Leah Messer wears a Staud top, COS skirt and Ganni bootsMadeleine Hordinski
The first time Leah Messer was on television, in 16 and Pregnant, she was 17 and expecting twins. Simultaneously, she was mourning her high school life and trying to build a new one with Corey, the father of her children. Her blonde hair was highlighted and scrunched, except for her straightened bangs, and her bright blue eyes were lined in thick black pencil. She spoke with a southern drawl typical of West Virginia.
In Messer's episode of 16 and Pregnant — the MTV hit show that lasted for six seasons and spurred spin-offs like Teen Mom, which are still airing 14 years later — Messer was alternately morose, fixated on her former life and tempted to try to return to it, and bubbly, even laughing when an attempt to buy a used car was derailed by her peeing her pants. Six minutes into the episode, her cheerful veneer dropped when she said to her friends, “I really wanna try to make it work with me and Corey. I didn’t have my dad at all and I don’t want my kids to go without that.”
Leah Messer, now 31, was born to a teenage mother who was born to a teenage mother. Leah's grandmother was 18 when her mother, Dawn, was born. By the time Dawn was 16, she was pregnant with Leah and married to Leah’s father, a 25-year-old Baptist preacher and construction worker. The Messers had three children in quick succession, but by the time Leah was in kindergarten, the marriage had ended. Within a year, Dawn got remarried, to a man she met through their work as hospital janitors.
In Leah's memoir, she describes her mother as angry and abusive throughout her childhood, quick to spank her children or dole out antiquarian punishments, like making them hold heavy boots until they cried. The Messer children spent their childhood years bouncing from trailers to low-income apartments, she writes, isolated from extended family after yet another fight about their mother’s parenting.
A photo printed in her memoir features an adolescent Leah looking at the camera, wearing a shirt that reads “Cheer America,” her eyes blank, her mouth drawn. She didn’t attend school for the entirety of eighth grade, an arrangement her mother approved of because it enabled Leah to help around the house.
At age 13, Leah had sex for the first time, with an 18-year-old, the same night she had her first kiss, she reveals in the memoir. When she told her mother, Leah writes, Dawn put her on the Depo birth control shot, “[without a] discussion about whether, at 13 years old, I was ready to be having sex.”
The reality of Leah’s upbringing reads like an Appalachian American nightmare, threaded with drugs, physical abuse, intergenerational poverty, and teenage parenthood. When asked whether she feels resentful toward her mother, Leah says she used to: She used to be angry and resentful, but now she just feels bad for her. “I feel sorry that she endured so much,” Leah explains, referring to Dawn’s own difficult upbringing, teenage pregnancy and marriage. “Now I feel like I just want to nurture my mom too.”
In any case, Leah's marriage to Corey was over. Just a year after the divorce was finalized, though, 19-year-old Leah got married again, to pipeline engineer Jeremy Calvert. Leah smiled onscreen, still in braces on her rainy wedding day, as she and Jeremy each held one of her daughters. Rewatching it now, I’m struck by the uneasy symmetry of her life laid over her mother’s — the succession of young marriages in a misguided but understandable search for a provider for the children. Of her first marriage at 18 and her second marriage at 19, which also ended in divorce, Leah says, “No one seemed shocked, except for my family attorney. That is really what I thought was normal and what I thought was my destiny.”
Two months before Leah's 21st birthday, after what she says was a spinal-cord puncture during an epidural and C-section to deliver her third daughter, Adalynn Faith, Leah was sent home from the hospital with prescriptions for three different opioid painkillers. It was 2013 and she was in pain in West Virginia, the epicenter of the opioid epidemic, and a state that would later reach a $400 million settlement with two drug distributors after alleging they had “recklessly oversupplied West Virginia with prescription pain medication,” as reported by Reuters.
With her pipe-fitter husband often working away from home for weeks at a time, Leah tried to take care of her three young children as she fell deeper into drug addiction — and it was all unfolding on reality television. The Teen Mom 2 footage from that time is harrowing: Leah appeared to fall asleep during a phone call about Ali’s muscular dystrophy diagnosis, fought with her husband and ex-husband in a voice made raspy by opioid use, and nodded off while holding her newborn niece.
Leah's smile doesn’t falter when she reflects on how she didn’t have time to find what she loved in her own rushed childhood. I get the sense that she’s okay with everything she missed out on, as long as her girls don’t miss out too. This is what she wants for her children: the chance to explore their identities in a childhood that is not rushed or shortened.
