Roxane Gay & Everand Originals: You Are a Teen Mom: Ins

Roxane Gay & Everand Originals: You Are a Teen Mom: Instructions
The second installment in the series from Everand and Roxane Gay, the beloved bestselling author of Hunger, Bad Feminist, and Opinions. Memoirist, essayist, and novelist Randa Jarrar offers an honest and wholly original user’s manual on how to raise a happy and well-adjusted child with little help and even fewer resources, but a fierce willingness to live out loud.

She was a young college student, barely eighteen. As the daughter of overbearing immigrant parents, she reveled in the freedom of being away from home, having fun, spreading her wings. But then she got pregnant.

Life as a single mother is a challenge, even in the best of circumstances. If you’re like Randa Jarrar — young, marginalized, yet fiercely determined to get an education and forge a career — it’s seemingly impossible. Yet she did it, and she shares her story in this honest, deeply moving, and profanely funny how-to that parents of any age will find useful not just for raising a happy child but for keeping oneself sane, healthy, and fulfilled.

Randa, the author of the acclaimed books A Map of Home; Him, Me and Muhammad Ali; and the memoir Love Is an Ex-Country, came to parenthood with no expectations. As little more than a child herself, with a family who offered criticism but not much else, she more or less made it up as she went.

“Raising a child alone and working and going to school is doable,” she writes, “but you will need to do one at a time at first. See: a juggler’s instruction manual.”

Jarrar’s own juggling act yielded hard-won lessons you won’t find in other parenting guides. Without a partner or much disposable income, she relied on her wits and common sense to make the best life for herself and her son. As he grew up, so did she, working her way through graduate school, finding community among single moms like herself, and refusing to crumble beneath the societal presumption that, as a brown-skinned woman of limited means, she was doing it all wrong. By holding on to her confidence against all odds, she raised a young man any parent would be proud of while establishing herself as a respected author and professor.

But it was far from easy, and Jarrar’s missteps and misadventures offer readers both moments of great wisdom and hilarity. Her moving story, a series of thirty-three short chapters with instructive titles such as “How to Advocate for Your Child” and “How to Explain Easter to Your Muslim Child Who Doesn’t Realize He Is Muslim,” reflects the challenges that come with raising a child on your own. Parenthood, especially single parenthood, is a serious, ridiculous business, and Jarrar shows us there is no one way of doing it right.