By Woody Stanfield
Before I wrote this, I called my mother. And I did what a lot of men need to be doing right now – I listened. I asked her about her life, what she had gone through, how she felt, and how she persevered. When I asked her if it was okay for me to share her story, she told me “If you think it will help someone, you can tell whoever you like.” I am going to be as true and earnest as possible to my mother’s story as I write this because it is her story, not my take on it that we need to hear.
My mother was born on the far south side of Chicago in 1964. 12223 South Peoria. My mother grew up there in a family of too many kids and too few checks. It was hard for each of them and they didn’t make it easy on each other. They didn’t have much themselves and there wasn’t much nearby – a decent park and average garbage collection was about the extent of the city’s services that my mom remembers.
Today Chicagoans still talk about poor education systems and poor accessibility to trauma and health centers on the South Side of Chicago. Well, it was worse then, far worse. In the late 1960s to mid 1970s, there was no comprehensive sex education. So when my mother needed to be told what was happening with her body and how to be safe, there was no infrastructure in place to teach her. So it’s not surprising that my mother, like many other young women, became pregnant when she was 15 years old.
She struggled to make it work, pulling on her friends and family. The people who truly loved her came together to help her through. When I talk to my mom about how she made it, she’s always thankful. Thankful for the people and the communities that came together and thankful that while she had a lot of work ahead of her, other people were going to help with the heavy lifting.
Year after year, my mother was playing catchup. Eighteen years old, with a 3 year old in tow, she had to figure out how to raise a kid and provide for him when she was struggling to provide for herself. She didn’t have the education, the skillsets, work experience, or really anything to make her highly employable and help her earn enough to support my brother. It wasn’t just hard, it was overwhelming. Years later, during the ‘80s, my mother and her friend lived together in a trailer park on the oil fields of Salem, Illinois. Both single mothers caring for their children together. When one was at work, the other would watch the kids. It was a poor woman’s Hull House, decked out in aluminum siding. Neither of them would have succeeded without the other.
In spite of the entirety of her life stacking against her, my mother persevered. I don’t know where she summoned the strength from and I doubt she even knows– she barely even gives herself the credit. But as a teenage mother, she pulled a strength out of herself that could tackle the world. It was a combination of my mother’s sheer determination, willpower, and hard work along with her friends and family that made raising my brother possible.
But not everyone has those windfalls. For a lot of young women who got pregnant, especially in the 1970s, were exiled from their families, shunned by their communities, and cast out by their churches. The only people who could make it possible to take care of the child, turned their backs on them. It is for these women that what my mother told me really stings.
“Nobody told me about my options. No one took me aside and said ‘Listen, let’s go to the clinic and figure out what you want to do.” She was incredulous when she told me this. Not angry or bitter, but amazed. She never thought of it in the moment, but reflecting on it years later, she realized how absurd it was. But the takeaway for my mother was the toll that took on her son. “The birth of my son was a struggle for me and for him. He was born to a mother who wasn’t ready and because of this he had to grow up with a mother who was still growing up… my only regret is that I didn’t know how to be the mom I am today.”
Women should never be forced to go through what my mother had to and children should not have to come into this world to parents not ready for them. For every success story like my mother’s, there are many more stories of moms who did not succeed and whose children were not taken care of properly or the care of their child fell to their family members.
As my mother puts it “The price of unwanted teen pregnancy never goes away. Children can forever be scarred by their childhood. Be a parent when you are ready to be the best parent. It is the most important work you can do for this planet.”
Those women should have choices. And right now, they don’t. Not in this country or across the world. Things have improved in the past decades, sure. Every single woman in my family can get access to birth control if they want it, most of them for next to nothing or free.
But then again, I don’t have family in Alabama or Mississippi where access to sex education, birth control, and abortions is nearly nonexistent. You know, those same states that inexplicably have the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the country. Where far too many young women are living what my mother’s story would have been if she didn’t have the community she had and if she wasn’t the woman she is.
So today is the Day Without Women and I don’t know where I’d be without my mother. I really don’t. But I know for certain that if it were not for her strength, compassion, and perseverance, I would not be who I am today. And if it were not for her morals, I would not have mine, and I would not be fighting for the causes I believe in. So mom, thank you, and I love you.
In honor of my family: my mother Denice Racine (Ellis), my grandmother Mary Lee Stanfield, my sister-in-law Amanda Pitts, my cousin Mary Stanfield, and my sister Madison Rain Pratt. And to my dear friends, Izzy Gut, Lara Haddadin, Claire Short, and Maggie Stange.