Section B · Page 8
The University Daily Kansan
Wednesday, February 21, 2001
Promise of future success justifies hardship
Continued from page 1B
Virginia this summer to be with Jachon. She will do her workouts with a personal trainer and take classes at a community college with her father.
"I can't wait till summer," Dalchon said beaming. "I'll get to see him all the time."
"It was a real shocker"
Dalchon had been on a rigorous training program in her last season at Independence Community College, trying to
lose weight and get in peak physical condition for her arrival at Kansas.
When her body began to change shape, Dalichon thought it was from the workouts. She never imagined she could be pregnant. But when her roommate mentioned the differences, Dalichon took a pregnancy test.
She was already eight months pregnant.
pregnant "I saw it changing colors, and I just went in my room and started crying," she said. "I just couldn't believe it.
"But the main reason I was crying was that I knew I had to tell my dad."
Dalchon is the youngest child and the only daughter in her family, and has always been a daddy's girl. She knew her father would be 'liv'd when he found she was with child.
"That was a real shocker. I wasn't prepared for that at all." Robert said. "But, she's human and she makes mistakes. Some of the mistakes we make can be blessings, and he's truly been a blessing in our lives.
"I love him, my main man
here. I can't go anywhere without him."
A long-distance family
Jachon, who was born March 20, 2000, has been talking since he was about four months old, and recognizes his mother's voice on the phone. Dalchon has missed his first step, his first teeth, and all of the daily things her son is experiencing for the first time.
with all of the things she's missed, Dalchon hopes to be home in a month to celebrate another first.
"I hope I get to be there for his first birthday," Dalchon said. "I've missed everything else."
Dalchon relies on phone calls and e-mails to keep up with her son's progress — having only seen him for three days since August. Though the stories of Jachon's fights at daycare and anecdotes of his first eight teeth come easy, Dalchon says talking about her son makes him seem farther away.
"It's hard every day.
Sometimes I just hide my down-falls, if I'm depressed," Dalchon said. "And sometimes I don't
hide them at all. There's nothing I can do about it."
Robert said he was proud of his daughter's efforts in the classroom and believed her decision to try to make a better life for her son had been worth the things his daughter had missed.
"There is a lot of sadness in it," Robert said. "But she knows the best place for her to be at this time is at Kansas getting her degree so she can better herself and the life for her son."
"I think it was the best decision in the world."
— Edited by Matt Daugherty
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