Listening Posts 2 & 3

I got my chance to visit the students at the Out of School Program again. I was just as nervous the second time around as I was the first.

Last time was a bust, so I was hopeful someone would talk to me and not look at me like a plastic doll.

When the students saw me, their response was a lot warmer than before. One girl smiled at me and pointed out that I wasn't wearing my cardigan. I laughed it off and pretended it wasn't a total diss but more of an endearment kind of thing.

I sat at the large table and waited for someone to start talking. They just stared.

Then, a girl burst through the door, talking loudly and she was well received by everyone in the room. Xaviera, the girl from my previous meeting told me this girl was sure to talk.

"Her name is Michelle, a 19-year-old mother of four," one girl said.

I sat in shock at such an introduction.

I asked her if she would tell me her story and she agreed. I thought it was weird how excited she got to talk to a total stranger.

She told me she has four babies. I couldn't help myself and blurted out, "when did you start?"

She smiled and said she started having sex with a 27-year-old man when she was 13. It sounded like a soap opera to me and she read the doubt in my eyes. It made her a little hesitant to talk after that.

I asked her how she could be in a relationship with someone 14 years older than her and not think it unusual. She said he lied about his age and she didn't know any better. After all, she was just a kid.

By the time she was 13, she was pregnant with twins.

She lost one child at birth when the umbilical cord wrapped around the baby's neck. She named her daughters Natalie and Nicole, a name she came to hate.

"This was a difficult time for me. I was 13 and completely alone with a newborn and handling the death of her sister," she said.

I asked her where her mother was throughout this whole time and she told me she was in and out of her life. She had her own issues to deal with.

At 15, she was pregnant again with another little girl, Janise. Her boyfriend at the time started out as the perfect gentleman until he showed his true colors, she said.

He tried to shoot her with a shotgun but lost control and cocked the gun back, shooting the bullet over her head. She realized she had to get out of the situation and fled.

She found herself with a baby, another one on the way and totally alone.

"Wait. Your parents were still nowhere to be found?" I said.

She explained she was taught sex from a very early age and said her mother used to have sex with different men, she can recall at least 30 of them, and smoke crack in front of her so her situation was normal.

She grew up seeing this and thought it was okay, not realizing the consequences.

"It's not just dip and go," she learned later as she got older.

Michelle just kept having sex and kept having babies. She smiled and said, "That's something I love. I love having kids. Babies are my world."

All the while I'm sitting there in my judgy-wudgy suit thinking this girl is nuts.

She was happy with her out of the ordinary life and when she met her husband, Richard, she thought life couldn't get better.

As she told me her story, I was freaking out. I felt my eyes bulging out of my head and I sat waiting for the camera crew to jump out of the closet and tell me this was one big joke. They never came.

The eerie part of it all was that Michelle shows no remorse or regret for her life as twisted as I think it is.

Here I am, this preppy little girl with her tape recorder and here she is this girl, two years younger than me, totally fine with how messed up I think her life is. She couldn't picture it any other way.

How can this be? I thought to myself.

I snapped myself back into her story and listened to her tell me how her husband was a drug-addict and alcoholic when they first met. Michelle had never been into anything of that sort until they started dating and it led to a downward spiral that she wasn't ready for and I wasn't ready to hear. Like if her story wasn't wild enough!

She had two daughters with him, Charlene was the first.

At the time, Michelle was working as a driver for her brother's escort service. She was in charge of making sure her brother's "girls" looked good for the clients and that they got in and out on time. She was also in charge of collecting the money from clients in exchange for half of the night's profits.

Living the good life, she started partying with her husband's old friends and got tied up in the "bad stuff."

She stressed to me that she always made sure her daughters were taken care of when she went out and never neglected them even though she would be gone for days at a time.

It got ugly one night when Michelle refused to give her friend Nicole money for cocaine and as revenge, the girl called the Department of Children and Families.

They came and drug tested Michelle and removed all three of her children from her custody. It was June 10, 2007.

That was the last day she touched alcohol or drugs.

She completed all her court mandated classes and completed a drug rehabilitation stay, but with no avail- she didn't get her kids back. The case was closed and her kids were separated. One lives with Michelle's sister, another with her father and another was placed in foster care.

She's happy to at least have visitations with the girls.

Throughout the whole ordeal, Michelle ended up getting pregnant- again. Brianna is her youngest daughter and Michelle was terrified she would be taken away as well. She explained to the judge she was on birth control and the judge let her keep Brianna.

Ever since Brianna, life has been better for Michelle. Her and her husband are both working towards a degree and are living on their own.

As for her other kids, she'll get the chance to fight for her daughters back one last time next month.

Right as she finished up her story, the rest of the class walked back into the room and I couldn't remember when they had stepped out.

Even though I was shocked by her story, Michelle's openness put me at ease with the group. She trusted me enough to talk to me and I appreciated it.

Xaviera joked about Michelle's crazy life.

Susie and Xaviera then started talking about their lives and gave me a quick summary of why they were here. Susie repeated what she had told me before, "Mom was a bitch. I had to get out."

I laughed at her blunt attitude about it and she surprised me by turning the tables on me.

She asked me about my story. I told her it was pretty boring and nothing "bad" had happened to me. One girl got defensive and said the things that had happened to them weren't bad, just not what I considered normal.

"Oh, sorry," I said.

Susie asked me if my parents were together and I told her about their recent split. That's when she got all psych-y on me. She asked me how the situation made me feel. I gave her the sob story and she nodded.

To her, my story was nothing. To me, it was the most devastating thing that's ever happened.

She explained to me that most of them had come from broken homes so they don't know what it's like to come from a childhood with both parents living under the same roof. When I told her that it was different for me and how I was blindsided by the whole thing, she understood where I was coming from.

The bond these girls have is obvious. They've formed their own families without their blood relatives.

They each take care of each others kids and hang out outside of school. No, their lives aren't perfect or normal- but I guess what's normal is different for everyone.