From PEOPLE Magazine
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Not long ago in Houston, Questaleicia Steemer, a clerk at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, spotted the father of her 7-year-old twins. He didn't recognize her. Days later, when they crossed paths again, he realized who she was and froze, knowing he had done nothing to help raise the kids and fearing she might want something. Instead, Steemer says, she made clear that any loss in their relationship was his. "I said, 'You're the one that missed out,' " she recalls. " 'You're going to want their love some day, and they're not going to give it to you.' "
Steemer, now 23, is one of two dozen teenage parents PEOPLE profiled five years ago in a cover story titled "Babies Who Have Babies." Recently we touched base again to see how the young parents had fared and how the early pregnancies had affected their lives. Of the original 25, we were able to locate 16, and of these, 13 agreed to talk to us. Most, like Steemer, have set aside initial regrets and focused on finding jobs and establishing a stable home life. Yet despite Steemer's contagiously positive attitude, the truth is that life remains a struggle for her—just as it does for Jeff Mims, 24, who works 16 hours a day to support his four children, or for Faye Schmid, 22, who felt she had a handle on things, until she lost her 3-year-old son in a car accident.
Of the original group, only three have married—none to the other parent of their first children. Five have had more children—some by design as they start families with new partners and some out of a seemingly cavalier attitude toward birth control. Though most are getting by financially, many are stuck for now in low-paying jobs. The good news is that nearly all the young parents are deeply attached to their children and are determined not to let them make the mistakes they did. In fact, between 1990 and 1997, the rate of teenage pregnancy in the U.S. has dropped 17 percent. No one knows exactly why, though experts point to the availability of jobs, fear of sexually transmitted diseases and new methods of contraception. "We can conclude," says Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, "that teenagers are getting the message that starting families while still young themselves is a situation where everyone loses."
On the following pages, we meet again the young women and men—mostly women, since they ended up with primary responsibility for the babies—we first spoke to five years ago. While some have flourished and others have not, all have had to recognize that their lives are no longer purely their own.
Kristi Mullally, 22, with Alexis, 5
When she went to Miami with friends last April, it was the first time Kristi Mullally had ever been away from Alexis. Some vacation. Mullally called her daughter 10 times a day. Once, Alexis hurt herself in her rush to get to the telephone. "She started crying, and Kristi heard her," says Shea Toomey, Mullally's fiancé. "I thought Kristi was going to jump through the phone." Says Mullally, who got pregnant at 16: "Alexis is my life now. It's the weirdest feeling."
High emotions aside, Mullally works hard to make ends meet. She, Alexis and Toomey, 23, live with Mullally's older sister and her son in a two-bedroom apartment on the top floor of the Mullally home in Hicksville, N.Y. Eventually, Mullally, who attends cosmetology school and works part-time at a local salon, and Toomey, a carpenter, hope to have their own place. But for now, the rent is right ($600 a month), and the live-in emergency child care is hard to beat. Mullally also gets help from Alexis's father, Eric Germuth, 24, who pays child support and spends Sundays with his daughter.
Though she regrets never having had much time to herself since Alexis was born, Mullally credits her daughter with helping to straighten her out. The old Mullally was a poor student and a dedicated partygoer. "I had Alexis," she says, "and it knocked sense into me. I realized that she came first." That devotion was reinforced even after Toomey came into the picture. After the couple's engagement, Mullally couldn't find her ring because Alexis had hidden it. "If you get married," she told her mother, "you're going to have other kids, and you won't love me as much." Clearly, there's no chance of that.
Questaleicia Steemer, 23, with Quintis and Quantis, 7
Hoping to move out of her mother's home and buy a place with her sister Telicia, 19, Questaleicia Steemer drove around Houston last December in search of For Sale signs. She even phoned a few Realtors. But, she says, given her finances, "they just laughed." Finally she found a place she could afford: a windowless, busted-up house for $1,700 down and $444-a-month. "It was hideous," she says. "But once you jump in, there's no going back."
That same spirit propelled Steemer through four years of juggling full-time jobs and school, while her mother, grandmother or sister watched Quantis Detroy and Quintis Detray. So far, Steemer, attending various community schools in Houston, has earned state certificates as a nurse's aide, a psychiatric technician, a medication aide and a medical assistant. Now a clerk in the chemotherapy department at the city's M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, she wants even more. "I want to get my bachelor's and then a master's, and I want my Ph.D. very badly," says Steemer, who was forced to drop out of Texas Southern University four years ago by the pressures of single motherhood.
The boys' 32-year-old father still plays no role in their lives, nor has Steemer found a replacement. But she hasn't let that hold her back. "I don't need him," she says, adding that hers is a lesson others could learn. "You can't do anything without an education; you have to be able to support a household; you don't have to live with this man who doesn't love you," she instructs. And as for that once run-down house, "I think by the time the year is up," she says, "I can turn it into something beautiful."
Faye Schmid, 22, with Taylor, 22 mos.
She had it all worked out. After graduating second in her high school class in 1995, Faye Schmid, then known by her maiden name, Cottier, joined the Army and left her home on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota to train at Fort Lee, Va. The plan was that until she received a permanent posting, her 2-year-old son Dalton would stay behind in the care of an extended family that included her mother, Eunice LeValdo, and Dalton's father, Alton Cuny, 25, an employee with a trucking firm from whom she had amicably split. Then the toddler would join her, along with Schmid's sister Tanyah LeValdo, 25, who would be his nanny.
Tragically, that was not to be. On Mother's Day 1996, Dalton and his paternal grandfather, Bill Cuny, 65, were killed when a pickup truck crashed into their car on a reservation road. (The driver of the truck later pleaded guilty to negligent manslaughter and was sentenced to 60 months in prison.) When she heard the news at Fort Lee, "I was just in shock," says Schmid, who took a month's leave. "I just cried so much I couldn't think. I was there, but I wasn't."
Drawing on a well of personal strength Schmid says she inherited from her mother, she persevered. It also helped that she fell in love.
In May 1997, not long after they met at Fort Campbell, Ky., she and Greggory Schmid, 26, a former Army power-plant mechanic, were married. Now based in Giebelstadt, Germany, where Faye works in a military supply warehouse and Greggory has a civilian job as a youth counselor, she is reminded daily of Dalton by his half-sister Taylor. "She is my life," says Faye, who credits Dalton, in part, for her sense of fulfillment. "Having him helped me be a better parent to Taylor. It has made me a better person."
Kim Huffman, 23, with David, 6, and Abigale, 5 mos.
"I finished everything I set out to do," says Kim Huffman (formerly Dickinson), of the years since she gave birth to her son David. It is an impressive list: Graduate high school. Attend college. Train at police academy. Become a patrol officer. Not to mention her greatest achievement: providing a stable life for her son. "Right now," says Huffman, who shares a rented home in Ellisville, Mo., with David, Mike Huffman, her husband of 10 months, and their daughter Abigaie, "I'm right where I want to be."
But as a young single mother, getting there was a challenge. Though David's father disappeared from her life 10 months after their baby was born on Nov. 29, 1992, Huffman had resolved from the start to go it alone. She and her mother didn't get along then, so Huffman moved in with an aunt and uncle, studied criminal justice at community college at night and worked as a cashier by day. In 1996, after moving in with a family friend, she entered the part-time program at a Missouri police academy, where she met Mike, now 26 and a fellow officer. Kim knew Mike was special when he came to pick her up for their third date and David kissed him. "He had never done that with any man before," says Kim. Brenden, Mike's 3-year-old son from a previous marriage, sleeps over often and has come to be like a brother to David, whom Mike hopes to adopt. Meanwhile, Huffman is revising her To Do list to include a bachelor's degree in criminal justice. After that, who knows? "There are so many avenues I could go," she says.
Colleen Fitzgibbons Maydew, 21, with Alexis, 4, and Tori, 1
Watching Alexis (nicknamed Lexi) cartwheel through the family's Wheat Ridge, Colo., home, Colleen Maydew glances proudly at her husband, Matt, and the daughter they had together, Tori. Such cozy family scenes had only been the stuff of dreams for Maydew when she became pregnant and dropped out of school five years ago at 16. "I would never have thought then that I would meet a great guy who would accept me and my baby," says Maydew, who concedes she "went through every birth control there was" after Alexis was born. "But my luck, I did."
Then Fitzgibbons, Maydew had split with Lexi's father, Leonard Armenta, 23, by the time she met Matt on the way to a high school party in 1996. "I would have ended it if he hadn't accepted Lexi," she says. "But he just took to her immediately." They stayed together and married this past May.
Having earned her diploma by correspondence, Maydew hopes to become a midwife but has put her career plans on hold until her husband finishes college. If he had graduated before they started a family, Matt concedes, "I would have a better job, making more money." Still, between their two salaries—he earns $22,000 as a security technician for public schools, while she makes $24,000 as a receptionist—they have scraped together enough for a down payment on a home. "I wanted not to be one of the statistics," says Maydew. "I graduated, I've never been on welfare. That makes me proud."
Kevin Howe, 29, with Kevin Jr., 6, and Alex, 4
Kevin Howe and April Baker, 23, were unique among the young people profiled by PEOPLE in '94 in that they chose to become parents. At the time, Howe said he was "getting kinda old" and wasn't doing much with his life "except drinking it away." So they "decided to have the baby."
Five years later the couple, who never married, have two sons—Kevin Jr. and Alex—but not each other. The boys live with their father in Westbrook, Maine, near Portland, where Howe and Baker grew up. Baker still lives in Portland, where she works in a Goodwill warehouse and visits the children daily. "She sees them on her lunch break for 15 minutes," says Howe, "and also every Thursday for four hours. It gives me a little time to myself."
Howe says he took the kids because he was the one ready to settle down. He insists it's no hardship for him; he likes being a father. He likes taking the kids swimming and teaching them to play T-ball, and he plans to get them involved in the Boy Scouts. "I do get stressed out," he says. "All parents do. You deal with it, day to day."
For the moment, Howe works at McDonald's, cooking and unloading trucks for $6 an hour. He hopes to find a better job with more benefits, but until then continues to depend on Medicaid for health coverage. Thanks to a HUD program he also pays only $200 a month rent for a three-bedroom apartment. As for his social life, Howe spends a good deal of time on chat lines. He says he likes the single life, but admits, "It gets lonely sometimes too."
Jeff Mims, 24, and Twanna Gaines, 21, with Jeffery, 6, Jac'Quazia, 5, Jay'Quan, 3, and Jhané, 1
Once imprisoned for selling heroin, Jeff Mims says he no longer messes with drugs. Fatherhood, he says, has straightened him out. "I shut [dealing] down," he says, "just like the flip of a light switch. This is my life."
Even without drugs, it is not an easy life. After a year of separation, Mims is back with Twanna Gaines, the mother of his children. The couple live in public housing on Staten Island, and Mims has found a job as a teacher's aide in Harlem. Up at 5 a.m., he is on the ferry to Manhattan by 6. At 3 p.m. he starts a second job, drawing lattes at a Barnes & Noble cafe until nearly midnight. Gaines's days aren't much better. She rises with Jeff and gets the two older kids off to school, the two younger ones to daycare. She has just started working as the assistant manager of a restaurant.
Gaines admits that none of her kids was planned. "I have hard days with them," she says, but no regrets about having them. Gaines and Mims both say they are together for the kids and because, deep down, they love each other. Yet Mims doesn't want to get married (though he swears he'll be faithful), and Gaines does. "I want one thing from Mr. Mims," she says. "A ring on my finger. I'm worth it!"
Leedteena Farris, 22, with Timothy, 6, Tytianna, 5, and Deondre, 2
At 5 a.m. on the first day of the new school year, Leedteena Farris clasps hands with her three children and their neighbors in a circle as a preacher leads a prayer near her house. The quiet Atlanta suburb of Stone Mountain seems a world away from the drive-by shootings of the Maywood, Ill., neighborhood outside Chicago that Farris all but fled with Tim, Tytianna and her disabled parents three years ago. "Here, I have a focus," she says. "It's a better life for my kids."
Still, never having finished the 11th grade, Farris has yet to find the kind of office job she feels would suit her. "I've tried restaurant work and warehouse work, and it's just not for me," she says. Also, an ill-advised relationship with a man she calls "no good" (adding, "I'm not even sure where he is") left her with another son, Deondré. "After Deondré, I had my tubes tied," says Farris, who is now engaged to 28-year-old forklift driver Dale Hicks. "I'm not a pill taker. I'd take it one day and forget the next. And I tried the three-month shot, but it made me swell up."
The family scrapes by on $600 a month in public assistance and food stamps, the elder Farrises' disability checks, some help from Dale and the charity of the minister next door, who provides them with bread, eggs and sweets for the children. Timothy Gillespie, 25, father of Tytianna and Tim, still lives in Chicago and occasionally contributes. "I ain't going to say I'm the greatest, but if they need anything, I send money," he says.
But Farris—who, like her own mother, first became pregnant at 15—wants more for her children. "Tim wants to be a football player when he grows up, and Tytianna wants to be a model," says Farris. "I want her to go to college. I know the mistakes I've made."
Becky Anderson Gaynor, 21, with Tyler, 4, Amber, 2, and Riley, 1
Tyler James Gaynor is buzzing around the kitchen of the wood-frame house on Chicago's South Side. Dipping a chip into the salsa being whipped up by Neal, the only father he has ever known, the boy announces dismissively, "Yucky!" then leaps to a subject he loves—computers. "I'm lucky," says Becky Anderson Gaynor, 21. "Ty is an exceptional kid, which makes me feel better about myself—that I did a good job, even though I was young."
Things could easily have worked out differently. In 1995, after Ty was born, his biological father, Becky's high school boyfriend, dropped from view. Becky quit school in her senior year. She took the GED and tried community college; then, while working at Kmart, she met and fell for fellow employee Neal Gaynor. "I knew it was a package deal," says Gaynor, 31 and a Cook County police officer, who adopted Tyler. "I loved Ty from the beginning."
Anderson and Gaynor, who married in '96, have added two more faces to the mix—Amber, 2, and Riley, 1. Becky is a full-time mother, while Neal pulls extra duty as a security guard to make ends meet. "My alarm clock is Tyler and Amber at 7 a.m.," says Becky, who is on the go until the kids sack out at 8. Evenings are spent paying bills and watching TV until Neal arrives at 11:30. Finances are tight and their time together scarce, but Becky isn't complaining. "I'm glad my life turned out the way it did," she says. "It doesn't work out for everyone. I don't take it for granted."
Angela Myada, 22, with Maresha, 5, and Mandisa, 5
Angela Myada is a puzzle. Obviously bright and devoted to her twin daughters Maresha and Mandisa, she has struggled to get clear of homelessness and unemployment. Last January, she landed a secretarial job with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. But in July she quit after a run-in with her boss, Rev. E. Randel T. Osburn. "I got tired of him yelling at me," she says.
It didn't occur to her to have another job lined up before walking out. "Angela is young," explains Roxanne Gregory, general counsel of the SCLC. "She is living the life of somebody who ought to be a lot older than she is."
Myada lives in public housing, works as a cashier at Wendy's and gets $150 a month in food stamps. She lost contact with Lee Franklin, the twins' father, when she moved to Atlanta from L.A. in 1996. Recently she lost a baby when she miscarried at 3½ months. She has had bad luck in general with men. "A lot of the guys think selling drugs is the way to make money," she says, adding that she is not looking for romance but stability.
Myada wishes that she had gone to college and gotten married before getting pregnant. "I'm still growing and learning," she says. "I'm not there yet."
Tori Michel, 22, with Caitlin, 5
Being just 17 years older than your child can occasionally be an unexpected advantage, says Tori Michel. When her car was rear-ended on the interstate recently, it was her daughter Caitlin who did the mothering. "I was crying in the back of the police car, and Caitlin turns to me and says, 'Mom, accidents happen. It'll be okay,' " recalls Michel, who gave birth to Caitlin in her senior year of high school in St. Peters, Mo. "It's like having your own live-in best friend."
Except that the real mother has to cope with the bills. "Everything's behind—car payments, rent," says Michel. "It's horrible." An aspiring model, Michel earns $25,000 a year as an administrative assistant at a construction company, waitresses weekends at Hooters and receives Medicaid for Caitlin. Still, it's a stretch. Having lived with two different boyfriends over the past three years, Michel recently moved into a duplex in St. Charles, Mo., with her divorced mother, Susan, 51. "It's been really hard for Tori," Susan says. "The responsibility of having a child at that age is unbelievable." Still, Michel feels she has done well by her daughter. "She says 'please' and 'thank you' and respects her elders, which is what I want," she says. Michel has been dating warehouse employee Rick Barry, 25, for nine months but says she has no contact with Caitlin's father. In hindsight, she says, "I'd never do it the same way." When Caitlin turns 16, she adds, "I'll say, 'Take your time.' "
Yaisa Jones, 22, with DeShawn'te, 6, Shawnise, 3, and De'Asia, 1
DeShawn Jackson and Yaisa Jones had been an item since elementary school in Cleveland. In fact, in 1994, a year after the birth of their first child, Jackson vowed to marry Jones. Baby DeShawn'te was followed by Shawnise, then by De'Asia. Today the girls live with their mother in a two-bedroom apartment in Cleveland— Jackson does not. "When I got pregnant with De'Asia, things kind of broke off," says Jones. "We're still good friends."
Jackson, 23, a housepainter, sees his children nearly every day. But Jones is the major force in their lives. A year ago she got a nursing-assistant license and, with her job at a nearby nursing home, was able to move the girls from a drug-infested neighborhood to a clean and safe apartment complex. Jones says she was using birth control when DeShawn'te was born in 1993. But following an abortion, she says, she and Jackson decided to have the next two kids. "We had planned to get married," she explains.
Jones is a protective mother. "I talk to DeShawn'te all the time," she says. "I tell her, 'Drugs are not nice. Sex is not nice. People and guns, none of that is good for you.' I want them to know there's a limit to what they can do."
And if one of them gets pregnant? "I pray they don't put me through that," says Jones. "But I'll be by their side. I was young, too. I'll understand."
William Plummer and Anne-Marie O'Neill.
Reported by: Vickie Bane in Wheat Ridge, Colo., Karen Brailsford in Los Angeles, Gabrielle Cosgriff in Houston, Mary Green in Cleveland, Lisa Kay Greissinger in Hicksville, N.Y., Mary M. Harrison in Ellisville, Mo., Kate Klise in St. Charles, Margaret Nelson in Minneapolis, Laura Sanderson Healy in London, Krista Reese in Stone Mountain, Ga., Barbara Sandler in Chicago, Aaron Smith in Portland, Maine, and Michael Sommers in New York City
- Contributors:
- Vickie Bane,
- Karen Brailsford,
- Gabrielle Cosgriff,
- Mary Green,
- Lisa Kay Greissinger,
- Mary M. Harrison,
- Kate Klise,
- St. Charles,
- Margaret Nelson,
- Laura Sanderson Healy,
- Krista Reese,
- Barbara Sandler,
- Aaron Smith,
- Michael Sommers.
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