‘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
One 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?
