No Time to Cry : 3 Teen-Agers, One the Mother of Triplets, Talk About Their Lives and Their Children

Melissa is 17, the daughter of a middle-income Mormon couple from the South Bay. She was in the fifth grade the first time she heard about kids in her school having sex. Throughout junior high she held off, saying her religion didn’t permit premarital sex.

“All my friends told me I was scared to grow up,” says Melissa, who asked that her real name not be used.

In high school, peer pressure mounted. In the corridors, girls joked about the night before. After school, all she ever heard on her favorite radio stations was “sex, sex, sex.” Then, on Sunday, some girls she knew would put on “their virgin acts.”

In her sophomore year, Melissa met a boyfriend who seemed “too perfect”: Tall, blond, blue-eyed, with buzzed hair--an older guy who told her he loved her and gave her passes to concerts at The Forum.

“I didn’t want him to think I was mean,” she said. So, she had sex with him at his father’s office.

Minutes afterward, he told her he had another girlfriend. She felt dirty and cheap. Angry and tearful, she started hitting him. “I thought you knew,” he said, shrugging.

About a year later, she found a new boyfriend and, it seemed, real love. They went to a family planning clinic together to get birth control pills because neither trusted condoms. To their astonishment, she found out she was already pregnant.

Six months later, her boyfriend told her he “wasn’t ready for a relationship” and she went briefly into premature labor. At church, meanwhile, she was transferred out of a youth group because she was a “bad example” and moved into a group of adults for whom she had baby-sat.

But her parents stuck by her. And, after years of finding school a bore, she perked up in an independent studies class for pregnant teens--in part because her teachers encouraged her to read about women. Inspired, she now wants to go to college.

“History seemed stupid; it was only about men fighting wars,” she says. “There were never any girls in it. Now, it’s all different. Life ahead may be harder, but I feel better about it.”

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DeAndre Harrison, a burly 17-year-old shot to death by police in Watts during the height of the April riots, left behind an infant daughter and two baby sons--three children, by three girls, in less than a year. A fourth child was born after he died.

Robert Mendoza, a Catholic high school principal who knew DeAndre for years, describes him as “a kid that got caught up in a vicious cycle.” His father had been shot to death when DeAndre was small. Later, the youngster drifted away from school, abandoned his dream of a professional sports career and began hanging out with friends at the Nickerson Gardens housing project.

“He was growing up fast and found out about girls all of a sudden,” says his mother, Anita Lewis. “But he loved his babies . . . At least he could leave something behind.”

One of his girlfriends, a teen-ager named Antoinette, says DeAndre visited her often after their first child was born and occasionally gave her money. She was pregnant with their second last year when she got a telephone call saying he had been shot.

Only at DeAndre’s funeral did she find that she was one of three young women mourning the same man--and that each of the other young women had a baby too.

“He tried to keep the other babies a secret,” says Antoinette, who asked her real name not be used. “I don’t think it’s right, but guys do it anyway. That’s the way it is.”

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Tracy was 17 when she broke the news to her boyfriend that she was pregnant.

Abortion was the first word off his tongue. When she found out “the baby” was really three babies, he vanished.

Half-Chinese and half-Vietnamese, Tracy had already incurred her Old World mother’s anger by taking a Latino boyfriend. She decided to break the news in stages. First, the bombshell: She was pregnant. Second, the baby was twins. Then, finally: It’s triplets, Mom.

“Among Asians . . . if the relatives hear about this, our family would lose face,” she says. “The girls are supposed to go to school, get engaged, have a big wedding and then wait a year before having a kid. I skipped all that. . . . “

Her mother was angry and suggested abortion. Tracy, determined to have the babies, moved out of her San Gabriel Valley home.

But when her triplets were born, all three were sick. One needed surgery for a cyst. The second had a defective heart and a fever that wouldn’t go away. The third had spina bifida and meningitis. Today, Tracy is back home, paying her mother $550 a month rent out of her $788 welfare check.

“I don’t have any time to cry,” she says, sitting in a room filled with baby supplies. “I’m too busy with them going back and forth to the hospital. It’s only at night, when I’m thinking about everything that’s happened, that I want to cry.”