At 16, Pregnancy Gave Her a Reason to Change Her Life
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 25 May 2026
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, by the time Teri Neal became pregnant at sixteen, she had already dropped out of school and fallen deep into drug culture. She had grown up watching addiction consume nearly everyone around her and expected her own life would end the same way. Then her son gave her a reason to believe something else was possible. Teri shares the remarkable story of her life, her recovery, and the bond that changed both her future and her son’s.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:13.9 | And we return to our American stories. |
| 0:17.5 | Up next, we're going to hear a story of faith, redemption, and overcoming. Here's Terry Neal |
| 0:23.6 | with her story, beginning with her childhood. |
| 0:32.4 | The earliest memories of me, like, four or five, I knew what drugs were. |
| 0:39.2 | It was just out in front of us. |
| 0:41.5 | It wasn't hidden. |
| 0:43.1 | You know, they were so wrapped up in their addiction. |
| 0:45.1 | They just used kind of in front of us. |
| 0:48.2 | I could remember it's just being at different houses like I would be with her aunts or |
| 0:53.5 | our grandma or just back and forth. |
| 0:56.6 | There was fighting between both families. |
| 0:59.4 | When I was one, my mom did leave my dad and she met my stepdad about a week later and |
| 1:05.7 | started using heroin with him. |
| 1:09.0 | So me and my sister were constantly back and forth |
| 1:11.8 | between my mother and my father. |
| 1:14.4 | My dad wasn't addicted to heroin, but he was an alcoholic |
| 1:17.7 | and addicted to other, like, psychedelic drugs. |
| 1:20.9 | So we weren't cared for really well. |
| 1:25.4 | My mom started getting arrested when I was almost two. so she was in and out of jail a lot. |
| 1:31.6 | So when we were with her, me and my sister were with my grandmother, her mother. |
... |
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