Diary of a teenage mother 21 years later…..

I have been following this story about the “teen pregnancy pack” in Gloucester, Mass.  It amazes me all the press it has gotten.  Check out PoynterOnline for complete coverage at http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=67&aid=145862

Now as a teen mother two decades later I would like to share my experience.  I got pregnant at 17 years old and I can tell you first hand that peer encouragement had a lot to do with it. Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying one of my peers pressured me into getting pregnant. I saw it as a way to get out of the house. Plus in my eyes there was a lot of romance associated with the thought of getting pregnant. The government wasn’t shy about proving assistance back in the 1980’s, when I got pregnant with my daughter either.  Not only did I do it on purpose I planned it so that I wouldn’t have the baby until I was 18 years old. That way my family couldn’t force me into giving the baby up for adoption. My best friend had a baby when she was 16. She got on welfare and she started investigating everything she needed to know about other forms of assistance and low-income housing for single mothers. I was right by her side learning all the ends and outs of being a single mother on welfare too. She was still at home living with parents that accepted the choice she made. I knew for me it would not be so easy, especially since my parents would not be so accepting. So I decided to wait just a little longer to get pregnant, but by the time I was 16 I knew I wanted a baby.

Anyway, back to the glamour of it all. We had fun during her pregnancy. I watched her body change. I felt her baby kick, and I was one of the first to show up at the hospital to visit her the day her baby was born. He was so tiny and sweet.

I was so jealous. I wanted a perfect little baby to fill a void I had in my life back in those days too. I was an unhappy kid trying to escape the pain of abandonment and loneliness. My mother abandoned me to my father and left when I was 2 years old. She had several children before me that she had also abandoned. She was never really able to bond with any of us or our children for that matter. By the time I was 12 my father had been married 3 times. To say the least it was very difficult having stepmothers.  

My first love was my high school sweetheart. I imagined us against the world. Now I wasn’t trying to trap him into marrying me. I had heard it was harder to get welfare if you were married and I didn’t want him to mess up my chances of getting aid, so I was just happy with the thought of us living together. It was never a question of marriage. What kind of crazy thinking was that? I can only say that it was because I was so young that I just didn’t understand the gravity of my situation.

See the problem with this level of thinking…..or lack of thinking is that most young people are not mature enough to consider the needs of the child. Some people are just too selfish, but I never though about how painful it was going to be for my daughter to be raised in a single parent household without her father. I never thought about the challenges of getting a good job, all the sleepless nights I spent worrying about money; because I learned as the days passed, once she was born, welfare was not going to be enough.

I spent a good portion of her childhood in college. Unfortunately many of my friends that had babies early did not choose the same path that I did. My girlfriend from high school ended up addicted to drugs. She had a few more children a few years later and all of them ended up in foster care. She spent most of their adolescense in and out of prison. I lost contact with her many years ago. Over the years I would contact her family from time to time, but at some point I stopped looking back. 

I was a lonely teenager whose parents were wrapped up in their careers. I got caught up with the wrong crowd and relied on my friends to see me through the tough times, which we didn’t know at the time we were causing ourselves. I needed a strong mentor, and I didn’t have one. I can’t say enough about spending time with our children, and being the support they need.

Can we irradicate teen pregnancy? I don’t think we will ever stop it, but addressing the problem is a move towards prevention. Changing how it is viewed would help too. Especially in Hollywood with characters like Juno….and real life teenage celebrety Jamie Spears who as we know are both being glamorized. This in my opinion is just plain stupid…not good at all.

Back in the early 90’s there was a TV sitcom fictional character named “Murphy Brown.” She was successful, professional, witty, beautiful, and very single.  At some point during the shows run in the 90’s the Murphy Brown character had a baby that she was determined to raise as a single parent. In a 1992 speech Vice President Dan Quayle spoke out against glamorizing this fictional character’s life style. Murphy Brown’s insistence on raising her baby without a father supported the life style of an independed successful woman that didn’t need the financial support or presence of a man…you know “sistas are doing it for themselves.”

Vice President Quayle’s got a lot of negative feedback after his speech. Many folks started subcribing to the belief that there is nothing wrong with this lifestyle. That to me is a lot of drama. I believe his speech had more to do with the Murphy Brown character mocking the importance of fathers helping raise children in the home, not so much that he had an issue with working mothers. My take on it is that fathers, (and in some cases mothers), should be viewed as more than an extra household income. They are a part of the child, and the child needs their love and support too. I have a link to an article highlighting the story ( Exra, 2006) http://www.rightwingwatch.org/2006/10/speechwriter_wh.html 

When I look back on being a single mother, I can say that it was hard, but not just on me. I know in today’s economy most women have to work outside of the home, married or not. I was a working woman….and a college student with a young daughter to look after. So how did that turn out. Well my daughter is now 21 years old. She too is a college student with no children. So yes the chain can be broken, and the two, (working and raising a child), can be done at the same time but let’s be honest…..a working mother has a much harder job keeping up with the flow of what goes on in her home when she is not there.

We can’t be divided when raising children. We have to give 150%.  What I can say from experience is that we have to think about what is best for our children. It was very hard on my daughter being raised without her father. She missed him terribly, just as much as I missed my mother. How in the world did I put myself in the position of discounting her feelings when I had been through the same thing having a parent abandon me too. 

I have learned from being a teenage mother, and associating with other teenage mothers that most of us didn’t know to think about what is best for our children before we have them so young. I never thought about my unborn babies feelings. I don’t thing I was mature enough to do so in the first place. We as people and parents are not the only ones affected by our life styles and decisions. We need to think of our children’s needs, and spend time nurturing them, and teaching them the differences between right and wrong. That has to be taught from birth, because if not I am sure many of us know how hard it is to try and start teaching a child right from wrong when they are older, even teenagers. 

Knowing the difference between right and wrong is the only way we learn common sense, and for crying out loud we need to be parents, that’s our primary job before anything else is to parent our children….let’s not leave that up to their peers….heck most of those kids still need their parents too.

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