From Girlhood to Motherhood

So I've recently been thinking about babies. (This has probably been influenced more by the fact that I'm reading Midwives than the ticking of my biological clock.) It has occurred to me that my former students who were pregnant when I taught them last year have recently become mothers. Just as they probably did not equate sex with pregnancy, I had difficulty equating their pregnancy with motherhood.

I can't help but wonder how these girls—now women, I suppose—are faring. I know that most of them have the support of family members, even if the father of the child is no longer in the picture. (This is the case, I know, of three out of five of these girls.) What are they doing for income? What are they doing for higher education? I realize, of course, that most of these girls weren't planning on going to college.

But one of them was. Jenn, one of my darlings that I taught in tenth then twelfth grade, spent her years in high school getting experience in child development and early child development so that she could go to college to become an elementary school teacher (no small feat, as she was the first in her family to graduate from high school). Instead, Jenn got pregnant her senior year—which prompted her boyfriend to leave her—and in August entered motherhood instead of entering college. Her sister, two years her senior, was also pregnant and due in late summer; they will be raising their children together.

What life is this for Jenn? I by no means deem motherhood an inferior fate, but Jenn's teenage pregnancy has relegated her to the same life as her sister, who had not enough aspiration or motivation to graduate from high school. All I can do is shake my head; the thought of this young girl postponing—and probably never fulfilling—her dream saddens me.