This past summer, I received the opportunity to serve as a student intern for YoungLives Columbus. My role was very fluid, allowing me to experience every position in this organization. From handling the newsletter, to running childcare, to finding reliable resources to relay to moms, this internship definitely exceeded my expectations. I truly saw the behind the scenes work of supporting mothers in their day-to-day lives and helping them grow in self-advocacy.
I really enjoyed working on the resource toolkit with the committee members. The goal of this toolkit was to create a living document with reliable resources for moms. It contains many resources for shelter, food, pregnancy, diapers, transportation, furniture, and medical options. I didn’t understand how much this was needed at first, but I have come to learn that some places that advertise that they are here to support moms really fail to accomplish that. Whether it be a completely false advertisement or many times another agenda is involved, it is really hard to get help when needed. Creating this toolkit involved YoungLives mentors calling these places and explaining what we do and asking the question of how can you help us. We then tried to use the resource for ourselves first before referring to moms.
The biggest thing that I have learned was how to put the feelings of these mothers over my own. Being involved in an organization like this truly requires a selfless character and this character does not come naturally. This was not something that I could be taught solely, but something I also needed to learn through experience. When I first experienced a blowup with a mom, I had no idea what to do. The specific mom that I was connecting with has deep trauma and suffers from severe depression and addiction. One day, I was at her apartment and she became extremely angry with me because I refused to take her to get cigarettes. She became hysterical in such a short time and I was honestly shocked because it was my first time seeing her in that state. I knew that I had to stand my ground, but I also did not want to abandon her at her worst because that is what she was used to. So, I stayed with her and listened because that was really all I could do. She was not in the state to even have a logical conversation surrounding it, so I stayed at her apartment for about 30 minutes until she calmed down. My purpose for doing that was to show her that she does not deserve to be walked out on just because she had a bad moment. How she feels and why she feels it still mattered to me. I understood that her anger was about way more than the cigarettes. One part of me was really confused about why this was happening with me and to me, but another part was really concerned for her well-being and that was the feeling that ended up taking over. I was not worried about me because I was not the one who was hurting.
It is my dream to become an OBGYN and this internship has really helped me understand what mothers go through on the daily, specifically teen moms. Teen mothers are not a monolith and their lives look so different from one another. Even though they are young mothers, they still deserve to be supported and cared for. This internship has grown my passion for working with mothers in the future.
-Valerie Simon