A 13 Year Old Girl Cut School one Day

Sittng on the porch today, I was thinking about this: A 13 year old girl cut school one day in a gritty post industrial white once-Irish town. She was very tall for her age and skinny and had bright red hair. She and her girl friend were strolling along and passed an open porch where a 27 year old man was sitting, drinking, and idling away the day. He invited the girls up onto the porch and gave them drinks. They all laughed and joked and drank and the girls became intoxicated. The man took the red haired one into the house and raped her.

The girls never told anyone because they had been skipping school and they knew they would get in trouble. They were frightened. Then, the red hair girl discovered she was pregnant.

The red haired girl had a boyfriend her own age, a boy who was innocent like she had been. She told him about what had happened. Then she told her mother. She and her mother decided to go through with the pregnancy. The mother was a darts champion at the local bar and spent most of her time at work or at the bar and possibly she felt a little guilty about the lack of supervision provided to her two little boys and her daughter.

The little red haired girl and I met when I was hired by my school district to tutor her at home in the last month of her pregnancy. Her row home was furnished with threadbare but serviceable furniture. Around the top of the walls just below the ceiling hung a collection of beer themed baseball hats. Each day, after school, I arrived at her home with her books and assignments so she could keep up with the classwork and return to school after her delivery and, hopefully, finish her education.

Often, I had to hire my 10 year old daughter to come with me to do the math as it was so different from any math I had ever seen that I was stumped! My daughter and I named the little red haired girl Pippy Longstocking because we had been reading the books and I had bought the video cassette.

We invited the red haired girl over to our house, one cold rainy day and the two girls sat at tv tables with grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup watching the movie Pippy Longstocking, and laughing. From the back, they didn't look much different as my daughter was already getting tall. From the front, one of the children was pregnant.

Before I became Pippi's home-bound tutor, her mother had gotten the whole story from her and the man down the block had been arrested. He had been convicted and sent to jail.

Just before the end of the nine months, Pippi began to cry. I asked her what was wrong and she said, "I don't understand how the baby is going to come out!" Fortunately for us both, I had a close friend who had worked in a community education program that had taught sex, pregnancy and child birth education and she had the materials and an overhead projector. She gave Pippi a class on child birth.

For a few months after the baby was born, I was still paid to tutor Pippi. She was a good mother, unlike so many of the other teens I had tutored who resented the babies after they were born and were impatient with the crying and the demands of an infant. One day, she showed up at the high school with her baby in a stroller; she was so proud of the baby, but the school officials asked her to leave. The kids were all in class anyway and there were no kids roaming in the halls to see her baby. She had walked so far and had been so proud and now she was embarrassed.

Over the years we lost track of one another and I was reassigned to many other home-bound students. Time went by. My own daughter became a high school student. I took her to my gynecologist for birth control when she told me she thought she should have it. She was so proud when the doctor asked if it was necessary for her to talk to her mother and my daughter said that I had told her when she felt the time was right I would bring her, no questions asked. We'd had experience, both of us, with teen pregnancy.

Years passed and my daughter graduated and moved on to a different life far away. One day in Spring I went to the J. C. Penny store in the local mall for a raincoat and umbrella. A tall, nicely dressed woman with bright red hair asked me if I needed help. It was PIPPI! She told me she had married the high school sweetheart who had joined the army as soon as he graduated and they had traveled with his postings and her daughter was now 8 years old and smart and good and doing well in school. I told her about my daughter in California working at DisneyWorld, and we chatted generally for awhile until she had to get back to work and I had to leave.

It was the best happy ending of all my home-bound tutoring stories. Pippi had a job, a husband, a good and healthy child, and a good life. I can only hope that I offered some help and support with that.

What made me think about this story was that a friend and I were celebrating Margaret Sanger a week ago. I had painted a portrait of Sanger for an Art Show during March Women's History Month, and I said how so many girls become sexually curious and often active by 16 years of age and how important it was to have birth control so that they had some chance to get their high school diploma, at least! My daughter had the opportunity to try several kinds of careers over the years and I, myself, had been able to travel and go to college and get a career, and after my divorce, to buy my own house. And now, I live comfortably with a pension from that education and career, all thanks to birth control and Margaret Sanger!

Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com