A Welcome Hard Lesson

During the week, Deeannah gets up at 5:30 each morning and wakes Jamara about 6. She changes, dresses and feeds the baby, hustles her off to day care and then gets to school, where classes start at 7:17.

Deeannah's schedule -- six classes, no electives -- allows her to leave school at lunchtime and gives her three hours to do her homework before she picks up Jamara, whom she has trained not to touch her school papers.

"As long as I really sit down and get focused, it's plenty of time," she said.

Deeannah grew up the second of four children in a button-down home. Her father, James, spent 27 years in the Coast Guard, maintaining cutters. Her mother, Dorinda, is a secretary and part-time real estate agent. No one left the Taylor home unless their homework was done. The children were allowed to have friends, but not necessarily boyfriends.

Jamara was due in the middle of Deeannah's junior year. She hid her pregnancy beneath baggy clothes until well into her seventh month, weighing abortion or adoption, frightened of angering her parents and alienating her classmates. At a sleepover party for her friend's 16th birthday, she never took off her coat.

She finally confided in her mother the day before the family went in for flu shots. Deeannah was afraid the inoculation might hurt her unborn child.

Sitting on a couch with her mother at the real estate office, Deeannah wrote the message, "I have to tell you something. . . . " on a sheet of paper and handed it to her. Deeannah began to cry.

She showed her mother the tummy she had been hiding.

"We just both sat there, and I held her," Dorinda Taylor said.

Deeannah had been a B student taking second-tier classes until her junior year, when with her counselor, she decided on a more challenging schedule. She has taken seven AP courses since then, the bulk of them in her senior year as a teenage mother. Her most recent report card came back with four A's, a B and a C.

"She was never the best raw talent in my class, but she's always been the hardest worker in my class," said Michael Willis, her AP physics teacher. "She has a lot of drive. She could really get somewhere."

Dropping out, Deeannah said, "didn't seem smart to me."

She said it was clear that there "wasn't going to be a strong relationship" with Jamara's father, "so I knew I had to make the best decision for myself. The mind-set I've had since the day I found out is that the best thing for us is for me to finish college."

Deeannah stayed home after giving birth and was home-schooled almost to the end of her junior year. Willis made regular visits to her home, because the course work wasn't covered by the home educators. His trips enabled her to progress to his AP class this year.

Deeannah's family cared for Jamara this year while Deeannah played volleyball and rehearsed for the school's spring production of "Footloose."

Most of the time, though, Deeannah and Jamara travel together. She takes her daughter along to study groups and on outings with friends to the Arundel Mills mall.

In the fall, Deeannah plans to pack up Jamara and drive to Frostburg State University, 150 miles away in western Maryland. She'll do this over the objections of her mother, who would prefer that she stay home and commute to college or, if she must go to Frostburg, that she leave Jamara behind.

"I try to look out for her; I'm looking out for her and my granddaughter," Dorinda Taylor said. "She has no idea of what's ahead of her. It's going to be real hard."