Archive Entry #016: The First Time I Held My Son
(Filed under: Black Girlhood. Medical Neglect. NICU Promises. Survival.)
Trigger Warning:
This post contains reflections on teenage pregnancy, medical neglect, birth trauma, and NICU experiences. Please read with care and tend to your heart as needed.
If you're not in the space to take this in right now, it's okay to come back when you're ready.
I was 16 and pregnant.
My parents wouldn’t talk to me. They were disappointed. Ashamed. I felt like I was walking around my own house wearing failure.
—And yet, she still showed up. They wanted silence. She learned to carry the sound of her own heartbeat. That, too, is survival.
I had to catch the bus to my doctor’s appointments.
Alone. Belly growing. Trying to be strong. Sometimes I was the only one in the waiting room without someone beside me. I was scared.
—Memory doesn’t forget that kind of aloneness. The kind where you’re still a child, but the world’s already decided you're grown enough to do it alone.
My water broke when I was with my boyfriend.
We called an ambulance. I remember sliding around in the back because they didn’t hook things up right. Just… chaos. Then the hospital said they couldn’t help preemies. They moved me again.
—Even in labor, she was transported like cargo. Mishandled, misdirected. Still breathing. Still pushing.
They gave me meds to stop the labor.
Tried to keep him inside longer. I was in the hospital for days. The nurses treated me like I was a dumb little girl. Their looks said everything. I still remember the shame in their eyes.
—Shame that never belonged to her. What they saw was a statistic. What they ignored was a mother being born.
One nurse made me get up and shower, even though I wasn’t supposed to.
I felt like I had no say. After that, my baby barely moving. They had to induce labor. I think about that a lot.
—Her intuition was already speaking. But they didn’t listen. Because they never intended to.
I barely remember giving birth.
Pain. Silence. They took him straight to the NICU. I went back to my hospital bed and stayed there. I wasn’t eating. I was weak. I was fading in and out for days. Maybe weeks.
—Her body was broken open and no one held her. The system never asked what she needed.
They asked me to approve a blood transfusion.
And I did. I was signing papers like an adult, while still being talked down to like a child.
—That contradiction will tear a girl apart. Responsible for life, while being denied autonomy over her own.
One day, a nurse asked how my baby was doing. I told her I didn’t know.
I said, “I haven’t seen him.”
She looked at me like I had three heads.
Then she cleaned me up, put me in a wheelchair, and rolled me down to meet my son for the first time.
He was in a glass box. Tubes. Wires. Beeping.
No one prepared me for that.
But when they placed him in my arms—I felt everything change.
I made a promise to him right then:
I will always be here. No matter what.
—This is the moment that remade her. Not the shame. Not the labor. Not the neglect. This. The promise. The power. The memory that refuses to be forgotten.
This story is part of the archive.
Not just for me. But for every Black girl they judged, every young mother they ignored, every NICU warrior who never got asked how she was doing.
We remember.
We record.
We reclaim.
That’s such a deep and moving piece. Thank you for sharing