Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/111400
Mom N atalie Brock pulls a small pair of blue jeans from a pile of laundry and places them on the ironing board set up in the dining room. She presses them carefully so her son will have a sharp crease in his trousers when he arrives in his kindergarten classroom. Tere aren���t enough closets in the house she rents on Vermont Avenue near 31st Street, so several bins of clothing are stacked along the dining room wall. Above the bins is an arrangement of rooster pictures, a motif that continues into the kitchen, where rooster curtains frame the window above the sink, and colorful rooster decals decorate each cupboard. ���I just like roosters,��� the 35-year-old Brock says as she washes dishes from the night before. In a crate in the kitchen, a fve-month-old pit bull whimpers for attention, a cry the brindle pup will keep up all morning long and start again when everyone comes home in the late afternoon. Upstairs, 11-year-old Kie���Vonna, slender with intense, dark eyes, is preparing for school. She is not a morning person. Brock wakes her at 5:30 a.m. and will check back on her progress in a few moments. Her daughter will crawl right back into bed given the opportunity. She���s been known to take her blanket and curl up in the closet. But right now, Kie���Vonna sits on the foor of her bedroom stufng a pack with gear. Justin Bieber watches over her from her wall posters. Two T-shirts hang on a far wall, commemorating the lives of uncles ��� her father���s brothers ��� slain by gunfre. Sometime during the night her brother, fve-year-old Michael, made his way to her room, and now he is cocooned in a green comforter on her bed. As Mom reaches the top of the stairs, Michael tugs the comforter over his head and burrows deeper. If Kie���Vonna isn���t a morning person, Michael is downright anti-morning. Across Louisville this morning, thousands of moms are urging their reluctant children from bed. One quarter of those mothers are 46 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 3.13 The real story of west Louisville belongs to women like Natalie Brock ��� strong single mothers battling long odds. By Jenni Laidman Photos by Mickie Winters ISLAND women like Brock, raising children without a father���s day-to-day involvement. Tey are part of a fast-growing demographic throughout the United States. Between 1977 and 2010, single motherhood increased by more than two and a half times to 41 percent, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. What is diferent in the lives of Brock, Michael, and Kie���Vonna is a matter of context. In this slice of the Russell neighborhood, just east of I-264, female-led households make up almost half of all families with children, according to the U.S. Census. Troughout west Louisville, the percentage of single mothers is higher than the rest of the city. West Louisville is Mom Island. Brock gets Big Easy, the pup, from his crate possible moment to get him up. He���s a slight boy, small for his age, his mother says, and full of activity. Brock gives him potatoes and a slice of bologna for breakfast, but he never sits down long enough to eat it. Michael attends the West End Boys School on Virginia Avenue and 36th Street, a private school founded in 2005 by the former headmaster of Kentucky Country Day School, Robert Blair, and his wife Debbie. Tis is the frst year the school has ofered prekindergarten and kindergarten. Brock saw signs around the neighborhood announcing the new kindergarten and applied to get Michael in. Te tuition is free. Middle school boys board at the school during the week, and she thinks that would be good for Michael when the time comes. In this slice of the Russell neighborhood, just east of I-264, female-led households make up almost half of all families with children. and takes him out into the dark morning, snow swirling around her. Two tall shrubs threaten to take over the front window of her tan two-story house. Te house has an anonymous face, not trimly maintained, but not a shambles either. Right now the grass in the empty lot next door is mowed, but for most of the year, it grows untended until it dwarfs the one-story home on its other side. ���All kinds of things was coming out of there: rats and possum,��� she says. Brock comes back in to fnd Michael out of bed; it���s not even 6:30 yet. Tis is unusual. ���If he gets woke up, then you got to listen to him cry. He does the whole temper tantrum thing if you wake him up,��� Brock says. ���Most of the time I just let him sleep.��� She will dress him while he slumbers, lifting arms and legs into the outft for the day, and then wait until the last ���Tey have a lot of males involved over there, whereas a majority of our black kids, their dads is either dead or in jail,��� she says. ���Tey are barely getting attention from other male fgures because they���re not there, so I���m going to keep him over there as long as I can.��� Brock heads upstairs to dress for work. She works two jobs. She puts in 25 hours in the cafeteria at King Elementary School, where she earns about $11.50 an hour, and 10 hours a week at Park DuValle Community Health Center. Te school job covers her medical, vision and dental care ��� not an easy thing to fnd. But the school district sets aside a portion of her pay so that she receives a paycheck in summer. It stings. ���I���m like, they should let us decide,��� she says. Motherhood, it turns out, can be a shortcut