ABSTRACT
Yolanda and Ann both spent time in Albuquerque New Mexico’s Youth Diagnostic and Development Center (YDDC) for incarcerated teens. YDDC has a program that allows teen mothers to spend a couple of afternoons or evenings a week with their babies. I visited there twice. It is a program kinder than many, but it is heart wrenching to see fifteenyear-olds clinging to their infants, walking them along the tiled institutional floors, cooing, rocking, and handing rattles and pacifiers to the tiny bundled infants they carry for two precious hours. Most of them, children themselves, take parenting classes to gain clues about the roles that fate and their own longings have called them to early. Some are too wounded to take in much. Others grasp whatever keys to parenting they are offered. Few had role models they want to emulate. They have to learn, at fifteen or sixteen, how to come to grips with the anguish they carry, and to love another more than their own drama.
