grrlstories: Shantel Chapter Four

She returned home and now needs to learn how to cope with anger, which is causing problems with her relationships at school and at home. She faces the possibility of living in a group home without Iris, which upsets her.

This is a critical time for Shantel. She hopes to return to Florence Crittenton, the school for teen moms she attended when Iris was born. Hopefully the new medication will help her control her mood swings. She also needs to learn how to handle the stresses in her life. Raising a toddler, going to school, and attending her court and therapy sessions is a huge load for Shantel to manage on her own.

Chino visits sporadically and hasn't provided the financial support that Shantel needs for Iris. She told him to "either spend time with Iris or don’t, but don’t let her get attached to you and then you leave."

Shantel is still very close to her mom and leans on her for support. "I do have someone to talk to. I have my mother. I can talk to her about anything."

"I do feel like I grew up too fast because I was partying when I was supposed to be playing with Barbie Dolls. I was smoking weed when I was supposed to be smoking fake cigarettes, so in a way, I do feel like I grew up too fast. But I still have my young days my fun days coming. It’s going to be a change cause I’m going to have a little shadow following me around saying ‘mom, mom, I want to go with you.’"

"People never told me, you know you could do it. Like you could graduate you could do this and that when you get older. I mean they told me that but I never really thought that they meant it because of how I always messed up. So one thing that I could do different is tell my daughter not to mess up. If she messes up I’m always going to be there for her you know. Even though she’s barely in daycare now I know she could do it. She’s a smart girl. She’s just so smart. She recognized her name since I’d say she was like 31/2 or 4 months old. I’m happy to have a smart baby."

"Now that she can walk I think it's horrible because she gets into everything. She gets into my make up…she just gets into everything. In a way its kind of easier because I don't have to carry her weight around all the time but I don’t like to run after her all the time either. So, in some ways it's good and in some ways it's bad."

"Iris' father, he's been doing fine, but he's not coming around as often as he should be. He also is not doing very good with financial needs. He thinks that $50 will last her for two weeks and it's not going to happen that way. I told him that my daughter needed diapers and he said, 'well, she has to wait for a week, cause I don't get my paycheck for a week.' He thinks his car payment is more important than diapers. So he's doing good with coming and visiting her but he's not that good of a father still. My daughter still doesn't know him. I want to be able to trust him so she can go spend the night over there, you know, spend time with her dad, and we could go to the zoo with each other. He doesn’t even recognize her voice. Well it’s kind of weird cause he called over here and I talked to him and he was talking to my daughter and he just started crying cause she doesn’t know the sound of his voice. It’s kind of sad really and now she says the word DaDa and she was saying it in the phone and it was like somehow she knew and she didn’t know, you know? It was kind of weird though, he goes, ‘was she calling me dad?’ and I go ‘no, she’s calling me dad.’ So in a way I have to be like my mom, I have to be the mom and the dad and I don’t want to be like that. I want her to have her own dad, you know?"

"I'm looking forward to not changing her diapers. I'm looking forward to seeing her pee on the potty. Or seeing her with a mouthful of teeth. And with a lot of hair. I want to see her with a lot of hair cause she don't have that much no more. I mean it all fell out when she was born. She's getting more now but I want to see her with a lot of hair so I can put pigtails. So that's what I'm looking forward to."

"I was diagnosed with bipolar when my baby was two months old. They noticed I was different because I was having highs and lows, extreme highs and lows actually. The doctors wanted to diagnose me with bipolar when I was pregnant but they couldn't because pregnant females have mood swings. So they couldn't do it then. And they were going to do it after I had the baby but they couldn't do it then because women have postpartum depression. So two months after I had the baby, it was still going on. I was still having major depression and also major like where I was getting out of hand, where I was beyond control as a parent. So they diagnosed me with bipolar. I've been on 3-4 different medications and I'm still not on the right medication."

" The extreme lows are that you are very very depressed, you're so depressed that you could have suicidal attempts or thoughts.

What I was going to do, when I was going to commit suicide, I was going to overdose on pills and I was going to overdose on all the pills in my house. What stopped me from that was my daughter. And that's what most people got to think about before they commit suicide is the people that they're leaving behind because I felt like, before I was going to commit suicide, that I was putting stress on my family and I felt that if I was gone that I wouldn't put so much stress on their lives or on my life either. But then I was thinking that I'm going to leave my daughter behind with a mother that committed suicide and with the family under more stress because they're going to have to pay to get my headstone to get my coffin and I'm going to leave them in debt. So I'm going to put them under more stress. So I just put the pills back."

Produced by Joanna Pinneo for
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