But it’s a life already crammed with memories too bulky for a young woman to easily bear.
At 18, Isabel Lopez sees each turn clearly: Relishing being the light in her parents’ eyes as the first child. Feeling it flicker when her sister came along. Struggling with English in school. Seeing her grades falter. Discovering as a high school junior that she was pregnant. And all that has followed since.
“My boyfriend would pick me up at my house,” the soft-voiced East San Jose native said. “One day, I just got pregnant. Protection? I didn’t really know. It was weird using a condom. When I found out, I had mixed feelings. My teacher, who I could talk to about
my problems, said, ‘You shouldn’t have the baby,’ because of the way I am. She knew I got depressed a lot.”
It felt like the dark end of a road: the heartache and confusion, the painful choice between aborting or not, the sadness of feeling lost at 16. But March 24, 2014, turned out not to be the end — rather, it was the start of a new journey. And it was one she would take hand in hand with Elias, now a 19-month-old charmer with long, black eyelashes and pudgy fingers who shares his mom’s half of the bunk bed in her childhood home.
“I’m hopeful for his future,” she said. “I want to teach him how to find his own opportunities in life, just like I’m doing now.”
What helped turn it all around, she said, was Teen Success. The Milpitasbased nonprofit, spun off from Planned Parenthood, is designed to support teen moms and their children through a 40-week program focused on educational and emotional assistance.
Family shaming
The mantra is clear: Finish school, follow your passion, move on to college, all while honing your parenting skills. And perhaps the most crucial component of all: weekly two-hour sessions with a group of other young women in the same boat, navigating the same choppy seas.
“A lot of these girls are shamed by their families or extended families,” said Executive Director Karin Kelley-Torregroza. “The message they get is: ‘You’ve ruined your lives.’ But our message is that ‘you’ve got a beautiful child, and you can still reach your goals.’
“Everyone,” she added, “makes mistakes in their lives, and many of the girls we serve were involved in gangs or drugs or partying. But many of them also told us that getting pregnant and keeping their child saved them in a way; having to be responsible for their babies has changed their lives for the better.”
Lopez seems to be a prime example of that, yet even at her young age she realizes that her fledgling parenthood is very much a work in progress. And much of that progress, she said, comes from the give-and-take at her weekly group meetings.
“That support is key,” said Yolanda Castro, one of the adult facilitators at the sessions and a one-time teen mom herself.
“It’s important to be able to share your stories with these other women who understand the challenges,” Castro said in late October during a mother-and-child field trip to a pumpkin patch in East San Jose. “These girls have so much going on in their lives, trying to establish themselves as young women while at the same time raising a child. But these weekly group sessions show the mothers they are not alone.”
Although Lopez was spared much of the family shaming that many teen moms go through, the past two years have hardly been easy. Elias’ father has been out of the picture for months. Lopez worries that her son will consider his grandmother to be his mom since Lopez has to be away so much (she works as many as eight hours a day at a San Jose bakery while following an independent-studies course at Liberty North High School in San Jose).
And though her mother has been supportive, starting with encouraging her to have the baby in the first place, Lopez says her dad’s initial angry reaction to the pregnancy added another layer of pain to her predicament.
“Before I got pregnant, my dad used to drive me to school, and he’d always give me a kiss on my cheek when he dropped me off,” Lopez said. “But after I got pregnant, he stopped doing that; I’d get out of the car and cry. He’d say things like, ‘What did I do wrong as a father? I feel like a bad dad,’ all because I’d gotten pregnant.”
Finally one day, Lopez said, her father told her: “I know you’ll have this baby, but you must finish high school, and after high school I’ll help you. But if you fail me again, I won’t be there for you.”
Perfect attendance
Teen Success has been a godsend, Lopez said. “They teach you how to set your own goals and to follow through and not drop out of school. They encourage you to find what you’re most passionate about and to go on to college.”
The group meetings have inspired and emboldened Lopez, which helps explain why she hasn’t missed a single session.
“We are all different ages, but we learn from each other,” she said of her fellow moms. “I love how one girl in my group teaches and motivates her son to do better than her own mother did with her. That inspires me; I want to raise my son that way, too.”
Teen Success is hoping Wish Book readers will contribute toward its goal of raising $10,000. The money will be used to operate support groups that currently reach more than 100 women, newborns and toddlers; to purchase diapers, wipes, clothes and shoes for the children; and to help the moms buy appropriate furniture, baby beds and toys.
Said Lopez of the benefits of Teen Success: “I feel now that I won’t always have to depend on somebody else in my life and that I’ll be able to take care of myself and my son.”