Just a Kid Herself : Linda, a Mother at 12, Is Determined Five Years Later to Beat the Odds

She was just a little girl.

Sure, she could talk as tough as any teen-ager on the block. She could hang with the older kids, smoking dope and drinking beer. She could come home from school to an empty apartment, scrounge together some form of dinner, and stay up late killing time with whatever hodgepodge of pals wandered by.

But she was only 11--an age at which most girls are considered too young to baby-sit the kids next-door.

And she was pregnant.

For months, she ignored the missed periods; her experience with menstruation had been brief, after all. She ignored the nausea and swollen stomach.

“It was, like, real denial until I actually felt something moving inside of me,” says Linda Pollard, now a senior at El Modena High School in Orange and the mother of a 5-year-old daughter. “I have a big mouth--I like to tell people things. But this was something I couldn’t tell anyone, I was so scared.”

The statistics are frustrating and frightening. In the past decade, births among young girls have climbed both nationally and locally, even though the population of 10- to 14-year-olds, caught in between baby booms, has declined.

Experts believe many factors have contributed to the rise in teen pregnancies: the media’s glamorization of sex, inadequate education about the consequences of unprotected intercourse, and the breakdown of the nuclear family.

“On television, everyone talks about the fun of sex, but nobody talks about the responsibility,” says Victoria I. Paterno, department chairman of Pediatrics at St. John’s Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica and a professor at the UCLA School of Medicine. “It gives teens an incomplete picture of sexuality.”

That picture, she adds, is not tempered by enough sex education either in the home or in the schools: “Prevention is the key. We, as a society, have not done our job in addressing the tragedy of children having children.”

Linda is one of those children, and this is her story.

She makes a lasting impression from the moment she bursts into view.

Clearly relishing center stage, Linda laughs a lot, states her opinion unabashedly and intercepts the limelight from her mother with a periodic, “May I finish what I was saying, puh-leeze?”

But when she talks about the events that led to motherhood, her story sounds surreal and distant.

Linda’s father, Arthur Pollard, met and married her Laotian mother, Onchanh Brumble, in Thailand, where he worked on a U.S. military ship. After Linda’s birth, they moved to the United States and lived with relatives on the East Coast.

Soon thereafter, Pollard landed in prison. “It’s kind of dumb what he did. He robbed a bank, OK?” Linda says, embarrassed..

When was Linda was 8, Arthur Pollard was released from prison and “bribed” her away from his estranged wife. “My mom had a lot of rules I had to live by. My dad said no more spankings, no more rules.”

Her father worked the graveyard shift on an assembly line, leaving Linda to her own devices. Neighborhood pals--teen-agers five or six years her senior--often stayed over at her apartment, where they smoked marijuana and drank her father’s alcohol.

She didn’t look 9. “People sometimes mistook me for 16,” Linda says.

Nor did she act 9.

“That’s when I first had sex. The boy was 11. It was a truth-or-dare type of thing: ‘I bet you can’t do this.’ ‘I bet I can.’ I had girlfriends 13 and 14 already having sex, so it didn’t seem like a big deal.”

Linda estimates that by the time she became pregnant, she had been with two dozen boys and men--including a 27-year-old.

She claims she enjoyed the sexual encounters: “Yeah, it was fun. I just like boys--what can I say?”

But UCLA’s Paterno has a different perspective: “The body is not made to have intercourse at 9.

“When she says she ‘enjoyed it,’ that could mean a number of things. There is the idea of giving someone pleasure; there is the idea of being loved, comforted, needed. Maybe (sex) was her only way of feeling loved.”

Linda began having periods at 10 but disregarded the link between menstruation and pregnancy. “I never used birth control,” she says. “Even after I was pregnant, I thought, ‘Nah, that would never happen to me.’ ”

Meanwhile, Linda’s mother had decided to regain custody after hearing stories from relatives in California about her daughter’s lack of supervision. Brumble arrived in Santa Ana to find Linda--just turned 12--visibly pregnant.

“There is no word to express how I felt,” Brumble says. “ Shock is not enough.”

“The first thing my mom said was, ‘You can’t keep the baby--you’re going to get an abortion,’ ” Linda remembers.

But they soon decided she was too far along for that option. Six months into her pregnancy, Linda finally visited an obstetrician.

In Los Angeles County in 1988, only 42% of mothers-to-be 14 years and under received prenatal care during the first trimester, contrasted with 72% of all expectant mothers, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.

Consequently, 14% of babies born to girls under the age of 15 have low birth weights (less than 5 1/2 pounds), which is twice the percentage of low-weight newborns overall, according to national health statistics.

“Pregnancy for these kids is not a real event until they start to blossom and look pregnant,” says Pam Lind of Orangewood Children’s Home in Orange, which last year housed five pregnant girls under the age of 15. “They have no idea about prenatal care and good nutrition. If they were indulging in substance abuse before they became pregnant, they often continue to use drugs throughout their denial (stage).”

Linda admits she smoked marijuana and drank alcohol during her pregnancy, but luckily, daughter Lisa arrived on her due date, a healthy 6 pounds, 14 ounces.

She says did not immediately take to her baby. “They laid her on my stomach, and she was all slimy, and I said, ‘Oooh, clean her up!’ ” Linda says with a laugh.

But later that day, when a nurse brought the newborn to her room to breast-feed, Linda fell in love.

The father was an eighth-grader, Linda says. “He wasn’t the best person to hang around with. He was affiliated with a gang and was into drugs.”

Still, she somehow felt driven to tell the boy about his daughter. “I went to his house,” she says. “His family was in the process of moving, and he wasn’t there. I left a photo of Lisa with his little brother.

“I figured he at least should know what his child looks like; I figured that would make him care--she’s such an adorable little kid. But I never heard from him.”

Linda moved in with her mother, who had become a grandmother at age 32. Shortly thereafter, her father died of a stroke.

Brumble remarried and had two more children--Travis, now 3, and Natalie, 2.

With the help of the Orange Unified Child Development Center, which provides parenting classes and day care to teen mothers, Linda returned to school. For the last four years, she has dropped Lisa off at the center every school morning and has attended child-rearing and vocational classes there later in the day.

Only 20% of teen-age mothers in the United States complete high school. Linda plans on being one of them. And after she graduates this spring, she hopes to enroll at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. She has applied for financial aid and scholarships.

She complains that her grades could be better: “I have too many distractions.”

The family’s three-bedroom apartment in Orange is sparsely furnished but comfortable. Linda and Lisa sleep together on a mattress in their small room.

It is a midweek night, and the living room has erupted in childish revelry. Lisa playfully pounces on her mother, who lies on the floor. Travis and Natalie follow suit. Loud squeals and giggles explode from the pileup.

The grandmother/mother of the four noisemakers sits on a couch, apart from the action, watching with a placid smile. She seems like the amused matriarch--and Linda the rowdy big sister.

Brumble has divorced her second husband, and her family survives on government aid.

“I hate to say that I’m a mother to Lisa, but I probably am,” Brumble says. “Linda is more Lisa’s playmate than her mother. She would go for three days without bathing Lisa if I didn’t do it. She forgets to brush Lisa’s hair before she takes her to school. She feeds her dinner when she should be putting her to bed.”

Linda agrees: “I’m not very strict with her. My consistency isn’t all that great.”

Indeed, in many ways, Linda leads a teen-ager’s life. She gabs on the phone too much (in her mother’s opinion) and overextends herself with extracurricular activities. Her latest endeavor is a role in a school production of “Grease.”

“She thinks about her daughter all the time, but she’s always off doing other things,” Brumble says.

At least, Brumble concedes, the child has inspired Linda to settle down: “She doesn’t use drugs at all anymore.”

Nor is she as promiscuous. “Lately, I’ve been trying to be kind of celibate,” Linda says. “That’s very hard for me, because I enjoy being sexually active, I’ll tell ya.”

Why, she is asked, does she find celibacy such a difficult objective?

She ponders the question. “I’m a hopeless romantic,” she says. “So, yes, I’d love to be carried off and showered with love and affection. I love the idea of commitment, but I think it’s scary, too.”

“I know one thing: I won’t keep any secrets about sex from Lisa, because it doesn’t work. If she doesn’t learn about it from me, she’ll learn about it from her friends. And she won’t get good information--she’ll just get wives’ tales.

“Society keeps speeding up. Kids today are pushed to grow up so quickly, especially in California. The worst thing that parents can do is stick their heads in the sand. It’s, like, they don’t want their kids to be taught sex education in school, but they aren’t going to teach them at home, either.

“I hope Lisa waits to have sex until she is at least 14.”