Recently I went back to Chelsea, MA to find the girls that I got to know there (a small arch). I stayed with Damaris. Andrea is 2 now and I can count how long I’ve been away by how much she has grown. She can talk and run and be just a little bit bossy. I have been away for far too long.

I don’t have the energy right now to tell you all that I feel for this family. What I can tell you is that before I decided to go to Oregon, I called Damaris to ask her advice. It was the last thing I did before accepting a graduate program. I can tell you that I think we all need people in our lives who truly believe in us, and Damaris and I completely believe in each other. There are things that she is learning from me and there is so much that I am learning from her. She lives her life day to day enjoying the small moments. She never is afraid of the future or bogged down in the past. I battle with life and can become almost paralyzed with existential concerns. She finds out that she’s pregnant as a teenager and sees a beautiful family in her future.

Andrea in the grocery store in Chelsea.

Andrea's cousin doing her hair.

Andrea with her cousin's iguana.

Me and Andrea.

Andrea eating breakfast.

Andrea and Andres waiting for the bus.

Andrea with her family at the Boston Commons.

Andrea on a carousel.

Andrea feeding ducks.

Andrea and Andres on the bus home.

Eli and I are leaving for Michigan in about a week. His family lives there and on the way we are going to spend a couple of days in Montreal and Toronto. I am very excited. I have been so overwhelmed trying to get all of the last pieces done and figuring out the exhibit that I really need this break. When we get back we will have a week and a half to pack our apartment into a car (which means sell most everything on craigslist), put up and take down a gallery show, and say goodbye to everyone here.

Because I am down to my last couple of weeks, I have been enjoying every moment of work. I finished up my last photo shoot on Tuesday with Zeinab and Oliya who are both from Somalia. I ended up at Zeinab’s house for a couple of hours hanging out with her son Ali while we tried to calm him down for the shoot.

The interviews with Zeinab and Oliya have been very interesting because their views about pregnancy and motherhood are very different than those of the other girls that I work with. Oliya is 21 and married. She was engaged for a year before they married and after they married she became pregnant a few months later. A lot of the questions I always ask were irrelevant to her. For instance, when I asked how her relationship with her husband had changed during the pregnancy and after she responded that they were already married so it hadn’t. When I asked how many children she wanted in the future, she responded as many as she will have.

Yesterday Damaris came over with Andrea and we spent the afternoon looking through photos and playing back the video tapes from Damaris’ pregnancy and Andrea’s birth. It is amazing how much they both have changed in the past three months. Damaris has transitioned into a stay at home mom and Andrea is more and more awake and responsive every time I see her. Damaris and I talked for a while about her taking one or two college classes this fall. I can’t even imagine college with a baby. It is so much easier to go through school without stopping or really even thinking about not being there. From everything I have read about young motherhood, the one marker that can really change your income, living situation… for the better is education. Even though Roca is such a nurturing place for young mothers, I support Damaris’ decision to work towards further education rather than to continue to work at Roca.

At 3:05 PM yesterday, after almost 30 hours in the hospital, Damaris gave birth to 8 pound 7 oz Andrea Isabella. I was fortunate enough to be there with Damaris from when they induced her through the birth until when her extended family showed up to meet a peaceful Andrea and an almost unconsciously exhausted Damaris.

In the afternoon when they induced Damaris, we were all excited. The monitors showed that she was having contractions, but she didn’t feel them. For a few hours she was dilating, contracting, and in no pain. It was delightful. At night, Damaris’ mom left. Andres (Damaris’ fiance), Damaris and I were left alone for the night. It felt a bit like a sleepover and for a moment I actually thought “the three of us together all night… this is going to be really fun.” We had cots and blankets and an endless supply of drinks and popsicles. We watched TV, set up and talked excitedly into the video camera… and then the pain came.

With Damaris in constant pain, it was hard to feel a part of it at times. Pain is disillusioning. It is impossible to understand another’s pain and it is so difficult to even describe. Without it’s own vocabulary, pain must be explained by similes, (As the nurse asked, “Is it like a bowling ball in your bottom?”) Fighting my own sleepiness, I was aware of Damaris’ pain, but I am quite sure that Damaris was more aware of my lack of pain.

During the night it got worse and then better and then worse as she slowly dilated. We weathered the night and then the morning with Damaris on heavy painkillers. Around 2PM she was finally 10 centimeters and the pushing began.

In this small room watching the baby pulse closer and closer to the opening- there was no embarrassment. It was easy to become so wrapped up in the pulsing as to forget that this struggle in the end was Damaris’ alone. During the course of pushing Andrea out of her, Damaris had her moment of complete exhaustion and demanded for it all to stop. Her mom said over and over on top of Damaris’s pleas and through her own tears “Tu Puedes, tu puedes, tu puedes.” Andres showed me how his hand was shaking. I walked away with tears and fiddled with my camera. Damaris is one of the strongest women I know – and to see her in such pain was overwhelming.

With out hands wrapped around hers and our arms pulling her legs back we were still only outsiders watching the greatest miracle of life. With Damaris exhausted and the baby’s head only inches away (it’s black tuft of hair peaking through) we could not convince her to go on and we all broke down (all except for the nurse who kept up her cheers of “you can do it Damaris, you can do it.”) After a few minutes, she regained composure and decided that she was getting the baby out as quickly as possible. And within 10 minutes Andrea emerged as the doctor pulled her head out with surprising force. She was blue and still until that first breath, and then she sprawled her arms, grasped at the air, turned pink and sobbed.

At the hospital, it was hard to know what to tell people I was. We said that I was a friend and that I was videotaping. I came carrying a huge tripod, a medium format camera, a 35 mm camera, a digital camera and a video camera. I had to explain over and over why I had all of the equipment and what we were doing, and how I knew Damaris. At times I questioned my own intentions.

During the delivery, at one point I heard Damaris’ nurse inform Andrea’s nurse of who was in the room. She said, “the patient’s boyfriend, the patient’s mom and her best friend,” for a quick moment I felt that that we had fooled the nurse. But thinking about it, besides my boyfriend, I am as close to Damaris as I am to anyone else in Boston (and she’s the only person whose portraits hang in my living room and bedroom.) In a strange way, I am much closer to the girls I work with than I was to very good friends in college.

When I started this fellowship, I never expected that these kinds or relationships would be a byproduct of documenting lives. Asking personal questions of one another over the course of a year – isn’t that basically what being a friend is? Shouldn’t I have known? Sometimes I think that without documentary work, I could never be this close to these girls. Without the excuse of photography, I would never have asked to enter their homes, know their children, meet their parents, cook with them, and be a part of their everyday lives. I certainly would not have been there with Damaris the moment Andrea arrived.

After Damaris gave birth her mom said to me in Spanish while holding little Andrea, “I only hope that Damaris and I can be there when you go through this. But, you should do it soon.” I smiled not really having the skills to respond well enough in Spanish.

Damaris Interview
January 17, 2008 4:45PM.

Damaris: My name is Damaris Nevarez. I am nineteen years old. I’m from Puerto Rico… I am seven months pregnant.

Ok, I’m going to talk about the first time I got pregnant and why. Ok, the reason why I even tried to check if I was pregnant was because I missed my period for a whole month. It wasn’t there. I got a urinary infection with that. My mom said to me “You’re pregnant.” I said “No I’m not” and she said “Yes you are.” The first time she got pregnant with my brother she got a urinary infection too. So then I was like, “Ok let me just find out.

So the next day I was working so my boyfriend came into work with me. When I had my break, he actually went to John’s pizza to get us something to eat and I went to the store, Compare. I bought a pregnancy test. He was waiting for me at John’s pizza. We ate. We were kind of quiet. And we were just nervous. I was like, “Don’t worry we’re not pregnant. We’re just not.” And we went back to Roca. I went straight to the bathroom. I didn’t really wait and it came back negative. It was like a relief for him, you know. Then it came out positive. I let it sit wait a little bit, and it came out positive. And of course, I was really happy and he was too, but we were nervous cause we knew our life was going to change, and I didn’t know how other people were going to take it. I don’t really care about what other people say or my family but they actually took it really really good.

Interviewer: How so?

Damaris: My mom was happy. My sister was excited too. Everyone was excited. This is the first time his family is going to be grandparents and aunts and uncles. They were really excited too. So the first person I told was him, and then he called his brother and told his brother that he was going to become an uncle. His brother was really excited. It was a good day. It wasn’t bad, but it was hard to keep the secret, like I wanted to keep it a secret, but I couldn’t I wanted to tell everyone.

Interviewer: (looking at photos in her journal) Were these pictures taken when you first found out you were pregnant or later?

Damaris: I believe these pictures were taken a day or two after I found out I was pregnant. Yeah I took a picture of that pregnancy test that I took. I wanted to keep it but it smelled really bad. So I was like, “No, I’ll just throw it away.”

Yeah I was really excited. I was so happy I couldn’t believe I was pregnant. I felt kind of good because I thought at least I’d beaten both my sisters because my first sister got pregnant when she was fourteen and the other one got pregnant when she was 18. I was 19 when I got pregnant.

Interviewer: I guess the only other thing we should do is (talk about) how you feel at seven months? Cause then when we do other audio recording…

Damaris: Um, I can’t complain about my pregnancy. I feel very well actually. I believe the baby has been very very good. She has never bothered me at all. Um, ever since I was like a month… well you know I didn’t even know I was pregnant. I didn’t even throw up puke or anything. Throughout my whole pregnancy I haven’t even puked. I eat a lot of food. I used to eat a lot before but not I eat a bit more. It’s been great. Even now at 7 months it still feels great. I feel a bit bigger. It’s a little bit harder for me to move around the bed and to get up from the bed it’s a little bit harder for me. To bend down. If I want to bend it’s a little hard. I have to squat. Is that how you say it? Squat? Yeah, um to pick up something… The stairs, I used to go up like 12 stairs like it was nothing. But, now it’s as if I did 2 miles just getting up those stairs…

I called one of my closest friends and fellow painter, Alex Freeman, and asked him for advice on how to make the paintings about teen pregnancy move further away from reproduction (although still basing the paintings on photographs taken by the young women.) He brought up the fact that ever since I was fifteen, we’ve watched each other grow artistically for that long, I have always included personal symbolism in my paintings. They have always included symbols that show how I am experiencing the world that I reproducing, so that the paintings become as much about my experience of the subject matter as they are about the subject itself. I realized when he told me this, that my journal is still rich with such symbolism and interpretation but the paintings are not.

I decided to sit down and work on a painting based on the same photo I used for the last painting. This one is more in the style of my “bathtub” series that I worked on all last year- combining images from photographs and symbols that enter my journal.

I had scribbled into my journal
“Fetus in a womb like adult in a bathtub. Child in a bathtub like adult in the world. Pregnant Teenager?” I decided to move forward from there and work in some of the symbolism I’d developed in my journal. I also decided to use gel medium (a clear acrylic primer) to prepare the birch wood for painting on so that the wood could remain the background of the painting. Here is my experimental painting.