Just as the cliché, when life offers you lemon, you make a lemonade from it. When Demoine Jones was 14 years old, he was set to be a father by age 15. The news almost shattered his dreams but he persevered and now he is a senior in law school while his child is also a senior in high school.
Jones took being a teenage father in his strides, seeing how his single mother raised him without his father.
“On August 10th he was born,” Jones said of his son, Devante. “It was actually the first day of school, my Sophomore year. So while other people were preparing for school I was preparing to be a dad.”
Luckily for Jones, his high school at the time, Kashmere High, had just introduced day care. Braving the system as a child himself and being from the Fifth Ward, the odds were most likely against him, but Jones did not relent.
“So the odds were already against me. Now to become a father at an early age at that point I was like, ‘oh man life has to be over.’”
As he prepared for school at the time, he got his son, Devante, ready as well. He soon realized that his baby boy is a blessing in disguise as he grew up hearing those words from his own mother. “I didn’t have my dad. So I always said that I wanted to be different than that. Parents, especially like my mom, they would say how kids are a blessing. To become a parent that made me realize what that meant.”
Jones now knew he had something to live for. Devante gave him every reason to see his dreams through. He worked odd jobs and got more involved in his community and church activities as well (he is a deacon at his church now), all the while doing so with his son by him.
“My son has been like my inspiration,” Jones said.
Devante, after his father had learned to be a parent at age 15, was also diagnosed with lupus at that same age. “We all have our battles but it’s not the battle, it’s how you handle the situation. Your current situation is not your final destination,” Jones said.
Jones, now a father of two, has a daughter, De’Naejah. His children gave him the push to earn an Associate Degree in Business Administration, a bachelor’s degree in Mass Communications and now he is in his final semester in law school at TSU’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law set to take the bar exam in February 2021.
With all these achievements under his father’s belt, Devante now sees the importance of education and pursuing one’s dreams and wants to train to be a doctor and take his fellowship to be a neuroscientist.
“At first, I didn’t even think about going to school. But because I see my dad going to school, that’s the main reason I want to go to school,” said the 18-year-old. “I want to study neuroscience,” he added.
