Amanda van Scoyoc

Last week at the Thursday Healthy Families meeting about 5 young mothers came. The mothers range from about seventeen to twenty-one with children up to four years old. All of them are in fairly constant contact with the fathers, but most of them are not married and if they did live together, no longer do. No one in this group is still in high school because the group occurs in the middle of the day at Roca. They are all in some way employed by Roca as young staff or members of Americorps.

I gave the young mothers a list of topics to write about in their journals to spawn conversation. Over a glass of wine at night and a cup of tea in the morning I conjured as many questions as I could about pregnancy, birth and motherhood. In class while journaling about one of the questions, the moment that they realized they were pregnant, a number of the girls prefaced it with an “of course I already knew,” or an “honestly I wasn’t trying to not get pregnant.” They brought up a question that I had forgotten to put on my list- whether or not they chose to become pregnant.

In psych 101 freshman year in a lecture hall with three hundred students, I learned that some women want to become pregnant so that they will have someone to love them. I imagined these women depressed and alone, using sex to make love momentarily and then eternally in the form of a child. I remember thinking it greedy to create a life to fulfill a hole in your own.

In the first couple of months that I worked with Healthy Families the story of how a teenager found herself pregnant was often the first story I heard about a girl. There were the women that knew they wanted to be pregnant before they were, the women who were secretly pleased when they found out, those who came out of the Health Center pale and upset, and the few who denied they were pregnant until the day they gave birth.

Talking to the mothers last week, I realized that I hadn’t asked them to write about the question of whether or not they chose to become pregnant because I assumed the pregnancy stories I didn’t know would mostly reside in the “oh shit” category. For most of them, I know much more about the difficulties they have had being mothers than I know about their lives prior to becoming a mother, and it is hard to imagine them making any decisions about motherhood haphazardly. I see the part of them that hasn’t gone out at night for 2 years because they have a toddler, the part of them that has weathered a pregnancy, a birth, and tiring relations with their baby’s daddy, and the part of them that frets over parenting mistakes.

While listening to them tell their stories about becoming pregnant (many of them remembered exactly where/when), I felt that psych 101 was wrong, that the girls weren’t searching for love any more than any other adolescent. They were living their lives in a way that was familiar to them, the same way their friends were living theirs. In the local high school during a class only for high school mothers, the nurse disparaged the number of pregnant girls dropping out, while the young mothers laughed at a joke and picked studded condoms from the mass of inferior un-studded condoms in the condom basket. Sex seemed the most common of conversations.

The twenty year old in my journaling group who is currently pregnant is the last of her friends to have a child, and is extremely excited to join her friends in becoming a mother. When she told her mother that she was pregnant, her mother was excited and proud of her for being the first of her daughters to complete high school before becoming pregnant. I don’t think these girls’ character and emotional well-being should be questioned because of the choices they’ve made. At the same time, knowing the care these mothers take with their children, it makes me wonder how much motherhood has created the image I have of the women I have come to know.