Teen Mother

I was 17-years old when I became pregnant with my daughter. Innocuous enough. Or not. I was also a female version of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause — having run away from home multiple times and basically dropped out of school. I was going to live my life my way. Whatever that meant. I have journals from my teenage years but for the most part, I cannot even decipher my rantings. I was on the fast track to absolutely nowhere when I became pregnant. Teen pregnancies are never ideal but for me…well it jump-started my reason. I re-enrolled in an alternative high school and slammed nearly two years worth of course-work into seven months — intent on graduating before I was a mother. I bought every parenting book I could get my hands on and subscribed to all the important baby magazines…and there are a lot. Everyone (and I mean everyone) told me I made a mistake getting pregnant and to actually keep the baby?? Oh the horrors. My life was over. So they told me. But I was not to be swayed from my course. I would be a mom at 18 and damned if I wouldn’t be the best 18-year old mom around.

My pregnancy was the epitome of ease and perfection, other than that I have RH-negative blood and my daughter was a positive, which means my blood cells attack the “foreign” object residing in my stomach and I had to get a shot to keep from losing the baby. The delivery…well, there is no amount of preparing someone for what delivery is like. Tadria, my daughter, was absolutely perfect upon birth — perfectly round head, dark hair, blue eyes, sweet smile. I, on the other hand, was not perfect upon her birth. I was terrified. Suddenly I felt the only safe place for such a tiny person was in my body, not in my arms. I worried someone would drop her, I would drop her, SIDS, car accidents, kidnapping — you name it, in those first few days in the hospital, I lived in fear.

My daughter will be 14-years old this summer and she now says she wants to be a mom, to which I groan theatrically. But I do not tell her it will ruin her life because that held no sway with me when I was young. What I do say is that my life has not been a cinch and I am not the greatest mom around. I do not bemoan my life nor ever regret my decision to have her. I wish I had waited, though, so that I could offer her more than what is possible as a teen mom. I think it is important, how very little it seems so today, to be able to provide for your children. You will not sit and hate your life and regret your choice because it is hard on you…you will regret that it is so hard on your children.

And to all the naysayers who tried to convince me to make a different choice, and to all the friends who abandoned me while I was pregnant, I would say…you were wrong. All of you. My choice may have made the choices in my life more simple (only if its good for the baby) and may have limited my career options (initially because now I am almost done with my BA in Accounting and have a GREAT accounting job), but it was not the mistake you said it would be.

Not even for a minute.