The hard part wasn’t the physical discomfort—the backaches, the swollen ankles, the midnight cravings. The hard part was the quiet. The 2 a.m. moments when she lay awake in the dark, one hand on her belly, and felt the weight of her own childhood ending. She wasn’t a girl anymore. She was someone’s mother.
Madi sat. And then she cried. Not delicate, movie tears, but the ugly, heaving sobs of an eighteen-year-old watching her scholarship, her freedom, her plans to escape this small town dissolve into diaper changes and daycare costs. Cheryl didn’t say “I told you so.” She didn’t lecture. She just pulled Madi into her arms, the way she had when Madi was five and had scraped her knee on the playground. madi collins 18 and pregnant
The next three months were a crash course in adulthood. Madi deferred her college scholarship—a heartbreaking phone call that left her hollow for days. She picked up extra shifts at the diner, ignoring the way her apron strained over her growing belly. She and Leo moved into the tiny, converted garage apartment behind her mom’s house. It had one bedroom, a kitchen the size of a closet, and a landlord (Cheryl) who charged them only what they could afford: $400 a month, utilities included. moments when she lay awake in the dark,
“So what do you want to do?” he asked, finally meeting her eyes. Madi sat
Madi’s mom, Cheryl, was a night-shift nurse at Mercy Hospital. She was a woman built of efficient love and exhaustion, a single parent who had raised Madi on a diet of leftovers eaten between shifts and lectures about birth control delivered with the bluntness of a surgical scalpel. Madi had nodded along to those lectures, convinced she was too smart to become a statistic. She was the class salutatorian, had a partial scholarship to community college, and worked thirty hours a week at the local diner. She wasn’t that girl. And yet, here she was.