Dear Jennice,
You’re 18 years old now and you’re the mother of a 2 month old child. You’ve become a statistic, my dear. You wanted to grow up so fast to prove to your mother that you were not stupid. You let a man seduce you with his kind words and attentive ear. And now you’ve become the cliche: black, on welfare, teen mom.
Not to worry though, for your mother is coming to rescue you from your verbally abusive aunt. She will take one look at Amani and fall completely in love with her. You will move back in with her and it will take her a long time to trust you and sometimes you will still lie to her but eventually you both will come to have a stronger relationship than ever before.
You are still ambitious and you refuse to stay on welfare your whole life. You know that you have many talents and you also want to show Amani that obstacles, no matter how great or small, can be overcome. Stop beating yourself about becoming a teen mom. You are a good mother. Your baby loves you and your mom is supportive. Yes, your aunt will try to continue to slander your name, but ignore her. She’s just mad that she won’t be getting money for you anymore.
So much is going to happen in the next five years. You will laugh,cry, and grow alot. You will learn that you are going to have to trust your mother’s intuition. Yes you will make mistakes, but you can do it and you’ll do fine.
Mommy In Color 
Jennice:
randomly discovering a post like this is one of the many reasons that theSITSgirls is a powerful and amazing community! Yes, I was drawn there by my own selfish wish to have more people reading my blog, but the experience of stumbling across a post like this is moving in so many ways.
Your words are honest, beautiful, and inspiring on a number of levels. As someone who has made self-improvement her official career in these last 18 months, seeing someone be able to reflect back on herself with such love and acceptance–not in spite of her “flaws” but BECAUSE of them–is more moving than I can even put into words…and I’m all about the words!
I look forward to keeping up with your work, and I am going to add your blog to my blogroll so that should anyone be reading mine, they might just take a peek at yours as well.
Fantastic work!
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Thank you so much!!! Your comments are so inspiring and I wrote it to inspire other women and I’m sitting hear tearing up because your comment has really moved me.
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wow!!! I agree with the commenter before me. I’m spell bound – and I want to say ‘good for you’!! I’m sure you’ve had ups and downs in the last 5 years but hang in there! Sometimes you have to cheer yourself on so it’s cool that you wrote yourself this letter!!
Thanks for coming by my blog last week on my SITS day – you’ve inspired me!
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This is … I have no words. You’ve inspired me – I LOVE that you wrote this to yourself during which was probably a hard time. Hang in there b/c sometimes you have to encourage yourself!! But you have other supporters out here on the web too! oh – thanks for visiting my blog on my SITS day!
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Thank you so much for your kind words!!!
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this seriously brought tears to my eyes!!! wow!!! you are an amazing woman and mother!!!
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Thank you so much! That means alot and believe I try so hard to do right by Amani. It isn’t always easy but my mom was a good mom so I have a great example to go by.
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Here via Sits linky party. What an amazing post! I had no idea what I was going to read when I clicked my way through and was quite blown away. It was especially interesting to me to read your analysis of your motivations for becoming pregnant. Don’t we all struggle with our mothers… *sigh* We had one pair of friends in our group when I was young who got pregnant and immediately after got married while we were all still at uni and partying. They seemed like freaks like to us: teenagers and babies — we felt alienated. 20 years later they came to visit us. We were both sleep-deprived with tiny babies but they were in the bloom of health, travelling around the world, their kids by now independent, they still young: it made me realise that 18 is actually not a completely bad time to have children: you’re biologically in good shape, and by the time the child or children are in school and getting older, you’re still young enough to do all sorts of stuff! Thanks for linking!
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I never thought about motherhood that way! Thanks for the new perspective!
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This was beautiful! Your honesty and bravery are inspiring! Just stay focused on the positive… As I’m sure you know, there will be really, really hard days, but just believe that you can do anything that you set your mind to do; all it takes is hard work, a little help, and a lot of love. It sounds like you have all of those things!
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Thank u for ur kind words and encouragement!
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So glad that I saw your post on the SITS ShareFest this morning! You are truly an inspiration! Your daughter is a lucky girl. We all face challenges in life…it’s how we rise to them that’s important! Following you on Facebook and Twitter now, really glad that I found your blog!
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Thank you for the support!!!
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