Mother Struggles for Education

Ask Melinda Nunez about the last four years and she will recount a textbook case of teen-age motherhood.

No school. No money. No clue.

Melinda’s story began early in ninth grade upon learning that she was pregnant with her now-3-year-old daughter, Nina.

“I was a virgin. I never thought I was going to do anything until I got married,” she recalls. A month after becoming involved with the baby’s father, she was pregnant.

Three months later she dropped out of junior high after balking at her physical education teacher’s insistence that she play touch football.

Spurred on by her high school-dropout father, who told her “you gotta break the chain,” Melinda tried to go back to school after giving birth.

But it’s hard to be a good student, she found, on the amount of sleep that a mother of a wakeful infant gets.

“It wasn’t perfect because I was up all night,” she said.

Lacking infant care, Melinda also tried home study. “There’s a pile of books on the table and there’s the soap operas. What are you going to choose? The soap operas.”

By her own account, the young mother also tried drugs, losing custody of Nina to her great-grandmother when someone told social service workers.

After drug testing, parenting classes with the baby’s father, Scott Ueda, and a year of proving themselves, Melinda regained custody of Nina, a victory of which she is proud.

She unabashedly presents her copy of a social worker’s report she was once ashamed to

show anyone. “I’ve proven them wrong,” she said.

Time, meanwhile, marched on. Nina has gone from womb to preschool. Scott graduated from high school on time and is a student at Santa Monica College. But “mommy” is barely out of the ninth grade.

Now that Nina is in preschool three days a week, and with financial help from Scott, Melinda is back at Venice High’s Phoenix Continuation School, with a target graduation date of 1992.

“He graduated on time, but he didn’t have as much responsibility as I did,” said Melinda. “He could always say, ‘Here’s the baby,’ ”

Unlike most of their peers, Melinda and Scott’s relationship has apparently survived teen-age parenthood and they plan to marry, she said.

The caption beside a snapshot of “Nina’s third Christmas” reveals the family history in a few spare statistics:

Nina: 2 years, 6 months

Mommy: 17 years, 8 months

Daddy: 18 years, 10 months.

“The reason we’re still together is because we’re growing up together,” Melinda said.