How the Unexpected Child of a Sexual Abuse Survivor Learned Love & Strength From His Mom

(Photo via New York Daily News)

Last week, Wayne Coffey of New York’s Daily News wrote a powerful profile about West Point senior Dion Hart and his mother Leah Chavez who survived major difficulties over the course of their lives because of the power of love. Here’s an excerpt.

When you grow up in the deep end, you better learn to swim. Dion Hart found that out long before he got to West Point, or ever swam a stroke in Army’s Crandall Pool. Even as life lessons bombarded him like incoming fire, he found a way to dodge discouragement and dysfunction, knowing that the one person he could always count on was his mother, Leah Chavez, who gave birth to him when she was 14 years old.

People in her family told Leah Chavez she should abort the pregnancy, or give the baby up for adoption. She was kicked out of her home, got nothing from the baby’s father, spent ten terrifying days at the hospital when Dion was a newborn in an oxygen tent, fighting for breath against a respiratory virus. Leah Chavez, a sexual-abuse survivor, wound up living with her baby in a crack house and other sorry outposts in the poorest precincts in Phoenix. She wound up being forced into prostitution, getting by with food stamps and public assistance.

But she had her son, and he had her, and now look.

Now he is a 22-year-old senior at West Point, a swimming stalwart whose teammates are the family he never had, a 6-0, 185-pound man who will graduate with an economics degree and a commission as a first lieutenant. Dion Hart wants to be an engineer diver, water apparently coursing deep into his soul. More than anything, he wants to honor Leah Chavez.

“My mother dropped everything in her life to support me,” Hart says. “She never gave up wanting to be my mother. She was the one to teach me that if you want something you have to be the one to make it happen. I wake up every morning with the intent to work towards achieving my goals because I know it will reinforce the fact that my mother was the best mother I could have ever asked for.”

Says Leah Chavez, “Before I had my son I could care less about living. He did not ask to come into this world. I told myself I was going to protect him at all costs. My strength came from my son.”

Read the whole story.