Going All the Way
The
lies, half-truths, and hidden advantages of teenage motherhood
When I was seven or eight, someone gave me
a diary. It was blue and white with a silver lock. You could open it
with its special diary key, or alternately, the metal catch of a
barrette. I wrote in it the day I got it and a few more times, but
eventually the diary wound up somewhere under my bed, the fate of most
objects I was in charge of. A few years later, I found it. “I like
Brownies better than school” was declared sometime in the fall. It was
a sentiment I found strange because I had never, ever liked Brownies
better than school. There were also references to doing gymnastics. And
to playing at the homes of girls like Crystal Kennedy, who was not my
friend. My sister Erin had written in my diary.
I’ve trotted out this story so much, it’s taken on parable-like
dimensions. For a long while, it was a typical story of big-sister
outrage. Then, during my navel-gazing college years, it became evidence
in The Case of What Kind of Person I Am, Was, and Will Be. (Erin wrote
out actual opinions, while the strongest feeling I ever expressed to my
own diary was that a girl I met was “nice.” Instructions: Note this.
Blow it out of proportion in bad fiction.)
Now the diary story strikes me as a shorthand of what my original
family—my mother, three sisters, and me—is like. We are extraordinarily
close, and I like to think of this story, in which my little sister
writes down private thoughts she must know I’ll find, as foreshadowing
for who we are today.
A friend of mine once called us the Niesslein Matriarchy. We are
marathon phone conversationalists and owners of karaoke machines and
wearers of tight black pants from Express. We are suburban girls who
know where one can find a nice wooden medicine cabinet for cheap, which
is the better school district, and that a sale at Hecht’s will always,
always come again. We are a girl gang, rallying against those who would
make us unhappy. We help a sister out in big and little ways. We are
not rich, but we have good middle-class credit and are unafraid to use
it, for ourselves and each other. We talk, talk, talk. My mother and
sisters know me in ways that are irreplaceable; they can make me, in
two words of an inside joke, laugh until I cry. We are each other’s
diaries, in a way: keepers of details that would be lost to memory,
links between the selves we’ve been and are.
But, like everyone, we are capable of suprising each other. Here are
two other stories that take place eight years apart.
I have just turned nineteen, and my mother is driving me home in her
black sports car. I have been visiting my grandparents—a week of
playing Scrabble and shopping for school clothes and eating cantaloupe
on the porch swing. In the car, my mother seems a little nervous, or
angry, or preoccupied. She rubs her thumbs against the steering wheel,
a habit of hers when she’s under stress. I prattle on about my week,
then stop to ask how things are at home. They were fine when I left,
even with Erin—who is seventeen and has, for the summer at least,
forsaken her fascination with bad boys for a nice boyfriend. “What’s
wrong?” I ask Mom.
“Erin hasn’t gotten her period,” she says.
I am twenty-six and the mother of a six-month-old baby, all chubby
cheeks and drooly chin. A car that belongs to Jill, my sixteen-year-old
sister, is parked in my garage, two hours from where she lives. She is
not allowed to drive it because she is acting very much like a girl
acts right before a daytime talk-show host sends her to boot camp for
out-of-control teenagers. These months with my new baby are punctuated
with calls from my mother, who is also picking her way through a rocky
parenting stage. I often don’t know how to respond: all four of us have
logged stints as … let’s say, party girls. Is Jill really behaving
worse than the rest of us did? I roll this question around and around
in my head, but all I come up with is that Jill is intrinsically more
stubborn than the rest of us. She insisted on a peculiarly mod-ish
haircut at six years old; later, she went through a stage of refusing
to answer to any name but “Brenda.” Is it a matter of degree? On the
phone with Mom, I hold my wiggling ball of cuteness and flinch at the
sound of mothering a girl gone wild. In late April, the phone rings and
Mom tells me that Jill missed her period.
Both times, I go immediately to the position I hold in the family,
which is the Let’s-Calm-Down person, a role rooted in optimistic
denial. Let’s not jump to conclusions! Periods are late all the time!
Which is true—but mostly for women who are pregnant. My sisters are.
They consider their options. They decide to continue on and raise their
babies.
Both times, my stomach twists a little. It’s a big drama for our
family, with key dramatic elements—a birth, and the death of my
sisters’ girlhoods. This is how it works for the Niesslein Matriarchy:
Shock, followed by a moment of sadness, followed by many quiet
conversations. Then, lots of shopping for the newest member of the
family, and finally convincing someone—usually Krissy, the only one of
us who is good with things like this—to get the crib from the attic and
put it back together.
*
* *
It may have felt like a private drama to
us, but in becoming teenage mothers, my sisters joined the ranks of
what may be the most hated group of mothers in the United States. Or,
as Barry Glassner puts it in The
Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things
(Basic Books, 1999): “In what may qualify as the most sweeping,
bipartisan, multimedia, multidisciplinary scapegoating operation of the
late twentieth century, at various times over the past decade prominent
liberals including Jesse Jackson, Joycelyn Elders, and Daniel Patrick
Moynihan and conservatives such as Dan Quayle and Bill Bennett all
accused teen moms of destroying civilization.”
There are at least three federal government agencies that collect data
on teenage pregnancy, and scores of national organizations and
thousands of state, local, and private agencies devoted to the
prevention of it. From the slick non-profit National Campaign to
Prevent Teen Pregnancy, to the religiously-undertoned
abstinence-promoter Friends First, to the March of Dimes, most
organizations present more or less the same grim statistics about the
half million teenage girls who become mothers each year in the U.S.
Only five percent of them will go on to college, compared to
forty-seven percent of teenage girls who delay childbearing; the
reported numbers of how many complete high school vary, from less than
one-third to seven out of ten. Teen moms are likely to receive welfare
and unlikely to marry. Their babies are twenty-eight percent more
likely to be born underweight, or with complications. Teenage mothers
and their families are more likely to wind up in poverty. The daughters
of teen mothers are more likely to become teen mothers themselves;
their sons, more likely to wind up in prison. And, The National
Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy presents this fact (sure to strike
fear in the heart of every teen in America): “Teen pregnancy hurts the
business community’s ‘bottom line.’”
No doubt, most of these facts are scary. But they are only half the
story. Six out of ten pregnancies occur in eighteen- and
nineteen-year-olds—the majority of whom have made decisions on whether
or not to leave high school before they even conceived. A little over
half of all teen pregnancies end in births; miscarriages and abortions
account for the other half.
The statistics on the fate of teenage mothers also leave out one large
fact: eighty percent of teenagers who give birth come from poor or
low-income families to begin with. When you compare their lives with
other teens from poor or low-income families who did not give birth,
their fates look much the same. Compared to their peers, these teen
mothers are roughly as likely (or not) to graduate high school, go to
college, or receive welfare. Their children are roughly as likely (or
not) to become teen mothers or go to prison. Because children born poor
are likely to be poor adults in this country, it’s little surprise that
poor teenage mothers become poor older mothers. Poor nutrition and lack
of prenatal care (hallmarks of poverty)—not the mother’s age—are the
main culprits in causing the low birth weights and related
complications of babies born to teen mothers. (In fact, prenatal care
being equal, the later teen years may be the ideal time to bear a
child, physiologically-speaking.) Childhood poverty, not pregnancy, is
the driving force behind the statistics.
But for the past thirty years, politicians, social scientists, and
pundits have labored under the impression that teen moms cause poverty.
They got this idea in the 1970s, when the legality of birth control was
still a hot topic.
As Kristin Luker writes in her book Dubious
Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy (Harvard
University Press, 1996), birth control, for the first half of the
twentieth century, was illegal. However, if a woman’s doctor deemed it
necessary, he could prescribe it. This created a situation in which
moneyed or middle-class women—who could afford a doctor—had access to
birth control, but the poor did not. What’s more, surveys conducted in
the early sixties found that a substantial number (over one third of
those surveyed) of poor and nonwhite women had wanted no more children
at the time their last child was born. At the same time, Aid to
Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) rates had gone up by
twenty-five percent in five years. “When poor women were having
unwanted, out-of-wedlock births in such large numbers … and when
unwanted babies seemed to be swelling AFDC rolls,” Luker writes, “an
archaic birth control policy that kept contraceptives out of the hands
of the poor seemed ludicrous, if not tragic.” By the late sixties, both
liberals and traditional conservatives embraced using federal funds for
birth control services and, later, abortion.
In the 1970s, family planning advocates saw teenagers as the last group
of Americans still not guaranteed a right to reproductive freedom by
the Supreme Court. “Advocates made the case that teenagers needed
contraceptive services (and, later, abortion services) as a way of
avoiding poverty,” Luker writes. And the advocates were successful.
“But in doing so they inverted the arguments made in the 1960s on
behalf of older women: whereas formerly advocates had argued that older
women lacked access to contraception and abortion because they were
poor, advocates now claimed that teenagers were poor because they
lacked access to contraception and abortion.”
In 1978, Senator Edward Kennedy held a set of Congressional hearings on
teen pregnancy, and according to Luker, that was it. The hearings
cemented the idea that teen pregnancy causes poverty and federal policy
has since linked teen sex with economics.
Today, the prevailing logic is that if we could only stop teens from
becoming mothers, we could stop poverty. We could stop the flow of
billions of federal dollars spent in aiding poor families, about half
of which started with a teen mom and her baby. (Only five percent of
public aid dollars actually goes to teenage recipients.) We could stop
a cycle of poverty, in which generations of teen mothers breed
criminals and yet more teen mothers. We could make the economy stronger
and more competitive, says at least one academic journal. We could
solve what Bill Clinton called “America’s most serious social problem”
in his 1995 State of the Union address. If only we could stop, as Jesse
Jackson put it, “babies having babies,” we could all be middle class
within a generation.
Pinning America’s problems on teen mothers is an old magician’s trick,
says Glassner. It’s called the art of misdirection. “To make an object
seem to vanish, a magician directs the audience’s attention away from
where he hides it. Stories [about teen moms] likewise misdirected,
focusing public attention away from real and enduring struggles of
women trying to care for their children in an uncaring world,” he
writes.
“The idea that young people would be better off if they worked harder,
were more patient, and postponed their childbearing is simply not
true—and is unlikely to become true in the foreseeable future—for a
great many people at the bottom of the income scale,” writes Kristin
Luker in Dubious Conceptions.
Simply waiting, she says, would only delay the problems poor women face
when they become mothers. “Indeed, the phrase ‘teenage pregnancy’
continues to be a powerful shorthand way of referring to the problem of
poverty.”
Teen pregnancy rates and birthrates have been on the decline since the
1950s, from a high of 96 births per 1000 women aged 15 to 19 in 1957,
to a low of 49 in 2000 (the most recent numbers available), according
to The Alan Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated
to reproduction health research, policy analysis, and public education.
(Pregnancy and childbirth in girls younger than fifteen is rare.) That
decline is pretty remarkable, considering that, in those years between
1957 and today, the sexual revolution happened. Many more teenagers
began having sex; between 1970 and 1990, the number of sexually active
teenagers doubled. At the same time, however, teens gained access to
birth control and abortion. These social changes, says Luker, balanced
each other out.
Still, our country’s teen birthrate is the highest in the developed
world, which perhaps reflects the two strata of the U.S., the
prosperous and the impoverished. Luker says that inequality among
families is growing—and fast. “Poor families are not only getting
poorer, but they now tend to be poorer in the United States than
elsewhere,” she writes. Everyone’s real wages are shrinking, she says,
and since 1973, none of us can expect to do better than our parents.
We’ve responded in one of two ways: the “yuppie pattern,” Luker says,
is to make our families more concentrated: postponing marriage and
childbearing, having fewer kids, and forging two-career marriages. But,
she adds, “the new yuppie pattern is available only to the affluent,
people who can realistically expect that the market will reward their
sacrifices.
“For people who have fewer resources, there is another shift in the
American family: these people rearrange the traditional family. They
either never get married or start a family at all, or they have
children without being married.”
Teenage mothers are rearrangers. Middle-class concentraters don’t
really get it. The good helpers among us try to lead teens to the light
of 401Ks, hardwood floors, thousand-dollar wedding albums: if they’d
just do it our way, we reason, they can expect to have what we do. For
those inclined to dislike the poor anyway, teenage motherhood is a
nifty way of showing how the poor bring problems on themselves. And if
a bunch of kids are responsible for poverty, then the rest of us don’t
have to deal with the poor’s unlivably low wages, their high-priced and
substandard housing, the growing demand at the food bank.
* * *
We five are an ardently pro-choice bunch,
so there was, of course, discussion of Choices. After Erin and Jill
made their decisions, we turned to The Future. In that wide-eyed,
earnest way of hers that I love, Erin said, “I’m not going to be a
statistic.” Eight years later, Jill said the same thing, in a similar
solemn tone. We didn’t know that by virtue of who we were, Erin and
Jill were already on the right side of the odds. No one else seemed to
know it, either, and this expectation—that pregnant teen moms fall,
belly first, into tragedy—would color my sisters’ daily lives.
In 1999, Jill started her junior year, four months pregnant and
showing. She went to school the first day dressed in a form-fitting
sundress, the sort of supermodelish thing someone who is
five-foot-eight and wears a size four—as she does—might wear. She was
sent home. She was told she was “flaunting” her pregnancy.
Before the 1970s, even pregnant married teachers were routinely forced
to leave school, according to Dubious
Conceptions. In 1971, an honors student named Fay Ordway sued
her school district and won the right to attend high school while
pregnant. Since then, it’s been illegal for schools to deny pregnant
teenagers an in-school education. Jill changed her clothes and went
back.
Both Erin and Jill took academic-track classes. It could not have been
easy for either of them. We grew up in a staid, mid-Atlantic suburb,
where homeowners’ associations make rules on what color you can paint
your house (light beige or dark beige, generally). Jill remembers
feeling that none of her teachers expected her to graduate. Most of her
friends either dropped her or assumed she would continue the party,
pregnant and all. On the other hand, girls who had never spoken to her
suddenly wanted to strike up friendships with The Pregnant Girl. (One
wound up calling the hospital several times to shoot the breeze while
Jill was in labor.) She felt very much on display: a cautionary tale, a
news story, the pregnant former cheerleader walking these very halls,
home of the Panthers!
They both started prenatal care early on in their pregnancies. Neither
of our divorced parents’ insurance policies covered Erin’s care; she
went to the public health clinic. By the time Jill needed it, our
parents had switched policies and prenatal care for policy-holders’
kids was covered. Both times, Mom was more involved than many husbands
of older pregnant women. She went to every doctor’s appointment; she
attended childbirth preparation classes as my sisters’ coach. She
purchased What to Expect, which my sisters duly read. She did not try
to shove her birthing philosophies down their throats (her last kid she
delivered, no drugs, in a birthing chair). She bought maternity
clothes, onesies, board books, innumerable diapers. When necessary, she
rearranged the house, figured out where the baby should sleep,
reassigned bedrooms, and generally prepared her home for her daughters,
the unwed mothers.
Mom did the lion’s share, but we all tried to help plan how to beat the
statistics. Erin called me halfway through Jill’s pregnancy. If I am
the Let’s-Calm-Down person in the family, Erin is the Let’s-Confront-It
person: efficient, problem-solving, cards on the table. Here’s the
deal, she told me: Jill will give birth in January, finish her junior
year on homebound instruction, but she still had an entire senior year
to get through. (Erin, by contrast, had given birth two months before
graduating.) She pointed out that Mom’s salary as a first-grade teacher
was already stretched pretty far, and that the day would come soon when
she’d stop receiving child support checks from Dad. Erin had made a
call, and her child’s paternal grandmother, an excellent childcare
provider, would reserve a spot for Jill’s baby in the fall. “I think
you and I should pay for childcare,” Erin said.
So, this is the part—when somebody flat-out asks me for well over two
hundred dollars a month—where I should report resentment. Outrage,
analogous to the outrage some taxpayers feel when poor women’s
decisions to have babies affect their paychecks. But, honestly, I don’t
feel it. This is my baby sister we’re talking about. Jill was pregnant,
yes, but she, like most women who receive assistance, would not need
that money continuously, forever. She is also eleven years younger than
me, and (guess what, babe) could play a starring role in our mother’s
old age—and mine. At the time, I didn’t think of this in such bald
terms as “investment.” This is what we do. We help each other out, and
the teen mothers in our family are not the only ones who benefit from
this.
“Um. Okay,” I said to Erin, and it was settled. If we could help it, no
one would say to Jill that she had made her bed and force her to lie in
it. The future—for the next year and a half, anyway—was smooth and
tidy, with hospital corners.
Or as much as it can be when you’re pregnant. With every pregnancy,
there’s always the specter of what could go wrong. In 1991, when Erin
was pregnant, I had my first experience with that fear, the flip side
of excitement.
I am home on break from college and we are all at the hospital’s
radiology department. Erin’s sitting on the table, and the room is dim,
except for the glowing screen of the ultrasound equipment. We are about
to find out whether those frightening statistics about the health of
babies born to teenage mothers will apply here. We talk. A doctor
strides into the room. “Hi, I’m Dr. Weiner,” he says, extending his
hand to Erin.
Krissy flees the room. She is fourteen and loves a dirty joke and
hearing a man say “weiner” in a such a casual tone is too much for her.
An eight-year-old Jill and I are asked to leave the room, too, and the
door shuts behind us. We wait. Finally Mom and Dad (who is there for
the major events in our lives) come out. Mom is beaming. “It’s a boy!”
she says. “And everything looks fine!”
A boy. The Niesslein Matriarchy has never had one, and unless he turns
out to be the kind of boy who likes to play with Barbies and to get
teary to Olivia Newton-John songs, he will be a brand-new experience
for us. As it happens, he’ll be the only boy to carry on the family
name. Dad smiles and says of his father, “Looks like Grandpap Niesslein
got his wish—the hard way.” Although things are sometimes tense between
our parents, this time we all laugh, full of the strange good fortune:
a school year going well, a healthy baby, the sense that this is new
and uncharted and makes us nervous, but we’re beating the odds.
*
* *
Today, teenage motherhood doesn’t get
the press it used to. It’s been eclipsed by the controversies
surrounding teen STDs, and whether the underage should have sex at all
(see sidebar on page 96).
Still, the pregnant teenager hasn’t disappeared from public discourse.
And she’s still the victim in the line we crossed long ago: conflating
the prevention of teen pregnancy with a hatred of teenage mothers. The
National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, an organization that
usually takes a relatively level-headed approach, ran a series of ads
recently in national magazines like Teen
People, Spin, and Vibe.
(As of press time, you could still see them on NCPTP’s website,
teenpregnancy. org.) A teenage girl is pictured with large letters
across her image, spelling, for example, “Cheap” or “Nobody.” In tiny
letters, the ads actually read, “Condoms are cheap. If we’d used one, I
wouldn’t have to tell my parents I’m pregnant,” or “Now that I’m home
with a baby, nobody calls me anymore.” Still, the message is clear:
Teenage mothers are society’s losers. We can talk shit about them and
no one will cry foul.
When we do get to hear the voices of actual teen mothers, they tend to
be something of a broken record: regretful, disillusioned, miserable.
NCPTP offers the following words from anonymous teenage mothers,
compiled from a variety of sources, on its website:
• “If I had been better informed, I would have
never had sex in the first place, let alone a child.”
• “Get up, take her to school, go to work, pick her
up, bathe her, feed her. Then it’s just the same thing over again.”
• “I could’ve been a cheerleader. I could’ve been in
pageants and homecoming queen. But I lost all of that.”
• “I got pregnant a month before my 17th birthday. My
son’s father and I got married five months ago and we’re already
separated. I live in an emergency shelter for teen moms. I raise my son
alone. My son will be a year old next week. In his whole life, his
father has only taken care of him by himself one time. He does not pay
me child support … I have only been out once without him. The rest of
the time he goes everywhere with me. I only get four hours of sleep at
night. I have no money because I quit work to go back to school, and
I’m not on public aid at the moment. I miss my friends. I don’t see
them anymore because they have their own lives. All I do is sit at home
… I love my son more than anything in the world, but it would have been
a lot better if this had happened when I was like 27 instead of 17.”
There is no context, no room for follow-up. What sort of information
would have made a difference in the regretful mom’s childbearing
decisions? Does the mother who acutely feels the weight of the daily
drone—which, God knows, we’ve all felt—ever have good days? Has anyone
screened her for postpartum depression? Would scoring the homecoming
queen sash have been all that it’s cracked up to be? Did the homeless
girl’s parents kick her out after she married? Was she homeless to
begin with? Who knows. This is not a place for questions. It’s one
phrase plunked out over and over again (sing it with me): Teen
motherhood ruins your life.
Contrast this to another source, where teen moms are speaking to each
other. From the discussion boards at Girl-Mom, a website founded by the
creators of the zine and website Hip Mama (themselves former teen
mothers):
• “I hate knowing that the people who glare at me or
tell me I’m too young to have a kid are the same ones who would be
kissing my ass and cooing over my son if I were 10 years older. Ageism
is real, and it’s everywhere.”
• “i am a great mother, just because i am young does
NOT mean i cant provide a good life for my daughter. god, I hate
fucking statistics!!!! UGH!!! i am finishing high school, not an
alternative one though (i have nothing against alternative schools, as
long as i get a diploma it doesnt matter). i lost my virginity at 15,
and got pregnant that first time. i didnt have sex because i wasnt
loved enough growing up.”
• “I get the comments too. Just got one yesterday at
the playground, in fact. (“You look too YOUNG to have a little kid!”)
WTF do they think we’re going to say? Why should we have to justify our
lives and our reproductive choices on the spot to any random stranger
who feels like being nosy? When people say that shit, it makes me feel
like I am somehow less of a mother than “older” moms, at least in their
eyes. No matter what I do or how hard I try, I will always be “other,”
weird, different. It makes me sad to think that people might
discriminate against my son because of my age. Even when I’m reading
“progressive” books about motherhood and getting into them, there’s
always the obligatory snide remarks about teen mamas to make me feel
alienated. (“Misconceptions” and “The Mask of Motherhood” spring to
mind. Hell, even in “Breeder,” there was the essay about the woman
whose girlfriend had a miscarriage, and she said, “Apparently, some
unlucky teenager’s prayers backfired.” Like teenagers are the only ones
who face unplanned pregnancies?!)
“Our children are no less special than the children of older mamas. We
are mamas just like they are. We all care deeply for our children and
work hard to give them good lives. We do not owe an explanation of our
lives or our choices to anyone but ourselves.”
To be sure, posters on the site also discuss plenty of heavy material,
like surviving on little money, dealing with a mother who both pays the
bills and insists you’re doing it all wrong, or coping with postpartum
depression when you have no insurance. Other discussion fodder doesn’t
really have much to do with motherhood, teen or otherwise (e.g., how to
apply for college scholarships, or good books to read, or professional
achievements). In short, these mothers sound less like an afterschool
special and more like regular women, with crises and triumphs, bad days
and good. With one exception: Girl-Mom is the only place I’ve seen
where a teenager can type, “I’m pregnant,” and get the response that,
at twenty-five, I took for granted: Congratulations!
In June 2004, Perigee/ Penguin Putnam will publish an anthology, You Don’t Look Old Enough to Be a Mother:
Teen Moms on Love, Learning, and Success. It will be the first
book of its kind: teen mothers’ stories, penned by teen mothers. I
spoke with the book’s editor, Deborah Davis, who has worked with teen
mothers in a variety of capacities. I asked Davis what she’s found to
be the biggest difference between teens’ mothering experiences and the
rest of ours. “They do, in varying degrees, struggle with the fact that
they’re in a phase of life when they’re still growing up—that’s a piece
of it,” she said. She added, “As a woman who gave birth for the first
time at thirty-six, motherhood in some ways forced me to grow up as
well.
“But the biggest difference teenage mothers face is the added burden of
people’s prejudices. Right off the bat, they’re treated differently,
not as respectfully or warmly as older mothers.”
Does any mother dream for her daughters that they become mothers
themselves before they graduate from high school? No. Anything you want
to do—right on down to going to the bathroom in peace—is much harder if
you’re a mother.
But modern wisdom tells us that there comes a point in a woman’s
life—somewhere after her teen years—when she’s emotionally “ready” for
motherhood. I read a lot of essays about motherhood, both published and
unpublished. And here is a theme that recurs: I had this life of doing
what I wanted, sleeping late, eating whatever happened to be in the
fridge, etc. Then I had a baby. I was bowled over, completely
unprepared. In these essays, there are often tears. The phrase “What
had I done?” appears with surprising frequency.
And most of these essays are written by women in their thirties and
forties.
Is anyone ever completely emotionally “ready” for motherhood? Do we
really reach a point in our lives when we’d rather not curl up with a
book alone, play music loud, stay out late? I’m thinking no. There are
no good ways to test the waters of motherhood. I’d say most of us dive
in, then bob up gasping, shocked by its initial bracingness.
It’s around dinnertime on an April day in 1992, and my boyfriend
Brandon and I are studying in my bedroom. I received a call that
morning that Erin was in labor. My boyfriend looks up from his
notebook. “Let’s go,” he says.
We drive the two hours home and pick up Krissy and Jill, and the four
of us make our way to the hospital. Erin has been in labor for
twenty-one hours already, and when I enter the birthing room, I’m a
little dazed by the medical equipment and the look on Erin’s face:
exhausted and a touch out of her mind. Mom and Dad are in the room,
both looking tired. There is a goofy song that I have promised to sing
to Erin during labor to make her laugh. I get two lines into it before
she laughs a slow ha-ha-ha and says, “Jenny, you don’t have to sing
that. I am so out of it.” We tell each other I love you and I leave her
to rest.
It’s late, and the hospital is quiet, like an office building after
hours. The four of us fidget in the waiting area, but somehow we make
our way to the closed door of the birthing room, even Jill, who is
eight years old and likely not allowed to be here. We listen. Someone
says push, someone says you can do it, Mom yells, He has red hair! Then
we hear our nephew’s first cries, hearty but soft.
When Jill gives birth almost eight years later, it is the coldest day
of the year and she is two weeks past her due date. To me, who looked
alarmingly pregnant even in my arms and chins, she looks like an actor
playing pregnant on TV, as if she’s going to take the basketball out
from under her shirt any minute now and do a lay-up. We all woke up
before dawn to get to the hospital for her induction. In her room,
before labor pains really kick in, we play rounds of a name game. Elvis
Presley. Pamela Anderson. Abraham Lincoln. Jill and I are the only ones
who really like this game, but soon her contractions get stronger, and
the labor takes precedence over coming up with a name to follow Marilyn
Manson.
Jill’s birthing experience is the textbook variety. Her pain is
managed, and Mom and Erin are in the room when the real labor starts.
My aunt brings up a meal of crusty rolls and chicken salad for all of
us while we wait in the lobby. My boyfriend Brandon is now my husband
and he runs around with our fifteen-month-old son in the hallways; he
takes the boys—the cousins—to the cafeteria several times. This time,
since we’re here before labor even begins, it is a long wait. But at
some point, I notice that everyone has disappeared from the waiting
room, one by one.
I find them all outside a door in the maternity ward. A doctor rushes
by and through the curtain; she has been paged for a good hour by now.
Krissy tells me that she’s the OB that Jill and Mom don’t like. (She
thinks she’s cute, which is the surest way to get Jill and Mom not to
like you.) We listen to Mom comforting, Erin cracking jokes and giving
encouragement. Then, the voice of a healthy, dark-haired girl with ou
eyes.
After the birth and after everyone goes home, I hang out while Brandon
tries to locate somewhere to change our boy’s diaper. Jill, Mom, and I
take turns holding the baby. I go to the nurses’ station, ask for a
takeout menu, and order a sub for Jill, who has rejected her tray of
cold hospital food. I say my good-byes. I will be back in a few weeks,
after Mom, Erin, and Krissy have exhausted their vacation days. I
know—like everyone realizes in their last days of pregnancy—that the
hard part is just beginning.
But in 1992, the enormity of what Erin had chosen for herself didn’t
strike me until I was back home from my second year of college. Her son
was a month old, still with his lovely red hair and deep dimples and a
startle reflex (which Erin called his “Praise the Lord!” reflex) that
made his tiny bent arms fly skyward. I held my infant nephew and rocked
him in the recliner. I studied his perfect lashes, his tiny hands, his
pale eyebrows, the way he pursed his lips. Mom and Erin, watching
Jeopardy, zonked out on the couches, both bone-tired. My nephew fell
asleep in my arms. I sat there with him for hours, unwilling to wake my
sister and mother and terrified of putting him down wrong, of doing the
smallest thing to ruin the perfection of this sleepy boy.
*
* *
Why would you choose to become a teenage
mother?
Actually, few teenagers set out to become teenage mothers. The Alan
Guttmacher Institute reports that seventy-eight percent of teen
pregnancies are unintended (this number includes the small percentage
of teens who are married); nine out of ten sexually active teen women
use contraception (although not always consistently or correctly). In
other words, the majority of teen pregnancies are surprises.
But, in this culture of Palm Pilots and Day Planners, retirement
savings plans and groceries bought two weeks in advance and frozen, we
do not like surprises. We do not like to roll with the punches. We
think there must be a good answer out there, given that teens could
have been more vigilant with the birth control or opted for an
abortion. Why, teen mothers? Why do you do it?
There are a lot of theories, even beyond the largely discredited,
pop-psychology ones abundant on daytime talk: teens who become mothers
have low self-esteem, or just want someone to love them. In a publicity
blitz surrounding the first National Day to Prevent Teen Pregnancy on
May 8, 2002, talk show host Ricki Lake opined that teens get pregnant
because they’re bored. Lake escaped this fate, she says, because she
was “completely consumed” by acting. “There was no time for getting
drunk with boys in the parking lot or having sex because it would have
got in the way of my goal.” (In Lake’s defense, girls who make the time
to get drunk with boys in parking lots may indeed seem bored, compared
to some of Lake’s other guests, who are embroiled in the high-drama
stuff of sleeping with their hootchie-fied mother-in-laws, or are
nursing an addiction to men who “play” women.)
Meanwhile in Washington, welfare reformers operate under the assumption
that teenage mothers live in a world of alternate logic, in which
governmental financial incentives play a big role in teens’
childbearing decisions. When, in 1996, AFDC was revamped as TANF
(Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), lawmakers tried to erase some
of these “incentives.” They included a provision in which unmarried,
underage mothers had to live at home or in some supervised setting in
order to qualify for aid. “The living-arrangement requirement was
premised on the notion that some teenagers who are unhappy living at
home may have a child in order to get welfare benefits, which would
enable them to set up an independent household,” according to an Alan
Guttmacher Institute article.
Another idea reformers tossed around was adding a “family cap” to the
amount of money a family on public aid could receive for each child in
the family. “On the assumption that poor women were having children in
order to obtain AFDC benefits and having additional children to
increase those benefits, family cap proponents advocated mandating the
cap in TANF,” the AGI report explains. The provision did not make it in
the final act (anti-choice advocates argued that it could lead to more
abortions), but twenty-three states have some sort of family cap. The
logic goes like this: Welfare recipients (teen moms included) would
have a child just to get some extra cash—in 1997, the sums ranged from
all of $24 a month in Mississippi to $109 in California.
Kristin Luker writes that economics—specifically, poverty—does have
something to do with teen pregnancy. Teenage mothers don’t cause
poverty, she says—but poverty does cause teenage motherhood. She points
out that, when faced with an unintended pregnancy, over half of poor or
low-income teens become teenage mothers, while three-quarters of
middle-class or affluent teens have an abortion. (Giving a child up for
adoption accounts for a small percentage of outcomes of teen pregnancy,
particularly among black teens, who know that a non-white infant is
likely to join the half million children already in foster care.) There
is a link, she believes.
“From the outset … the people who get pregnant as teenagers and who
carry their babies to term are substantially different from people who
do not. Many of these young mothers would be poor (and would have
children who grew up to be poor) no matter how old they were when they
gave birth,” she writes. In some cases, she points out, if a teenager’s
life is going to turn out pretty much the same anyway, it makes more
sense to have a baby as a teen, when the teen’s mother is still young
enough and committed enough to help with the raising of that baby.
Moreover, she says, there is a certain type of person who becomes a
teenage mother, regardless of socio-economic status. She’s a girl who
doesn’t have high aspirations, and she’s discouraged about her future.
This accounts for why a teenager growing up in poverty—lacking
middle-class role models in her life, probably receiving an inferior
education, perhaps not expected to make much of herself—is much more
likely to become a teen mother. She feels like she has nothing to lose.
And, statistically, she doesn’t.
“Society should not worry about some epidemic of ‘teenage pregnancy’
but about the hopeless, discouraged and empty lives that early
childbearing denotes,” Luker concludes. “If America cares about its
young people, it must make them feel that they have a rich array of
choices, so that having a baby is not the only or most attractive one
on the horizon.”
I don’t doubt Luker’s genuine concern for mothers living in poverty.
But I’m not so sure I buy her theory—which she backs with studies on
“motivation”—of teen moms as society’s sad sacks, either.
Like Luker, I think there is a certain type of person who will become a
teenage mother, but “discouraged” seems to me an unnecessarily negative
spin. My theory is that this girl is the sort who is unconventional
anyway. She probably isn’t on the traditional track to the middle class
before she gets pregnant, and so having a baby isn’t really derailing
her. She doesn’t so much care that she’s supposed to progress through
the middle-class mile-markers (in this order): go to college, find a
good job, find a good mate, marry, and have your first child somewhere
around age twenty-eight, give or take. And admittedly based on my own
memories of high school, I don’t think this girl is uncommon; for every
high-schooler taking an SAT prep class or learning a trade, there is
another zoning out in English or happily working a seven-dollar-an-hour
job, which seems like a damn good deal when you don’t have any bills.
It’s little wonder that this girl is more readily found in the poor
families than in middle-class ones: The fewer middle-class people she
has in her life, the further away she feels from middle-class rules.
We’re trained to think of our teen years and early twenties as the time
when we must be selfish, but maybe it doesn’t have to be that way; I’m
certainly not the first person to point out that our
livelihood-building and child-bearing years are, for most people, the
same ones. I did feel a certain ache when I recognized that, at twenty,
I was dancing at concerts and earning a degree from a white-columned
university, while Erin, at twenty, was potty-training her toddler. But,
when Erin is thirty-six, she’ll have money in the bank and the
opportunity to throw herself into whatever she pleases—concerts,
travelling, more kids, more education, a brand-new career. At
thirty-six, I will still need a babysitter.
There are people who question all the time we spend mucking around in
theories of teen motherhood, anyway. “Ignorance about contraception,
psychopathology, desire to prove adulthood, lack of family restraint,
cultural patterns, desire to obtain welfare benefits, immorality,
getting out of school—a host of reasons are given for childbirth in
women under 20, while ‘maternal instinct’ is thought to suffice for
those over 20,” note two British sociologists in Culture of Fear.
Or, as Jill says, it can be as simple as this. You are pregnant. There
are hard decisions to be made and whichever one you choose will be with
you forever. Two of your options, you believe, will bring a deep
sadness. The other one—becoming a mother—is unknown.
*
* *
There have been “sister studies” done on
teenage mothers, in which researchers looked at the lives of sisters,
one who became a teenage mother, one who did not. The large conclusion
from the study was that the teen-mom sisters fared roughly as well as
the ones who delayed childbearing. The researchers also looked at the
sisters’ children; the teen mothers’ children fared just as well as
their cousins and, in some cases, did better for themselves. Kristin
Luker calls these studies “ingenious” and I’d have to agree. You can’t
get a much better control group than a sister, who has a similar
genetic make-up, grew up in the same household, lived in the same
neighborhood, received more or less the same upbringing and early
education, and had the same household income available as the teenage
mother. Whatever determines a girl’s fate, it’s not just the age at
which she has a baby.
But this is the study I really want to see: the alternate universe one,
where both forks in the road are taken. Just as I would never know what
it’s like to like Brownies more than school, or enjoy doing gymnastics,
I think I can say with some certainty that I would not have chosen to
do the bold backflip into teenage motherhood that my sisters did. As
much as we’re alike, we’re also very different. Comparing my life with
Erin’s, or Krissy’s life with Jill’s—our own little sister
study—doesn’t interest me as much as the impossible What If scenario.
What if we could compare an Erin who got pregnant at seventeen with an
Erin who did not? What if we could know what Jill’s life would look
like had she not become a mother at sixteen? I’d like to see a study in
which Erin and Jill simultaneously had their children, and did not.
It’s the consensus in our family that teenage motherhood turned out to
be the best thing that could have happened to Erin and Jill. Would they
have straightened up, cut out the bad-ass friends, quit the party-girl
lifestyle in that alternate universe? We can’t know.
“Some experts report that young women tend to become more motivated to
finish school and find jobs once they have offspring to support,” Barry
Glassner writes. “Data indicate too that teen moms are less likely than
their peers to engage in other self-destructive behaviors, such as drug
abuse, participation in gangs, and suicide. Motherhood can bring about
what sociologist Joan Moore of the University of Wisconsin, an expert
on delinquent girls, calls ‘a conversion to conventionality.’”
Erin is now twenty-nine, Jill twenty. They both graduated from high
school with good grades; Jill even aced physics. They both went on to
different business schools and have associate’s degrees. Erin owns her
own home, a townhouse gorgeously decorated in her trademark bright
colors; her household income is roughly the same as mine, which is to
say, middle-class. Unlike me, she’s the primary breadwinner. Erin’s son
is now eleven, a handsome straight-A student and a member of a
prestigious soccer team. (This, you’ll note, makes Erin both a former
teen mom and a soccer mom.)
Jill lives at Mom’s house. Because she can and because she wants to,
she’s taking some time to be at home with her daughter while she’s
still little. My son and his blond-ringleted, Barbie-loving, musically
inclined cousin are very close, although you wouldn’t know it from
their phone conversations. (She asks him to come over, repeatedly; he
tells her that he can’t, repeatedly.) Jill and I talk to each other at
least once a week on the phone; although she’s eleven years younger
than me, she’s the sister I have the most in common with. What she
struggles with are the things most mothers, regardless of age, struggle
with: her toddler asking her the same question three hundred times a
day, what preschool’s right for her child, the next step of her life.
She also tells me of the prejudice she runs up against. She takes her
daughter to drop off a paper to her professor. He shakes his head and
says, “Babies having babies,” then turns to my niece and says, “Can you
say, ‘Babies having babies’?” Jill takes her daughter grocery shopping;
the checker looks at the food on the conveyer belt and says snottily,
“WIC won’t cover half this.” Jill, because she has no experience with
poverty, doesn’t even know what WIC is.
I know that not every teenage mother has a big family to cry “Fuck
him!” when the professor goes Jesse Jackson on her, or a supportive
mother to watch the baby during her daughter’s night classes. This teen
motherhood gig can only work if certain planets are aligned—namely the
bodies of health coverage, money, childcare, and emotional support. But
isn’t that how all motherhood has to work? And if our country’s poor
can’t get it all together—either as teens or later in life—what do we
say? That you don’t deserve kids?
I talk to Mom, the unsung hero in all of this, the woman whose support
(financial, emotional) made all the difference in how my sisters’
stories turned out. I tell her the “conversion to conventionality”
quote and we marvel that once upon a time, my sisters—smart and pretty
and excellent teenage mothers—were interested in being bad girls. “But
didn’t you think Jill and Erin were good people all along?” she asks.
“Didn’t you always think they could do it?”
|
About the author:
JENNIFER NIESSLEIN is co-editor
of Brain, Child.
Last year, Erin married her long-time
boyfriend Jeff. (Like two-thirds
of teenage mothers, Jill is also in a stable, long-term relationship.)
My thirty-year-old husband wound up being the ringbearer. He was very
cute and did a good job passing off the ring pillow to our nephew, the
best man, but it was pretty obvious he was pinch-hitting. The guy
originally picked to be ringbearer—our son—clung to Brandon’s side,
baby-monkey-style. He was dressed down like a disheveled businessman on
his third highball of the evening. His bowtie was askew, his jacket
off, and he was crying.
After Brandon
delivered the rings, they went to the back of the crowd
where our son added a wailing background noise to the ceremony until I
made a vaguely military gesture for them to get moving far, far away.
At that point, the flower girl—Jill’s daughter—announced loudly, “I
DON’T WANT TO HOLD THESE FLOWERS.” And thus began the alternative
ceremony:
Officiant: We are
gathered here today—
Flower Girl: WHAT
KIND OF BIRDS ARE THOSE?
Officiant: —to
celebrate the love—
Flower Girl: ARE
THEY A GOOSE?
Officiant: —of Erin
and Jeff.
Flower Girl: I
SAID, ARE THEY A GOOSE?
Erin took it all in
stride. Things don’t always turn out the way you think they will, and
that, we all know, is just fine.
|
