Some Teens Measure Success by Motherhood

In seventh grade, my best girlfriend was a little girl named Linda. She was a quiet girl with deep-set Balkan eyes and a mop of curly hair. Linda sat next to me in homeroom, an average student with above-average equanimity.

Maybe it was the fact that her mother had died years before, leaving her with the knowledge that nothing worse could happen to her. But it seemed more likely to us that her demeanor was the calm of someone who had already accomplished her life’s goal.

For Linda had that coveted asset, an older boyfriend, and he had given her an actual ring. He was out of school, earned good money and owned his own car. If her dad didn’t approve, he didn’t raise much of a fuss, and neither did we, her peers. He was too old for most of us and we couldn’t relate to him, but Linda’s boyfriend fit into a plan shared by most girls in our country school: The idea was to grow up, get married and raise kids.

I was only a little shocked when she leaned across her desk one morning and whispered that she was quitting school--code for the secret news that she was going to have a baby, and that she would be getting married forthwith. By the time she was 14, Linda was a mother and wife.

Here, in my new life, in my current community, Linda’s story would be a kind of tragedy. But 25 years ago in that Pennsylvania coal town, it wasn’t all that strange or sad. In fact, Linda was, in our little social circle, the first of a long line of teenage girls to procreate.

At that age, in that place, I envied them--Andrea, who skipped gym class as her tummy swelled; Sherry, who with her boyfriend made up a universe of two; bawdy Bonnie, who, when asked in health class to give a short talk on reproduction, cracked: “All I know is, it feels a heckuva lot better goin’ in than it does comin’ out.”

They were the girls of a particular American caste and state of mind, and they shared a well-delineated dream: You grew up fast. You learned to cook and clean and sew.

When you were 16, if you were on the proper trajectory, a boy gave you his class ring. You wrapped it with Angora wool so it wouldn’t slip from your delicate finger. You held hands in the hallway, went “parking” in his pickup, put the love notes he tossed you in social studies into your hope chest. At the county fair, he’d take you on the Ferris wheel and rock when it stopped at the top. Below you, the bijoux lights would shine so brilliantly, the cornfields and trailer parks around them would be invisible. Who would blame you for wanting to give him a child? On graduation night, if all went well, he would propose.

What then? Who cared? You would have already arrived. You would belong to someone, would have earned a place in society. Marriage and children were the goals, not necessarily in that order, and any message to the contrary--that teenagers should wait until adulthood to, say, get pregnant, or that girls needn’t settle for membership in the ladies’ auxiliary of life--would have been met with incredulity.

There is a lot that is provincial in that view, and a lot that is distorted and stifling. But it lives on today, not just in the back country of rural America, but in our housing projects and our barrios and even in our suburbs. A generation has passed, abortion is legal, women are commonplace in the work force, contraceptives are as easy to get as an extra pencil in the first week of class, but teenage girls still are begetting babies by the thousands and no one seems to be able to stem the tide. It is a problem that tragically undermines us as a society, and yet one that seems impossible for us to shake, no matter how much poverty and frustration it creates.

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When I think about these issues--and as a mother of three girls, I do think about them--I always seem to arrive at the same sticking point. As flawed and self-defeating as our reasoning was growing up, our mission did hold one essential truth: Having and raising children can be a peak experience, if your heart and head are in the right place.

There is nothing like it, no experience that brings you closer to the mystery of the cosmos, no accomplishment that can rival the creation of another life. And any girl can do it. You may not know all the state capitals, may not be able to calculate square roots, but with just a few easy moves, you can embark on an exciting new career--the time-honored job of motherhood.

This is not a problem just of a sexist society, or just of the irresponsibility of a certain segment of the underclass. It’s a question of the deeply human yearning for self-expression, even in the most desolate of emotional environments. There is dignity in becoming the bearer of life, and for someone who feels demeaned, the lure of that kind of dignity is so powerful that it can override almost anything. Shame becomes meaningless; consequences feel abstract. All that matters is the thirst for self-worth.

Until we acknowledge that side of the equation, I don’t think we’ll ever really unravel the complex problem of teenage parenthood. My friends were poor rural white girls, but they could just as easily be living today in South-Central or East L.A. or even in the tract house down the street from mine. The faces may differ, but the core emotions are the same: the need to achieve something, the need to matter to someone, the need for some human connection in your life.

My mother was proud to see me go to college and leave my hometown. But many of my friends pitied the fact that I was being sent off to make my own way, all alone. I know that if I saw any of them on the street today, their first question would be, not about my work, but about my husband and kids--about the paths that they had hoped would help them find their place in the world.

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I thought of Linda the other day, when the governor came out with his latest proposal to curb teen pregnancy. Having failed to stop the trend with sex education and counseling and countless diatribes against the slatternly ways of welfare moms, Gov. Pete Wilson was now giving out money to county district attorneys to prosecute older men who impregnate young girls.

“The message to adult men is clear: Stay away from young girls and if you don’t, you’ll go to jail,” one district attorney speechified.

I smiled to think how Linda would have reacted had the law come for the father of her child. The words “stand by your man” came to mind.

There is dignity in becoming the bearer of life, and for someone who feels demeaned, the lure of that kind of dignity is so powerful that it can override almost anything. . . . All that matters is the thirst for self-worth.