Waiting to Become Mothers

Her dreams are big and bold, the way dreams are supposed to be.

She drives a 10-year-old Mercury Tracer, but has her eyes on a luxury car. She works a job that pays above minimum wage, but hopes to one day make much more. She lives in the projects, but wants to own property, a big house for her future family and for her mother.

For now these are only dreams, distant and airy. But 20-year-old Tazie Ashley has taken what might be one solid step toward reaching them: She has decided to put motherhood on hold.

“I like the finer things in life,” says Ashley, a student at Southwest Community College. “I know you can have that with kids, but you have to be financially stable. . . . I told my mother and I told myself I will never be on [welfare]. Never. That’s my plan.”

Ashley’s attitude helps explain why the birthrate for unmarried black women has shown signs of a slow but steady nationwide retreat. The birthrate of 7.4% in 1996, the last year for which statistics are available, is the lowest since 1955. At its high point in 1971, the birthrate was 9.6%.

“For all ages under 30 there have been really sizable declines in the 1990s,” says Stephanie Ventura, author of a report by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The chance that an unmarried black woman will have a baby has dropped, and that’s a very important finding. The rate is lower than at any time in the last 41 years.”

The era of high birthrates among unmarried black women and girls is not a closed chapter. In 1996, 70% of all African American children were born to single women--the percentage so high in part because married women are having fewer children.

But one generation can learn from the other. Young women like Ashley draw from a reservoir of borrowed memories--the experiences of mothers, aunts, cousins, friends--and use them to inform their own lives.

A small and slender young woman, Ashley could easily pass for a high school student, even younger, until she speaks. It is as if she has held on to every shred of advice and wise word ever offered her, and now she speaks them with full authority.

“A kid can’t raise a kid,” she says. “I can’t have a kid. I’m still doing what I want to do.”

In Ashley’s upbringing, the message to wait has been fundamental, reinforced by a strong-willed mother, once a teenage parent herself, who pushed her daughter to expect more from life. And by youth programs and jobs that took her from the projects and exposed her to other possibilities.

After 14 years living in the Avalon Gardens Housing Development, Ashley has seen “babies having babies,” and nothing about that life entices her. Ashley’s dream is to attend Grambling University in Louisiana and to open youth centers in the city.

“I look at them like, ‘Y’all, I’m not getting caught up in that, no, no, no!’ . . . I’m with getting an education, getting a job, taking care of my family, that’s all I’m with.”

Being with that has meant she has sometimes suffered taunts from some girls in the projects who have accused her of thinking she’s “all that.” They once threatened to jump her, she recalls.

“They envy me,” she says, holding a plaque that she has just been awarded for serving on the Housing Authority Youth Council. “I tell them, ‘Don’t hate me, be better than me.’ I tell them, ‘You can do it too.’ ”

A Change in Attitude

No single factor can fully explain why so many young women like Ashley are now less likely to have babies. U.S. Surgeon General David Sachter pointed to several factors, including African American women “seeing themselves moving into careers and not having babies” and better sex education.

Other experts say the national decline--which began before welfare reform--is the cumulative effect of complex social developments and changing attitudes: the difficulties of raising a family on a low income. Fear of AIDS. New forms of contraception. Youth with increased expectations. Religious leaders discussing sex more openly.

What is certain is this: Something is happening, slowly and steadily. In the houses of worship, in the community centers and the schools, at kitchen tables and in bedrooms, people have been talking--and that talk is shaping itself into action.

“This is a reflection of us choosing to live our lives consciously rather than by default,” says inspirational writer Iyanla Vanzant, author of “One Day My Soul Just Opened Up” (Fireside) and “In the Meantime Finding Yourself and the Love You Want” (Simon & Shuster). “People are waking up.”

‘Something Good Will Happen’

On a scorching day, the social hall at Avalon Gardens is packed with people coming to talk about sex and pregnancy prevention. On a side patio, a clown in a rainbow wig entertains the smallest children with a game of musical chairs. The back door of the hall opens onto the projects, a sea of mint green cookie-cutter houses and sidewalks, enclosed by a black wrought iron fence. There, Ashley is holding court.

“I’m gonna be somebody,” she proclaims. “You’ll hear about me on the news.”

For now, Ashley is known for what she has not done. Employed as a peer educator at the Drew Child Development Corp., she speaks to groups of middle school students about postponing sex.

“They ask me, ‘Why didn’t you get pregnant?’ ” she says. “I tell them. Just because someone tells you they love you that doesn’t mean you have to pull your pants down. . . . I tell them there’s more to life than this. There are other things in the world than just living here.”

Those other things are the reason Ashley pushes herself--even when life seems to be pushing against her.

She knows the feeling of trying to stretch money beyond its natural possibilities, and the queasy sensation that follows: the realization that some bill will not be paid, some need will not be met.

Three weeks into this school year, Ashley had no textbooks.

“Half my money goes to my mom,” says Ashley, who has held jobs since age 14, and worked this summer at the California Science Center in Exposition Park. “I have a little brother and a little sister. My mom only makes so much money; that money can only do so much.”

At home Ashley is second-in-command and her mother’s right hand. After school each day, before their mother arrives from work, Ashley is the one sitting at the kitchen table ordering 6-year-old Reggie to do his homework, giving him high fives when he gets it right. And she is the one listening to 13-year-old Kelli’s musings about Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. And the one who notices that there is weariness on her mother’s face when she walks in the door.

“My mom has not had a vacation in 10 years,” Ashley says. “I wish I could give her two grand and say, ‘Go on vacation. Go relax. Everything is going to be OK at home.’ ”

Ashley is upbeat, quick to smile, passionate about her beliefs. Kelli has heard them all; the two share a bedroom in the small apartment. When they look up they see glow-in-the-dark stars that Ashley has placed on the ceilings and walls.

Kelli is playful, a quick wit with a comeback for everything--but she listens when her older sister talks.

“She tells me just don’t let [boys] overrule me,” Kelli says, sitting on a pile of pillows in the front room of the apartment, tossing a makeshift ball in the air. “She be like, ‘Always be a leader, don’t be a follower. Don’t follow behind people.’ ”

Ashley tells herself that “something good will happen,” from all the working and going to school. But there are days when she looks around, sees she is still in the projects and a harsh cold hits her. This is not the way she wants their lives to be.

“I go through my moments,” Ashley says.

Recently, she and her mother went driving, looking for a new place to live. They ended up on the other side of town in a neighborhood near the Fox Hills Mall.

“I was like, ‘Mama, we can’t afford those houses,’ ” Ashley recalls. “She said, ‘I know.’ ”

“I wish she was living platinum,” Ashley says. “I wish she didn’t have to worry about bills. But all I can do is wish right now. I got a lot of struggle to do, before I can [really] help her.”

Ambition is not something Ashley hides.

“Any job openings where you work?” she asks a reporter.

No campaign or commercial or program could have provided Ashley with what her own life has given her: a front seat view of the drama known as single motherhood.

Still her decision and the decisions of others like her have been made against the backdrop of a changing social landscape. Hers is the generation that came of age with sex education, with family planning, with pregnancy campaigns and programs, and with a disease that has turned sex into a deadly weapon and made condom use an act of survival.

In communities throughout the city, an eclectic mix of organizations and individuals are addressing the issue of out-of-wedlock pregnancies, some supported by large foundations, others grass roots.

In the South Los Angeles neighborhood where Ashley lives, the Drew Child Development Corp. is a key player. It runs efforts such as Postponing Sexual Involvement, the federally funded program promoting abstinence that employs Ashley. Drew also operates Project SOAR--Supporting Options for Adolescent Responsibility--which is part of a 10-year, $60-million initiative to reduce teenage pregnancy through a variety of measures funded by the California Wellness Foundation.

Even athletes, long regarded as negative models of promiscuity, have joined the discussion.

Former Los Angeles Lakers Magic Johnson and A.C. Green have each released videos on sexuality aimed at youth. Johnson hosted “Time Out: The Truth About HIV, AIDS and You,” released in 1992. Green, now with the Phoenix Suns, formed “Athletes for Abstinence” and in 1993 produced “It Ain’t Worth It,” which promotes abstinence.

What Ashley remembers most are not the campaigns and videos, but what people around her said. The times she was called “goody-two shoes.” The times older people advised her to stay in school and read books.

‘Life Is What You Make It’

But of the voices she remembers, her mother’s is first in line. She wants, she says, to make her mother proud.

“She’s my inspiration,” Ashley says. “She got pregnant when she was 15. I can’t disappoint her.”

Her mother, Veronica McKneely, was a student at Fremont High School when she had her first of four children. She has passed her life lessons on to her children like a treasured inheritance.

“‘Look at me,” she tells them. “I got pregnant when I was 15, had my son when I was 16. I’ve been a mother all my life. Get a good education so you won’t have to live in a development like this. You won’t have to live on AFDC.”

She talked to Ashley about sex, kept her involved in programs, and tried to show her that “life can be fun and life is what you make it.”

She talked to Ashley about ignoring taunts from others and staying “spiritually inclined and be on the right road,” she says. They attend church together.

Those days when sadness surrounds Ashley, her faith sustains her. “I say, ‘Why you crying?’ I know all I have to do is pray.”

In recent years, more churches have begun to deal openly with relationships and sex, often in their singles or young adult ministries.

“Until very recently in the church . . . issues of sex were not addressed other than, ‘Don’t do it until you’re married.’ But there was a wink, ‘We know you’re going to do it,’ ” says the Rev. Donald M. Bell Sr., Singles Pastor at Faithful Central Baptist Church in Inglewood. “Preachers were intimidated to even talk about it.”

Bell, whose sermon was the impetus for “Sister, I’m Sorry,” an independent film that examines the issue of black male/female relationships, encourages discussions on those issues in Wednesday night Bible study. “I tell them there’s nothing off-limits,” he says.

Bell teaches members how to value their lives as single people and how to live daily in accord with their beliefs, including abstinence until marriage. And, he says, many are.

“I think people flat out respond to being challenged as opposed to being condemned,” Bell says.

At Bilal Islamic Center on Central Avenue and King Boulevard, some concerned families have returned to an old tradition.

Children who are dating must be accompanied by a sibling or other person, “not to be over burdensome, but as a means of protection” and prevention, says Imam Abdul Karim Hasan.

“Parents who attend places of worship are coming home with this message, and they’re taking charge of their families,” Hasan says.

Stereotypes Influence Youth

Even as the birthrate among unmarried black women declines, those in the field say factors that contributed to the high rate continue to exist.

“The image of the highly sexualized black teen is still very successfully communicated in all forms of the media,” says Gail Elizabeth Wyatt, who has a doctorate in psychology and who wrote “Stolen Women: Reclaiming our Sexuality Taking Back our Lives.” “My concern is that these stereotypes have had quite an impact on some young people’s assumptions that they should act like a stereotype and that sexuality is the most interesting aspect of themselves.”

It is as if there are two trains running, one moving ahead in the old pattern, another slowly chugging in the opposite direction.

Ashley’s direction is certain.

An ex-boyfriend once asked Ashley to be the mother of his child. Ashley flatly declined. He calls her headstrong. She agrees.

“My mind is too made up,” she says walking along a sidewalk in the housing development. It will not change, she says, just to keep a man, not as long as she keeps looking up, her eyes on a dream.

“I want to get married,” she says. “I want to wear that white dress. I want to be a little happy family with my husband and kids. . . . If God lets me live and have kids, that’s how I want it to be. Everything in place and how it should be.”