Heather Lichty '04 steps out of 1F Magie — one of Princeton's brown brick and cinderblock apartments squatting on the edge of Lake Carnegie — with a slight look of panic on her pale face. It's the look of fear that something just might've happened during the half-minute it took her to step back inside for her coat. It's a look hardly ever seen on the face of an undergraduate.
"Caleb?" she says.
She begins to run around the side of her building to scan the lake for her child, but stops at the sound of a giggle behind her. Her son, a three-year-old golden haired toddler, waddles into sight holding the purple plastic ball he's just found.
"Look Mommy," he says.
Relief spreads over her face. Caleb is never far from her thoughts. While biology midterms, house parties and summer internships dominate conversation up-campus, Lichty and her husband spend hours worrying how to stretch their budget to pay for graduate housing, how to share daycare responsibilities so they can both earn undergraduate degrees and how to plan a future that will allow all three to stay together.
Since Caleb was born in 2001, in Lichty's sophomore year, she has managed her coursework along with motherhood, marriage and a campus job. In June, she'll graduate with a degree in English and plans to finish her premed requirements.
Her days begin at 7 a.m., when she leaves her sleeping high-school sweetheart-turned-husband, Ashley Stanton, to make Caleb toast with peanut butter. She settles Caleb on their velvet couch to watch cartoons, and then heads up campus for her 8:30 a.m. biology lab.
Stanton wakes up a little while later, when Caleb, who's almost through potty training, needs to go to the bathroom. They spend the day together, Caleb amusing himself in the apartment while Stanton studies for his online organic chemistry class to get his degree in chemical engineering.
Often, Stanton sits in the nearby playground with one eye on his son and the other on his chemistry book. "My only friends are the other 47-year-old Moms," he says with a laugh.
Up campus, Lichty is in a lab finishing some of the premed courses she dropped her sophomore year because the chemicals were unsafe for a pregnant woman. She puts in 20 hours a week at the Marquand art library, checking bags to make sure no one brings in water and cataloguing the bookends according to color and size.
She earns $9.75 an hour — which, along with about $4,000 from their parents each year and student loans, must cover the $1,200-a-month rent the school declined to subsidize and the $300 they spend a month on food and other necessities.
At 4:30, Lichty returns home to take over from Stanton — he gets some time to study while she plays with Caleb, makes dinner, supervises the 8:00 bath and hopes that Caleb is tired enough to sleep by 9 p.m. Afterward, Lichty and Stanton spend a few hours in separate rooms studying, before watching a movie or talking until it's time for bed.
A life-changing test
When Lichty returned her sophomore year after spending the summer with Stanton in their hometown of Orillia, Canada, she quickly got caught up in the excitement of the school year. She wasn't really concerned when August passed and she hadn't had her period. September flew by, and October was drawing to a close when she began to worry.
Her jeans had been getting tighter. One morning, after she'd stayed up the night thirsty, she went to the local CVS to buy a pregnancy test.
"I was half panicked and in total denial," Lichty recalled.
At 8 a.m., she entered an empty bathroom in Campbell Hall. The pregnancy test showed two bars. She sighed with relief: not pregnant. She told her roommates, who were thrilled, and called Stanton to tell him the good news.
A few minutes later, she began to rethink the past hour. If one bar meant that the test worked and two meant she was not pregnant, what sign meant you were, she thought.
She went back down to the bathroom to dig the box out of the trash and reread the instructions. She had been mistaken. Two bars meant pregnant.
Decisions
"It was one of those really heartbreaking moments where you have no idea what to do," Lichty said. Her roommates were convinced she and the pregnancy test were wrong.
"My first thought was — no, it's just Dorf being naïve again," her freshman and sophomore year roommate MacKenzie Forsythe '03 said, referring to Lichty by her nickname.
But McCosh Health Center confirmed she was pregnant.
Lichty had to make a decision.
She initially wanted to "have an abortion and get on with it," she said, but Stanton begged her to reconsider.
"I just knew we'd be able to manage it," Stanton said.
They had talked about marriage before, and he offered to care for the child while she finished school. Lichty wasn't sure but was ultimately swayed by Stanton.
"Mostly it was Ashley. He was just so sure that 'this is going to work' and that 'this is a good idea,' and was just incredibly frustrated. . . . I think that he had put his fist through a cupboard that I had decided this and that he had no say in this," she said.
Lichty thought having an abortion would essentially end their relationship.
"I was already at the point to say let's get married," she said of the state of their relationship before the pregnancy. "He was totally into [the pregnancy] from the beginning, and I was totally into him."
She paid McCosh another visit, spending four hours with a counselor talking over her situation. Coming out of the meeting, she said she believed that she might regret an abortion, but not having the child.
Her mother drove down to Princeton, and the two went to a clinic for an ultrasound to determine when the baby had been conceived.
"[My mother] was saying, 'You don't have to look at this if you think this is hard,' and I said, 'No, no I'm going into this face first. If this is a good decision, then I'm going to look at everything and feel O.K. about it.'"
When her mother saw the ultrasound and "melted," Lichty said she knew she should have the baby.
"I thought, 'My mother's this into it, and Ashley's so sure about it, that this just has to be right,'" Lichty said.
Having decided to have the baby, Lichty wanted to get married.
"I thought that by having a kid, we already had a lifetime relationship, we might as well commit to each other," she said. Along with marriage came legitimacy, University housing benefits and tax breaks, she said, though she brushed these off as "stupid reasons to get married."
Yet Stanton was more apprehensive, in large part because his parents had several marriages that had failed.
"In his mind marriage messes everything up and ruins the relationship," Lichty said.
But she changed his mind, and they married on Dec. 27, 2000.
Birth
Five months later, on May 18, 2001, their 8 pound 3 ounce baby was born, and Heather was homebound in Canada, caring for a baby who had to be nursed every hour.
"For the first time in my whole life I really felt grounded," she said. "You've got a lot of ideas when you're 20, and, well, I had to change everything I ever thought about life and start a family."
Her mind was soon filled with doubt.
"I kept thinking — maybe [Ashley] didn't marry me, he just wanted to marry me because of Caleb," she said. "I was living inside my head and at home all the time."
Life improved when the newlyweds moved away from their hometown to Princeton. Finally, they could establish their own schedule and divide the chores their own way.
The adjustment seemed more natural to Lichty, who was used to sitting in the front row in class and staying home on Friday nights to help her mother prepare broccoli.
"My life was already a sort of parent lifestyle," she said. "I am like a child of the '50s. Conservative — I don't drink, I don't smoke, I didn't sleep around."
It's been harder for Stanton, the guy who grew his hair long, played in a rock band and only stopped partying at 4 a.m. to grab some pizza. She said he had had "tons of relationships" before her and dropped out of high school for two years before returning as a junior when she was a senior.
For their first date, they skipped school — something Lichty had never done, and he did all the time. She drove him to traffic court to plead guilty for driving his motorbike without a license plate.
"She's the lady, I'm the tramp," Stanton jokes.
Yet now, Stanton wears a wedding ring and vacuums, laughing with his wife about the longed-for day when all three of them will be in school — Caleb studying his ABC's, Stanton researching chemical damage in the environment and Lichty learning the intricacies of neuroscience in medical school.
They are "vacillating" about having another child, Lichty said.
"Last year, I was late, and I thought — 'Oh wouldn't this be nice, I wouldn't have to decide anything," she said.
Yet for now, with many years of schooling ahead, they have decided against it.
"For the moment, our tentative decision for today is, 'This is it.' I have a feeling we might be having another one."
Read More
As endowment tax looms, Princeton asks departments to make plans for ‘permanent’ budget cuts, warns of potential layoffs
Christopher Bao and Annie RupertusPrinceton asked all departments and University units to prepare “separate plans for 5 percent and 10 percent permanent budget cuts to be phased in over the next three years in a memo sent Monday. Administrators warned of layoffs as the University prepares for a potential federal endowment tax, set to be debated in Congress later this week.
Princeton asked all departments and University units to prepare “separate plans for 5 percent and 10 percent permanent budget cuts to be phased in over the next three years in a memo sent Monday. Administrators warned of layoffs as the University prepares for a potential federal endowment tax, set to be debated in Congress later this week.
Newark airport disruptions snarl student travel plans
Cynthia TorresNewark has been facing disruptions for around two weeks amid a national air traffic controller shortage, leading to delays of up to five hours for some flights. As a result, some students flying home for the summer have changed their flights.
Newark has been facing disruptions for around two weeks amid a national air traffic controller shortage, leading to delays of up to five hours for some flights. Some students flying home for the summer and may be effected by delays and some students changed their flights.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ’03 ‘plagiarized’ small portions of his senior thesis, experts say. But how serious is it?
Sena ChangA review of the senior thesis of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ’03 by The Daily Princetonian, in consultation with three plagiarism experts, found eight instances of uncredited material, sham paraphrasing, and verbatim copying. According to the experts, each passage violated Princeton’s academic integrity policies but varied in severity.
A review of the senior thesis of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ’03 by The Daily Princetonian, in consultation with three plagiarism experts, found eight instances of uncredited material, sham paraphrasing, and verbatim copying. According to the experts, each passage violated Princeton’s academic integrity policies but varied in severity.