Wait! I Have An 18 Year Old....Eeeek!

April 5, 2012

Takeyha Cheree Foreman

Good morning and thanks for hanging on while I took some time off to digest things in my life, but don't fret I'm back! First I'd like to thank all of those that stepped outside of the box and supported my debut novel, Skeletons, either by purchasing it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or recommending it to a friend or family member. I'm quite shocked that something that I'd written actually held its own on the #34 spot on Amazon's Best Seller list in the African American Fiction genre for a few weeks and has 21 five star reviews so far! I think that is pretty good for it to have been released as not only my first book, but also with me having self published it all while maintaining a household of six children and a crazy husband. Gold star for me. Don't worry I AM FAR FROM FINISHED. I am working on one more book now and have two more in the brainstorming processes so hopefully I will be able to get my name up there among other best selling authors. 

Deep sigh

Waking up today I felt something that was not physical pain and not mental pain, but what I felt was an emotional pain that has been lingering since mid-March. Today I realized that I now have an 18 year old daughter. I know, I know that being 18 doesn't mean much, but what it does mean is that my daughter who laid helplessly in my arms only 18 short years ago can go out and get her own apartment, buy cigarettes legally (she'd better not) and can move far away from me without asking me for permission. While she is still a teenager, she is legally an adult and can make her own decisions. Now how sound those decisions are have yet to be seen, but I am more than confident that I have raised her to know right from wrong, good from evil and I'm confident that she will make it through the rest of her life with not only what I've taught her but also what life teaches her as well. 

A lot of times as parents we want to tell our children DON'T DO THIS  or DON'T DO THAT but sometimes we have to step back and allow them to actually live and make the same mistakes that we made  because the best lesson taught is the one that is learned. I had Takeyha when I was 17 years old and while I had a great support system of my parents, family and friends having a baby at such a young age made me grow up real fast and I could no longer be selfish. That taught me the lesson that I didn't want my child to have to grow up so fast and I want her to be able to be selfish for awhile so I made sure that we have an open rapport about sex and that she is protected.  People told me that by putting her on birth control I was condoning her sexual activity and the such but what I say is that I cannot police her body 24/7 and just by saying DON'T DO IT like my parents did isn't going to work so I protected her future. 

Now that I see her future is bright I can sit back with a huge smile on my face and say "good job mom."
To think that 11 years ago I didn't think that I'd be able to see the day when Takeyha became a woman because 11 years ago she was struck my a car while she played outside. The car hit her with such force that almost every bone on her right side was broken leaving her in a coma for almost three weeks. For some three weeks isn't a long time but for a mother who is sitting by her child's bedside hoping and praying for that baby to wake up while the doctors said, "start making arrangements" or "Prepare yourself for the worse" three weeks seemed like an eternity. In addition to breaking almost every bone on her right side she also had a closed brain injury with bleeding and swelling inside of her brain. Swelling that was so severe that the doctors inserted a device on her brain that monitored the amount of swelling that she was experiencing and if that number got above I think 90 we were in trouble. I can still see that monitor to this day, I can still hear the sounds that it made when the pressure went up. I can still see my 7 year old daughter lay in that hospital bed as if she were only a baby with a breathing tube down her throat, a huge cast on her leg, a PIC line coming from her hip, a open cast on her arm, three pins sticking out of her arm, the feeding tube coming from her nose and that dreaded tube protruding from the front of her head that they'd shaven clean. I can still see how swollen my baby's body had become from the force of the car hitting her and I can still picture the tears that would roll down her face when the nurse would come and clean her breathing tube while my eyes stayed glued on that brain monitor praying for that number to stay low.
When she awakened three weeks later and the first words she groggily uttered was, "mommy" I still have tears in my eyes just thinking about that time. Lesson learned, never, ever take your children for granted because they can be snatched away from you in a blink of an eye. Since then I have become somewhat of a mama bear and I am afraid of missing even one second of their lives.

Okay enough rambling, Happy Birthday Takeyha, you are loved, you are blessed and you are wonderful. Have a great day baby, hopefully you can get in your car after all of the balloons Kerri and I stuffed in there late last night :) Love you baby!

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TTYL