D R A M A++Q U E E N

Are you a slut, a slob or a sleazebag? Share your shame in Drama Queen for a Day
(04/14/98)

T A B L E++T A L K

Your child will do anything to avoid using the toilet. Frantic parents seek advice on potty training in Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

The worst mother who ever lived, and other light reading
Mythology may be the key to understanding the meaning of your pathetic mortal life
(04/28/98)

Fly girl
By Phaedra Hise
Flying with my toddler at the controls brings back the thrill I felt when my dad taught me to fly
(04/27/98)

How many working fathers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
By Elizabeth Rapoport
Dad helps out? Sure. Try this test
(04/24/98)

America's war on children
By Joan Walsh
"The War Against Parents" that nobody can win
(04/23/98)

The happy prisoner
By Lori Leibovich
Because of Whitewater and Kenneth Starr, she may not be seeing the outside world for the next several years, but Susan McDougal regrets almost nothing
(04/22/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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_____BY TESSA SOUTER | When I had my son 25 years ago, at the age of 16, my father came to visit me in the hospital and, dandling my precious 4-day-old on his lap, turned to me and said: "But darling! Why on earth didn't you have an abortion?"

I might have been coerced into doing just that had I not run away from home. "Because I wanted a baby!" I said. Contrary to everyone's assumptions -- both then and now -- my son was not an accident. He was the product of a long and complicated gestation period that started with a neglected childhood and culminated in my falling prey to an older man who talked me into getting pregnant when I was 15.

To be fair, I didn't mind. I'd been fantasizing about having a child since hitting puberty, perhaps due to a subconscious realization that I needed something or someone constant in my life. I moved frequently throughout my childhood, attending 16 schools between the ages of 4 and 15. My parents divorced when I was 12 -- around the same time that I discovered that I was not my father's biological child -- and spent the next three years squabbling over whose responsibility it was to support me. And then along came Tony. He was nine years older than I and, unlike my parents, he cooked and bought clothes for me. And he wanted a baby. The month I became pregnant I was thrilled. I might have been a child, but I didn't feel like one. As far as I was concerned, I was a mother. At high school my confidantes and I pored over the pictures of fetal development in biology class. There was no question of an abortion.

I ran away with Tony just before my 16th birthday. He turned violent within two months. By then I was trapped: Aside from a secret correspondence with my brother, I was completely cut off from anyone I knew, living in a tiny Welsh village miles from anywhere. I had no one to speak to about Tony's physical and sexual abuse. No one to visit me when, seven months pregnant, I was hospitalized for placental bleeding. I was lonely. I missed my brother, my friends -- even my parents.

But once he was born, I had this wonderful new best friend -- my baby. While he was the cause of my entrapment, he was also my consolation. During my worst moments he was literally my raison d'être.

"You're going to spoil him!" all of my older friends warned, but I ignored them. I picked him up and cuddled him whenever he cried. He was my toy, my constant companion, my absolute universe. I gave him all the love I hadn't gotten at home. And in return he gave it back to me, at a time when I was still young enough for the gift to heal. Sometimes I think that was a big responsibility for him; I suspect the reason he later became a model teen was because on the rare occasions he was even half an hour late home I would burst into tears of relief and cover him with kisses as soon as he came through the door. But then, why not know how important you are to your parents? It still rankles me that mine didn't even report me missing when I ran away from home.

When I was 18, I left my abusive husband. We had been watching a TV program together in which a woman's husband hit her and she accidentally banged her head on the corner of a table and died. I turned to him and said: "What would you do if that happened to me?" His response: "I would take our son and go someplace where no one would ever find us." Wrong answer. The next day I called my mother (who my husband had always been slightly afraid of) and moved in with her while I looked for a more permanent place to live. Within six months my husband disappeared to avoid paying child support, and I became a single parent. It was that, far more than being young, that was the hardest thing.

N E X T__P A G E: The evils of teen parenthood?