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

By Randa Jarrar and Roxane Gay

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Everand Originals
• Release date: Feb 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9781094456409

Randa Jarrar

Randa Jarrar is the author of the memoir Love Is An Ex-Country, the novel A Map of Home, and the collection of stories Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. She is also a performer who has appeared in independent films and in the TV show RAMY. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Salon, Bitch, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a Creative Capital Award and an American Book Award, as well as awards and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, PEN, and others. She lives in Los Angeles.

Book preview

Introduction

By Roxane Gay

Instruction manuals are supposed to offer clarity or guidance, teach us how to use or do something. At their best, instruction manuals remind us that we are not alone as we try to engage with something unfamiliar. All too often, though, instruction manuals are overly complicated, confusing, incomplete. And worse, there are rarely instruction manuals for the most challenging things in our lives — nurturing relationships, living a good life, raising children.

In her essay You Are a Teen Mom: Instructions writer Randa Jarrar upends the notion of an instruction manual as she chronicles single motherhood from a young age. Everyone says children don’t come with an instruction manual. I’m here to tell you they do, she says in the essay’s opening. Across thirty-three sections, Randa writes of getting pregnant at eighteen, the rupture it created in her family, and after a tumultuous and brief marriage to the baby’s father, how she raised her son into a young man as a single mother. This is also the story of how Randa raised herself into the writer and woman she is today, how she made space for joy alongside life’s tribulations, and ultimately, how she forgave herself for her regrets.

Randa is a consummate storyteller and the author of three acclaimed books — the novel A Map of Home, the short story collection Him, Me, and Muhammad Ali, and the memoir Love Is An Ex-Country. She is a professor of creative writing at Fresno State University, where she teaches courses in both fiction and nonfiction. Her award-winning, widely published work explores Palestinian-American identity, the complexities of home as part of a displaced people, single parenting, and living a radical, creative life. She does not limit her creativity to writing — Randa is also a comedian, performer, filmmaker, organizer, and activist.

I started reading Randa’s writing many years ago when she had a blog while attending graduate school at the University of Michigan. I have no idea how I first found the blog, but once I started reading, I was hooked. She had the ability to make everything she wrote about interesting, often poignant. She projected strength alongside vulnerability, courage alongside fear, and these characteristics also shape You Are a Teen Mom. She defies our expectations for what motherhood can look like and is, at times, delightfully irreverent.

There is remarkable honesty in this piece as Randa shares the challenges of single motherhood, navigating one’s twenties, the loneliness of adulthood, the comfort of finding community in unexpected places, and the great and small joys she creates for herself and her son. She offers us the greatest of gifts — an instruction manual on how to be unapologetically human, how to live life on our own terms.

1. Breed with an Idiot

You meet him at a bar when you are barely eighteen. Your gay guy friends from college think he is extremely hot. Four months later, you are pregnant. There are no reality TV shows yet about single young mothers. Your life itself is now like a reality TV show with no budget, housing, film crew, editor, lighting, host, or set. Your father will kick you out, and your mother will keep calling every day and checking on you.

While pregnant, you are in college. The college will not allow a baby to live with you in the dorms. This is a liability for them. A baby shouldn’t be surrounded by weed smoke and bottles of cheap beer. You will have to move in with the man who impregnated you. Call your gay guy friends and tell them this is all their fault. Tell them they need to be there for you when you give birth, knowing they definitely will not be.

Give birth in a hospital where the nurses feel bad about your age. Only eighteen, they yell across the maternity halls. This one is a baby! They point to you. Agree with them. You don’t want to leave the hospital, ever. You don’t want to be away from their care and their kindness.

Your baby is absolutely perfect. You hold him and cry. You count his toes and notice they are crunched together. Worried, you ask the nurses why, and they explain that he was just swaddled inside you and hasn’t fully stretched out yet. They assure you that he is okay.

You kiss his cheeks and feed him from your own milk. This makes you feel powerful. As he nurses, you feel like you are spinning straw into gold, that there is a thread of pure gold silk unspooling from your body into his, nourishing him and keeping him safe.

The hospital staff will ask you if you want to purchase a breast pump. You can’t afford one, so they

Reviews for Roxane Gay & Everand Originals

[Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is the shit. I enjoyed every word. Randa is a great writer, who just keeps getting better. We are so lucky to have this succinct rich gift.

[Robin Rasumov-Rahe · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

My first time reading Randa Jarrar. Poignant, hopeful and real. Now looking for more from her.

[crf9fdjbxy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is, without a doubt, my favorite piece of writing she’s ever done.