Amanda van Scoyoc

At 3:05 PM yesterday, after almost 30 hours in the hospital, Damaris gave birth to 8 pound 7 oz Andrea Isabella. I was fortunate enough to be there with Damaris from when they induced her through the birth until when her extended family showed up to meet a peaceful Andrea and an almost unconsciously exhausted Damaris.

In the afternoon when they induced Damaris, we were all excited. The monitors showed that she was having contractions, but she didn’t feel them. For a few hours she was dilating, contracting, and in no pain. It was delightful. At night, Damaris’ mom left. Andres (Damaris’ fiance), Damaris and I were left alone for the night. It felt a bit like a sleepover and for a moment I actually thought “the three of us together all night… this is going to be really fun.” We had cots and blankets and an endless supply of drinks and popsicles. We watched TV, set up and talked excitedly into the video camera… and then the pain came.

With Damaris in constant pain, it was hard to feel a part of it at times. Pain is disillusioning. It is impossible to understand another’s pain and it is so difficult to even describe. Without it’s own vocabulary, pain must be explained by similes, (As the nurse asked, “Is it like a bowling ball in your bottom?”) Fighting my own sleepiness, I was aware of Damaris’ pain, but I am quite sure that Damaris was more aware of my lack of pain.

During the night it got worse and then better and then worse as she slowly dilated. We weathered the night and then the morning with Damaris on heavy painkillers. Around 2PM she was finally 10 centimeters and the pushing began.

In this small room watching the baby pulse closer and closer to the opening- there was no embarrassment. It was easy to become so wrapped up in the pulsing as to forget that this struggle in the end was Damaris’ alone. During the course of pushing Andrea out of her, Damaris had her moment of complete exhaustion and demanded for it all to stop. Her mom said over and over on top of Damaris’s pleas and through her own tears “Tu Puedes, tu puedes, tu puedes.” Andres showed me how his hand was shaking. I walked away with tears and fiddled with my camera. Damaris is one of the strongest women I know – and to see her in such pain was overwhelming.

With out hands wrapped around hers and our arms pulling her legs back we were still only outsiders watching the greatest miracle of life. With Damaris exhausted and the baby’s head only inches away (it’s black tuft of hair peaking through) we could not convince her to go on and we all broke down (all except for the nurse who kept up her cheers of “you can do it Damaris, you can do it.”) After a few minutes, she regained composure and decided that she was getting the baby out as quickly as possible. And within 10 minutes Andrea emerged as the doctor pulled her head out with surprising force. She was blue and still until that first breath, and then she sprawled her arms, grasped at the air, turned pink and sobbed.

At the hospital, it was hard to know what to tell people I was. We said that I was a friend and that I was videotaping. I came carrying a huge tripod, a medium format camera, a 35 mm camera, a digital camera and a video camera. I had to explain over and over why I had all of the equipment and what we were doing, and how I knew Damaris. At times I questioned my own intentions.

During the delivery, at one point I heard Damaris’ nurse inform Andrea’s nurse of who was in the room. She said, “the patient’s boyfriend, the patient’s mom and her best friend,” for a quick moment I felt that that we had fooled the nurse. But thinking about it, besides my boyfriend, I am as close to Damaris as I am to anyone else in Boston (and she’s the only person whose portraits hang in my living room and bedroom.) In a strange way, I am much closer to the girls I work with than I was to very good friends in college.

When I started this fellowship, I never expected that these kinds or relationships would be a byproduct of documenting lives. Asking personal questions of one another over the course of a year – isn’t that basically what being a friend is? Shouldn’t I have known? Sometimes I think that without documentary work, I could never be this close to these girls. Without the excuse of photography, I would never have asked to enter their homes, know their children, meet their parents, cook with them, and be a part of their everyday lives. I certainly would not have been there with Damaris the moment Andrea arrived.

After Damaris gave birth her mom said to me in Spanish while holding little Andrea, “I only hope that Damaris and I can be there when you go through this. But, you should do it soon.” I smiled not really having the skills to respond well enough in Spanish.

This is a photo of Damaris with the cast she made of her pregnant belly. In this photo she a beautiful 8 months pregnant.

Damaris Interview
January 17, 2008 4:45PM.

Damaris: My name is Damaris Nevarez. I am nineteen years old. I’m from Puerto Rico… I am seven months pregnant.

Ok, I’m going to talk about the first time I got pregnant and why. Ok, the reason why I even tried to check if I was pregnant was because I missed my period for a whole month. It wasn’t there. I got a urinary infection with that. My mom said to me “You’re pregnant.” I said “No I’m not” and she said “Yes you are.” The first time she got pregnant with my brother she got a urinary infection too. So then I was like, “Ok let me just find out.

So the next day I was working so my boyfriend came into work with me. When I had my break, he actually went to John’s pizza to get us something to eat and I went to the store, Compare. I bought a pregnancy test. He was waiting for me at John’s pizza. We ate. We were kind of quiet. And we were just nervous. I was like, “Don’t worry we’re not pregnant. We’re just not.” And we went back to Roca. I went straight to the bathroom. I didn’t really wait and it came back negative. It was like a relief for him, you know. Then it came out positive. I let it sit wait a little bit, and it came out positive. And of course, I was really happy and he was too, but we were nervous cause we knew our life was going to change, and I didn’t know how other people were going to take it. I don’t really care about what other people say or my family but they actually took it really really good.

Interviewer: How so?

Damaris: My mom was happy. My sister was excited too. Everyone was excited. This is the first time his family is going to be grandparents and aunts and uncles. They were really excited too. So the first person I told was him, and then he called his brother and told his brother that he was going to become an uncle. His brother was really excited. It was a good day. It wasn’t bad, but it was hard to keep the secret, like I wanted to keep it a secret, but I couldn’t I wanted to tell everyone.

Interviewer: (looking at photos in her journal) Were these pictures taken when you first found out you were pregnant or later?

Damaris: I believe these pictures were taken a day or two after I found out I was pregnant. Yeah I took a picture of that pregnancy test that I took. I wanted to keep it but it smelled really bad. So I was like, “No, I’ll just throw it away.”

Yeah I was really excited. I was so happy I couldn’t believe I was pregnant. I felt kind of good because I thought at least I’d beaten both my sisters because my first sister got pregnant when she was fourteen and the other one got pregnant when she was 18. I was 19 when I got pregnant.

Interviewer: I guess the only other thing we should do is (talk about) how you feel at seven months? Cause then when we do other audio recording…

Damaris: Um, I can’t complain about my pregnancy. I feel very well actually. I believe the baby has been very very good. She has never bothered me at all. Um, ever since I was like a month… well you know I didn’t even know I was pregnant. I didn’t even throw up puke or anything. Throughout my whole pregnancy I haven’t even puked. I eat a lot of food. I used to eat a lot before but not I eat a bit more. It’s been great. Even now at 7 months it still feels great. I feel a bit bigger. It’s a little bit harder for me to move around the bed and to get up from the bed it’s a little bit harder for me. To bend down. If I want to bend it’s a little hard. I have to squat. Is that how you say it? Squat? Yeah, um to pick up something… The stairs, I used to go up like 12 stairs like it was nothing. But, now it’s as if I did 2 miles just getting up those stairs…

Today I’ve been playing around with some audio I recorded last week during Thursday’s Young Mom’s group. We decided a couple of weeks ago to start talking more about teen pregnancy as an “issue.” Before this we had mainly talked about the experience of being a young mom or pregnant teenager.

I audio recorded the girls talking about whether teenage pregnancy is a problem, why it is a problem, and how to combat this issue. I like how in the end of the recording they are giving me suggestions on how to make my project better. It has been such a struggle to get the girls to see my vision, and now I love that they are sharing their own vision of this project with me.

Link to the interview.

Below is a transcription of an interview I did last week with Roxannie. During the interview she was very excited to talk on tape (she talked quickly and transcribing was a nightmare.) I have become quite close to Roxannie and she was willing to talk very honestly about her experiences as a teen mother. After we were done, she wanted to listen to the interview, so I put the headsets on her head and played back the tape. When it got to the part about her daughter’s Dad, she began to cry but kept listening. When I finally took the headsets off she said, “It is really sad isn’t it?” And I said, “yes, it’s sad.”

First a few of my photos of Roxannie and her daughter in their house. These are still raw and will soon be photoshopped.

“R: So, my name is Roxannie and I’m 20 years old now. My daughter is 4. I had her when I was 15. Her name is Naisha. Um, Naisha is from El Salvador and Puerto Rico. I’m from Puerto Rico. Her dad is El Salvadorian.

A: Where were you when you found out you were pregnant? How did you feel?
R: I was thinking about it for like three days before I decided to go and get tested. I was thinking about it and I wouldn’t tell nobody. I didn’t even tell Alex that I felt like if I was pregnant. I was feeling completely different. I knew I was pregnant right away because it was a complete change in my body in my mood, everything. So, I was in school, I decided to go to the doctor because they have a clinic in the high school. I got tested right there. I just started crying, felt overwhelmed that I was pregnant. Didn’t know what to think.

A: Did any part of you want to get pregnant?
R: It was a surprise, but I can’t say that we didn’t know that something like that could happen, because we weren’t using protection on either side, and we lived in the same house, and we slept in the same bed. Like we knew something like that could happen, but we didn’t prevent it. So, we weren’t all that surprised. I was just overwhelmed by the news.

A: Do you remember when you first held Naisha and what you felt like?
R: Well, right after we came out of the C-section… I was immediately out… When I woke up, what I saw was I saw Alex changing her diaper… and I was like “oh that’s my daughter, that’s my baby” But just immediately you have this bond… Like she’s not there no more. I’m not talking to the belly no more or trying to bother her. I used to poke my stomach just for her to hit back or something… and this time I was like touching her and it was nice.

A: How were the first few months with Naisha…
R: It just felt natural, and the doctors were surprised cause like I was only 15, but I didn’t ask the nurses for any help, it was natural. I didn’t have no complaints. I didn’t ask for help. Like, I knew what I was doing it was something natural. That’s how I felt.

A: What is your relationship with Alex like now?
R: I can’t say it’s a good relationship because really it’s not. Before, when I tried for it to be a good relationship because of the baby and stuff like that, Alex used to hang out with Naisha because I was always pushing it like, “Hey, you gonna come pick up Naisha? Hey … do you want to have her in the afternoon?” and I would go drop her off… I stopped doing that about like a year ago, because I wasn’t feeling me being after him all the time…

And I don’t have anything against him you know, I treat him with respect… It’s not a “Hi, how are you doing?” It’s just a simple “Hi. Ok, you’re taking her. Ok what time are you going to bring her back? She needs to eat. Make sure that she’s covered, and I will call you to see when it’s close to eight o’clock.”
Like that’s all.

…Naisha when she was three she was starting to create an imaginary figure of her father, and every single time she was in her room, she would come out and be like, “Oh Mom, I talked to Dad. Me and Daddy are going here, or me and Daddy did this.” I knew what she was telling me wasn’t real… she was going through a phase where her father and her weren’t together as often or she didn’t see him as much, so she was just creating an imaginary figure of him… That hurt me a lot. That hurt me so much and I told him and it was like nothing… But it’s like whatever. You’re not a good father so for me you are nothing. You are just Naisha’s Dad. That’s it. He’s just Naisha’s Dad.

A: Do you want to have more children and if so when.
R: Eh, well I had her when I was 15. I’m only 20. She’s 4, I’m just about to finish my GED. I like what I’m doing… I want to travel with Naisha. I want to go to Africa and Europe with her. South America, and have this road trip in the States. I don’t think anytime soon. I don’t know when either. Now that I’m on my own… I don’t know. Not having that other someone there, the father there for her, it’s a lot harder for me. I don’t think I want to go through this again… I want to adopt orphans. So maybe I’ll just adopt orphans after I turn 25 or after I turn 30, and just you know give my love to other kids instead of having more kids. Who knows.”

Here are some Roxannie’s photos. The bottom one is of Naisha taking her asthma medicine.

After finishing the painting of Damaris in her bedroom last weekend, I realized that I did not like the straight forwardness of the painting. Although the painting is in no way a reproduction of the photograph that Damaris took, it did not say anything that was not said in the photograph.

I called one of my closest friends and fellow painter, Alex Freeman, and asked him for advice on how to make the paintings about teen pregnancy move further away from reproduction (although still basing the paintings on photographs taken by the young women.) He brought up the fact that ever since I was fifteen, we’ve watched each other grow artistically for that long, I have always included personal symbolism in my paintings. They have always included symbols that show how I am experiencing the world that I reproducing, so that the paintings become as much about my experience of the subject matter as they are about the subject itself. I realized when he told me this, that my journal is still rich with such symbolism and interpretation but the paintings are not.

I decided to sit down and work on a painting based on the same photo I used for the last painting. This one is more in the style of my “bathtub” series that I worked on all last year- combining images from photographs and symbols that enter my journal.

I had scribbled into my journal
“Fetus in a womb like adult in a bathtub. Child in a bathtub like adult in the world. Pregnant Teenager?” I decided to move forward from there and work in some of the symbolism I’d developed in my journal. I also decided to use gel medium (a clear acrylic primer) to prepare the birch wood for painting on so that the wood could remain the background of the painting. Here is my experimental painting.

This weekend I am taking a break from from photography and working on a couple of paintings.

On Wednesday I went on my first intake visit with Healthy Families. An intake visit is the first visit with a young mother. Roca gets a referral from either a school or hospital and then schedules a time to meet with the young woman, usually in her home. Before the intake, Roca only knows that the young woman may be in need of Healthy Families services.

At 2 PM, I drive with Eloisa to the address of the young woman on her list. We end up in a part of East Boston that neither of us has been to before, and we park in front of a condo with the address. Inside the building there were 4 or 5 apartments and Eloisa knocks on doors and loudly says “Sandra, is Sandra here? We are looking for Sandra.” She has learned from experience that she must take charge of finding the young women. She opens a door to the wrong apartment and a small child points upstairs. A mother emerges behind the child and says in Spanish that Sandra’s apartment is one floor above.

Inside of the apartment it is dark and noisy. The TV is on as well as a lullaby. Sandra and her mom sit on the couch and we sit down as well. Sandra does not smile or look at us at first. Sandra’s mom asks if she can make us a cup of coffee or a cup of tea. She smiles at us and seems grateful that we have come. The baby is in the corner of the room sleeping in an electrical swinging bassinet that plays the same 2-minute tune throughout the visit. Although the baby is only a few feet away and signs of the baby are everywhere (in Sandra’s still puffy stomach, the music in the air, the toys on the floor, the fact that at 2PM Sandra is at home,) Eloisa doesn’t mention the baby. The focus of intake visits is the new mother. The baby is only mentioned in the question “when did you give birth.”

Sandra’s mom is very proud of her child and boasts that Sandra has always been such an independent young woman. She wants to help Sandra move out of the house and into an apartment with her 18-year-old boyfriend. She is OK with signing the papers so they can get married if that is what Sandra wants. Living in the house is tight. Sandra has three younger brothers.

In an attempt to give Eloisa and Sandra some privacy, Sandra’s mom and I walk over to the sleeping baby. Hovering over it, she says how wonderful it is to have a new baby in the house again. It makes her want a new one of her own. I say how beautiful the baby is. She says that the baby is a good baby just like Sandra was. She says Sandra only had to push seven times to get her out. I don’t know what to say to this so I say, “It must be in your genes. You must be so proud.” We stand around the baby not saying anything and then Sandra’s mom says something about dishes and walks into the adjoining kitchen. I return to the couch with Sandra and Eloisa and we don’t mention the baby again.

I have struggled with the act of being a photographer in a large community center where not everyone knows who I am and why I always have a camera. Roca has received consent to be photographed from all of their young people, so I can take photos of anyone in Roca to be used in Roca – based publications. I try to take photos only of the people who know me, but I have a hard time sticking to that rule.

The photos I take relate to Roca’s key groups of young people. I take pictures that show pregnant teenagers, young mothers, young fathers, young men working, and undocumented youth. They have all already given consent to be photographed at Roca, but is it right to photograph knowing that the photographs will label them as being a part of one of the above groups? I worry that capturing them while they are making a first effort to change their lives isn’t fair.

The issue of consent is very different with the young mothers that I work with. The photos I take of them and the audio interviews I have done with them are much more intimate. In many cases I am asking young women to talk and write openly about sex and relationships. The first couple of months I worked with them I was stressed about making sure I got their consent, but I felt that giving them a paper to sign would send the wrong message when I was simultaneously telling them that their journals were their own personal spaces.

In the past few weeks, I have finally gotten to know the girls well enough that they understand me better, which has made the issue of consent much less of an issue. They now know all about the Hine Fellowship. They have asked me questions like why I don’t have kids, why I live in Somerville, how much I get paid, and why I am working on the issue of teen pregnancy. I have tried my best to answer all of these questions. I have shown them previous work about teen pregnancy and tried to explain that I think it is important that their voices are heard because their stories differ from the public perception of teenage pregnancy. I can’t say they always react with the enthusiasm I hope for.

Last week I played them a Radio Diaries piece on teen pregnancy. I had hoped to discuss how Joe Richmond chose the worst case senario (the girl grew up in foster care, parties all the time, has no relationship with her parents, has an STD). I wanted them to understand that the stories that the public hears about teen pregnancy are often skewed to be the flashiest cases and are not their own. Instead they got very caught up in discussing how much the girl in the interview was partying and how they never get to party because they have kids.

One of the privileges of the Hine Fellowship is that I have the time to be in constant contact with the people whose lives I am documenting. I have the time to show them the work in progress and thus I am never working on something without their knowledge. If you know the participants well enough and you have a clear idea of what you are doing with the material and you keep your participants informed throughout the process there should not be any conflict or need for consent. In reality, I understand that with the limits on time, and changes that happen along the way, this idealism is not always possible. For this reason I do expect in the end to have each girl fill out a consent form. But, I want to make sure that before they sign, they understand exactly what will happen with their work. I want to take the time to go over their work and my work. In particular, I want to go over their journal scans with them to choose together the parts of their work that they give me consent to use.

I think the thing that has affected both my access to these girls’ lives as well as their willingness to display their work is the fact that I have grown to like them and it shows. They know me well enough that they know that I want to tell their stories, not my interpretation of teen pregnancy or the flashiest story. In the end I think of the act of giving consent as an act of trust You are granting your words to another, trusting that they will not use them to harm you in any way. I’m glad that I have taken the time to know these women before asking them to have such faith in me.

Damaris is 19 years old and 7 months pregnant with her first child. She moved to the Boston area from Puerto Rico when she was 5 years old. When I first met her, she was in her first trimester and was so excited to be experiencing her pregnancy. I can tell that she thinks I’m missing out on motherhood being 25 and in a relationship but without a child. She has worked with me to document her pregnancy in her journal and recently with audio recordings and video. I am impressed by the way she crops her photos and decorates her journal. Her work always has a distinctive Damaris style. She believes in being open and honest about her life and pregnancy and has allowed me to scan and put pages from her journal online.

Last week at the Thursday Healthy Families meeting about 5 young mothers came. The mothers range from about seventeen to twenty-one with children up to four years old. All of them are in fairly constant contact with the fathers, but most of them are not married and if they did live together, no longer do. No one in this group is still in high school because the group occurs in the middle of the day at Roca. They are all in some way employed by Roca as young staff or members of Americorps.

I gave the young mothers a list of topics to write about in their journals to spawn conversation. Over a glass of wine at night and a cup of tea in the morning I conjured as many questions as I could about pregnancy, birth and motherhood. In class while journaling about one of the questions, the moment that they realized they were pregnant, a number of the girls prefaced it with an “of course I already knew,” or an “honestly I wasn’t trying to not get pregnant.” They brought up a question that I had forgotten to put on my list- whether or not they chose to become pregnant.

In psych 101 freshman year in a lecture hall with three hundred students, I learned that some women want to become pregnant so that they will have someone to love them. I imagined these women depressed and alone, using sex to make love momentarily and then eternally in the form of a child. I remember thinking it greedy to create a life to fulfill a hole in your own.

In the first couple of months that I worked with Healthy Families the story of how a teenager found herself pregnant was often the first story I heard about a girl. There were the women that knew they wanted to be pregnant before they were, the women who were secretly pleased when they found out, those who came out of the Health Center pale and upset, and the few who denied they were pregnant until the day they gave birth.

Talking to the mothers last week, I realized that I hadn’t asked them to write about the question of whether or not they chose to become pregnant because I assumed the pregnancy stories I didn’t know would mostly reside in the “oh shit” category. For most of them, I know much more about the difficulties they have had being mothers than I know about their lives prior to becoming a mother, and it is hard to imagine them making any decisions about motherhood haphazardly. I see the part of them that hasn’t gone out at night for 2 years because they have a toddler, the part of them that has weathered a pregnancy, a birth, and tiring relations with their baby’s daddy, and the part of them that frets over parenting mistakes.

While listening to them tell their stories about becoming pregnant (many of them remembered exactly where/when), I felt that psych 101 was wrong, that the girls weren’t searching for love any more than any other adolescent. They were living their lives in a way that was familiar to them, the same way their friends were living theirs. In the local high school during a class only for high school mothers, the nurse disparaged the number of pregnant girls dropping out, while the young mothers laughed at a joke and picked studded condoms from the mass of inferior un-studded condoms in the condom basket. Sex seemed the most common of conversations.

The twenty year old in my journaling group who is currently pregnant is the last of her friends to have a child, and is extremely excited to join her friends in becoming a mother. When she told her mother that she was pregnant, her mother was excited and proud of her for being the first of her daughters to complete high school before becoming pregnant. I don’t think these girls’ character and emotional well-being should be questioned because of the choices they’ve made. At the same time, knowing the care these mothers take with their children, it makes me wonder how much motherhood has created the image I have of the women I have come to know.