‘Grown-ish’ Tackles College Pregnancy and I Finally Feel Seen

Yara Shahidi’s show salutes young mothers who are getting degrees and dream jobs with their babies in tow

Arionne Nettles
ZORA

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The cast of “Grown-ish” films a scene for the second season. Photo: Eric McCandless/Getty Images

OOne test didn’t feel like enough. There, standing in my tiny college bathroom, I looked down at the two lines indicating that I was pregnant, and I took a second test. Again, two more lines appeared, and I fell to the floor crying because surely, I thought, my life was over.

Depictions of all the unplanned pregnancies of young mothers I’d seen in my favorite TV shows and movies flashed through my mind — Kerry Washington as a struggling teen mom in Save the Last Dance, the drama surrounding a resort dancer’s pregnancy in Dirty Dancing, Tupac’s “Brenda Got a Baby.”

How could I, just a girl from Chicago living a thousand miles away from home, handle a pregnancy in college? It was the early 2000s and Florida A&M had been a blessing to me. But it was also a place of a lot of fun. Up until that point, that fun hadn’t gotten in the way of my seemingly permanent position on the Dean’s List or any of the many campus groups I was part of. I didn’t feel like I was just surviving in college. I was thriving, and this seemed to derail all of that. Could one mistake ruin everything?

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Arionne Nettles
ZORA

Arionne Nettles is a lecturer at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, a Chicago-based journalist, and a special needs mama.