Teen mum: How I bounced back to school after child birth
A schoolgirl solves a maths problem. A teenage mother says she returned to school for her son and herself, for a better future for them.
What you need to know:
- Felista found out she was pregnant a couple of weeks after resuming her first term in Form Three.
- She made a decision to go back to school after her father’s baby refused to pay for upkeep.
Felista*,16, was in boarding secondary school when she met the father of her son. He was her deskmate. At the time, Felista thought he was the love of her life.
“It was a lie in the name of love. He would come with a lot of shopping and pocket money that he would share with me. My mother is a single parent and does not have a stable job.
"She could not afford to give me enough pocket money and pay my fees. I thought that he loved me because he was sharing his provisions with me,” she tells Nation.Africa.
Jovial girl
Felista found out she was pregnant a couple of weeks after resuming her first term in Form Three.
“I could tell that I was pregnant because my body just felt different. I had also gained a lot of weight. My classmates also started suspecting that I was pregnant because I began isolating myself and was not the jovial girl they knew. I was too afraid to tell anyone.”
She reveals that she faked an illness so that the school could allow her to go home for "treatment".
“When I got home, I took a test and confirmed that I was pregnant. I did not tell my mother; she only found out three months later when I started showing. I refused to go back to school because I did not want to be ridiculed by my classmates and friends who thought I had wasted my academic potential.”
While she was away from school, she worked as a waitress, earning Sh200 a day so that she could take care of her unborn baby.
“There were a lot of complications during delivery because I was small and my baby was too big for me to give birth to naturally. I was advised by my doctor to deliver through a caesarean section. My son was born on my 17th birthday.”
Insulted
Felista made a decision to go back to school after her father’s baby refused to provide upkeep. “He insulted me and told me that he could not drop out of school for a ‘ghetto’ girl like me. I was so surprised. On that day, I made up my mind that I had to return to school for myself and my son.”
Her mother, who had been encouraging her to go back to school, was excited by her decision. She applied for government bursaries and transferred Felista to a day school so that she could study and take care of her one-month-old son.
"I would come back from school during break time (10am) and lunch (1pm) to breastfeed my child. The administration also allows me to report to school at 8.30am as opposed to 7am and leave at 4pm instead of 5pm.”
However, it has been difficult for Felista to be a present mother and a full-time student. She says she had to go back to Form Two to recover the year she took off school.
“Sometimes I would come back from school and find my son sick. Because he was so attached to me, I would forfeit my afternoon lessons and take him to hospital.
"On returning to school the following day, I would find that my books had been stolen. I also had a lot of homework and house chores that made me very tired,” she says.
Nonetheless, Felista says she pulled through and has found a working routine. She will be joining Form Four next year and hopes to become a journalist.
Teenage pregnancies
Reflecting on the International Day of the Girl Child, the mother of one is happy that her mother has been supportive. However, she wishes she had access to sexual and reproductive healthcare and information.
“When I got pregnant, people told me that I had become a woman even though I was still a girl, but when I had asked for information about sex earlier, I was told that kind of information is for ‘big’ people.
"I soon became a big person with no information about sexual and reproductive health. What if we provided girls with information and access to contraceptives? I am sure there would be a reduced number of teenage pregnancies,” Felista says.
Commenting on the issue, Sammy Muraya, project manager at Journalists for Human Rights, suggested that free sanitary towels be provided at every public facility because period poverty also leads to teenage pregnancies.
*Name changed to protect the teenage mother. A stock image used for the purpose of illustration and does not represent the character in the story.
