Roxane Gay & Everand Originals: You Are a Teen Mom: Instructions

Introduction

By Roxane Gay

Instruction manuals are supposed to offer clarity or guidance, teach us how to use or do something. At their best, instruction manuals remind us that we are not alone as we try to engage with something unfamiliar. All too often, though, instruction manuals are overly complicated, confusing, incomplete. And worse, there are rarely instruction manuals for the most challenging things in our lives — nurturing relationships, living a good life, raising children.

In her essay You Are a Teen Mom: Instructions writer Randa Jarrar upends the notion of an instruction manual as she chronicles single motherhood from a young age. Everyone says children don’t come with an instruction manual. I’m here to tell you they do, she says in the essay’s opening. Across thirty-three sections, Randa writes of getting pregnant at eighteen, the rupture it created in her family, and after a tumultuous and brief marriage to the baby’s father, how she raised her son into a young man as a single mother. This is also the story of how Randa raised herself into the writer and woman she is today, how she made space for joy alongside life’s tribulations, and ultimately, how she forgave herself for her regrets.

Randa is a consummate storyteller and the author of three acclaimed books — the novel A Map of Home, the short story collection Him, Me, and Muhammad Ali, and the memoir Love Is An Ex-Country. She is a professor of creative writing at Fresno State University, where she teaches courses in both fiction and nonfiction. Her award-winning, widely published work explores Palestinian-American identity, the complexities of home as part of a displaced people, single parenting, and living a radical, creative life. She does not limit her creativity to writing — Randa is also a comedian, performer, filmmaker, organizer, and activist.

I started reading Randa’s writing many years ago when she had a blog while attending graduate school at the University of Michigan. I have no idea how I first found the blog, but once I started reading, I was hooked. She had the ability to make everything she wrote about interesting, often poignant. She projected strength alongside vulnerability, courage alongside fear, and these characteristics also shape You Are a Teen Mom. She defies our expectations for what motherhood can look like and is, at times, delightfully irreverent.

There is remarkable honesty in this piece as Randa shares the challenges of single motherhood, navigating one’s twenties, the loneliness of adulthood, the comfort of finding community in unexpected places, and the great and small joys she creates for herself and her son. She offers us the greatest of gifts — an instruction manual on how to be unapologetically human, how to live life on our own terms.

1. Breed with an Idiot

You meet him at a bar when you are barely eighteen. Your gay guy friends from college think he is extremely hot. Four months later, you are pregnant. There are no reality TV shows yet about single young mothers. Your life itself is now like a reality TV show with no budget, housing, film crew, editor, lighting, host, or set. Your father will kick you out, and your mother will keep calling every day and checking on you.

While pregnant, you are in college. The college will not allow a baby to live with you in the dorms. This is a liability for them. A baby shouldn’t be surrounded by weed smoke and bottles of cheap beer. You will have to move in with the man who impregnated you. Call your gay guy friends and tell them this is all their fault. Tell them they need to be there for you when you give birth, knowing they definitely will not be.

Give birth in a hospital where the nurses feel bad about your age. Only eighteen, they yell across the maternity halls. This one is a baby! They point to you. Agree with them. You don’t want to leave the hospital, ever. You don’t want to be away from their care and their kindness.

Your baby is absolutely perfect. You hold him and cry. You count his toes and notice they are crunched together. Worried, you ask the nurses why, and they explain that he was just swaddled inside you and hasn’t fully stretched out yet. They assure you that he is okay.

You kiss his cheeks and feed him from your own milk. This makes you feel powerful. As he nurses, you feel like you are spinning straw into gold, that there is a thread of pure gold silk unspooling from your body into his, nourishing him and keeping him safe.

The hospital staff will ask you if you want to purchase a breast pump. You can’t afford one, so they