There I was, all of 19 years old, in the Air Force, living off base with two roommates. One was a white girl, and the other was a white guy. I'll call them Cindy and Bud. Bud was from Kentucky. The hills of Kentucky, and he was as crazy as they come. I had never met anyone that came from a very, very small town and had a very, very small mentality. He was nice, but he was a little off, if you know what I mean. One evening, right around the time that Charles Manson and his group had everyone on terror-alert, we were sitting around in the apartment smoking weed, like we did all the time. Cindy and I started talking about drugs, and somehow acid got into the conversation. Well, I don't know quite where the acid itself came from, but there it was. The "tab". It had to be Cindy; it wasn't me, and Bud was not even the kind of person to pop acid. She was one of those crazy white girls. The kind you end up seeing on a Girls Gone Wild video. Bud and I had never taken it before. Acid had only recently emerged with my age group in Baltimore just before I left. I tried it that night, and never again, ever. The most that I can recall about that evening is that we were in someones car. I have no idea whose car it was because none of us had one. We were going to some burger joint, and I was sitting in the back seat; and all the way there, the trees along the side of the road seemed to reaching out to grab us. I have had some scares with drugs in my lifetime, but that one was a doozie!



One of those weekends, fate was working overtime again! "G" had driven up for the weekend, and we were having our usual fun out on the town. He arrived on Friday evening, we did our thing-thing, and went out for a while. We returned to the apartment, and chilled with Bud and Cindy for a while, and headed off to bed. I awoke that next morning with my best friend lying next to me, sound asleep. It was a bright, cool and sunny Nebraska Saturday morning. But it "looked" different. I couldn't put my finger on what was different, exactly, because it all looked the same. Whatever. I needed to use the potty, so off I went. On my way, I noticed that my stomach felt a little queasy, and my first instinct was to assume that I had drank too much last night. That thought was instantly replaced by what turned out to be the actual truth: I was pregnant! Now, I have heard of women who don't even realize that they are pregnant until months into the pregnancy. I knew the very next morning. And, yes, you guessed it: I proceeded to do the usual "pregnant woman thing" and throw up for the next several minutes.

I must have sat in that bathroom for an hour tossing around the idea of having a baby. But more than that, I had to figure out how I was going to tell this man that I was about to bring a baby into the world that neither of us had planned for in our individual lives. On a personal level, I was fine with the idea. I didn't know exactly how it was all going to work out, but I was born and bred in the land of young, single, black mothers. At least I was legally an adult! Marriage never entered my brain. There was no scheme. We were having unprotected sex, I got pregnant, and I was going to be a Mom. I never even thought of linking our lives together forever because that was not a custom that I had ever seen in play. I figured I would tell him, he would decide if he wanted to be a part of the baby's life (either decision would have been fine with me), and then I would decide if I would remain in the military, or go back to Lexington Terrace to raise my child. Unfortunately, all of my training and preparation in the military did nothing to "fix" the hidden and scarred childhood building blocks that I was made up of. I was a victim of the mentality that made it "ok" to return and be a statistic. At least I had gotten out, even if I did return (a failure).

I returned to the bedroom with a new resolve. I excitedly jumped back into the bed and woke him up with the news. The man was less than impressed. I had no basis to know what he could have possibly been thinking; but in retrospect, I now think I know that he saw his future flash before his eyes, and he did not like it. He was from a place where boys and girls got married if the girl got pregnant. I didn't know that. It must have been like a bomb going off in his head. I was totally oblivious to the disappointment and probable terror he must have been experiencing. The impact and implications of the whole situation were far greater on him than on me. Once again, "The Plan". The man had a plan, he was working it, and he did not have a clue that this was headed his way. Guess he should have had a "Plan B", too, huh?


After that visit, things got decidedly cooler between us. He would still come to visit, but his visits were marred by brooding and long silences. My military experiences were getting to be less and less pleasurable, and I was having morning sickness every day, all day. My superiors were not happy with my performance, and I'm sure, secretly wished that I would just leave the military, voluntarily. I specify "voluntarily" because they previously had tried to kick me out with a Dishonorable Discharge, and did not succeed. That situation involved me bringing charges against the married senior master sergeant who was dating Cindy, calling me a "black bitch". That didn't turn out very well for him; he lost 2 stripes in that. And, fortunately for them, I was ready to go anyway. As far as I was concerned, they were starting to get on my nerves. In my own way, I was taking care of me and my unborn baby. What?! With all of that "Uncle Sam comes first" bull-crap! I felt no loyalty to the military, and if I had ever had any, it was certainly gone now. My priorities had shifted through no choice of my own, and my Higher Power went to work once again.