“I was a teenage mom” by TMDD founder, Natasha Olivera, was originally published on her parenting blog “Me, My Guys, & My Stumbles Through Parenthood”. Natasha shares her candid, witty, humorous, and always real stories about raising two teen boys and coping with living in a house full of testosterone.
I was carded buying a bottle of wine.
I was asked by a cashier if I was my 12 year old’s sister.
I dropped off my 14 year old at a friends birthday party and the dad asked me if I was my sons sister.
At 33 most people would be flattered by these inquiries. I, however, am not particularly thrilled by them. You see, these are small examples of the nuances of having become a mother as a teenager. The look that people give me when I tell them that my boys are in fact my children and not my siblings is not one of, “Oh, how wonderful you look for your age,” but rather a look of shock and awkwardness as they come to realize that I must have been rather young when I got pregnant which is then compiled with a look of disgust, as though I had committed the most heinous act possible.
I was seventeen when I became pregnant. It was the summer of my high school graduation and I was about to start my first semester at the University I was accepted to. Unlike most of my peers, I wasn’t going to the community college and that was huge! To top it all off, I was starting classes during the summer semester instead of the fall putting me a semester ahead of most of my peers. My future was bright and the opportunities were endless. I wanted to be a psychologist and later on become a lawyer.
When I learned I was pregnant I was extremely distressed, upset, scared….in sum: totally freaked out. My husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, said we’d do it together and be a family.
In an instant, my whole future was altered and there was nothing predictable about it….except for one thing: I was about to become a mother.
Today, almost 15 years later, I have accomplished many personal and career goals. Most importantly though, has been my education. Two semesters into college I ended up changing my mind about the psychology thing and instead, earned a Bachelors in English and then went straight into the Masters program for Literature and was even granted a teaching assistanship. Secondly, I have been an active member of my community through volunteer and philanthropic work. I’ve worked tirelessly with military family’s, coaching sports and as a member of the PTA. I even helped found a non profit supporting families of wounded soldiers with some friends and today my husband and I run our own non profit helping reforestate in Nicaragua, his home country.
When people see me with my children though, they don’t know these things about me. They simply see what appears to be a really young woman with children and they assume that she’s not a good mother (because a teenager isn’t capable of being a good mother), she has little to no education (because teenage mothers do not graduate high school never mind go to college), receives welfare and lives in public housing (because a teenage mother would never be able to afford feeding her own kids and paying her own rent/mortgage).
Unfortunately, the statistics do not dispel these stereotypes. And while a large portion of teen girls will fulfill these stereotypes, it could easily be minimized. Society, in conjunction with pregnancy prevention campaigns, have generated a negative rhetoric based on shame and humiliation that is supposed to deter teenagers from getting pregnant, but, if you look at the statistics, this approach is really NOT working. What this approach does accomplish though, is to showcase failure by highlighting the fact that teenage mothers will not and can not possibly amount to anything productive; in the end they will be poor mothers, poor students, poor employees, and poor members of society.
In turn, when teenage girls do find themselves pregnant and choose to keep their child and become mothers, there are few to no resources available to them. Instead, we want them to hide, close the door and stay away from mainstream society. In effect, we marginalize them and leave them alone to fend for themselves. Because after all, they made their own bed and now they have to lay in it, right? Besides, we definitely don’t want them coming around other teens infecting them with the idea of becoming a teen parent. Cuz it is a virus after all.
Regrettably, what people fail to recognize are the negative unintended consequences this type of marginalization has on society as whole.
I am a huge believer in collective efforts. Take, for example, what happened in Chile with the coal miners. Their rescue was a collective effort of minds, spirits, and physical yield. The world came together to rescue these men and it worked. Everyone collaborated and a solution was found. This event was an incredible show of what collective efforts can accomplish.
I feel the same way about my journey through motherhood. I wasn’t alone. I had my husband, my mother, my brothers, family and friends (like that one girlfriend I have who even though we only talk once or twice a year, every time we do, she tells me how proud she is of me), coworkers, peers and even professors who, if necessary, allowed me to bring my son to class with me. They all helped me get to where I am today. Without them, their encouragement and their belief in me, I would never have achieved half of what I have achieved today.
More teen moms need that; because at the end of the day, they are moms, they are women, they are members of society, and as a society (and not be cliche here) we are only as strong as our ability to work with those who are the weakest in our community.
Peace Out.
-Natasha Olivera
P.S. These are some images from a pregnancy prevention campaign that ran several years ago. The strategy merits critical analysis insofar that its message implies the cheapness and filthiness of a mother who happens to be a teenager whereby assaulting her and in turn, setting her up for failure.
