Yesterday I saw a retweet on my timeline...a tweet that made me f***ing furious. A tweet about how a guy would proudly not give up a seat on a bus for a pregnant 16 year old because she ought to stand there and think about her life choices.
Let me start by saying that I am hopelessly biased on this topic because I was a teenage mother. To be honest, for all I'm nearly 37, I still AM a teenage mother - it's not exactly something you stop being...you get older, your kids grow up but the facts remain the same.
I first got pregnant at 16. My parents kicked me out and refused to let me come home unless I had an abortion. Like I even wanted to go home! But after two weeks of being homeless I allowed myself to be bullied into it... Twenty years on I still don't know what I could have done differently. I had a miscarriage whilst on the pill a few months later. My ex partner, father in all my pregnancies, used my guilt against me...you can imagine what my mental state was.
I moved out of home just after I turned 17. My home life wasn't THAT bad but it was definitely something I was desperate to get away from. That definitely coloured my decisions. I didn't even want kids but my ex *said* he did and he was going to be a house-husband cos I had the better earning potential. I got pregnant again.
I had a HORRIBLE time of it. I was sick throughout - hospitalised for Hyperemisis Gravidarum, constant infections, every ache pain and niggle. People don't know you're pregnant. They see a teenage girl throwing up in a gutter at 8am and they abuse you for being drunk. I couldn't go anywhere or do anything. I couldn't work. I couldn't even clean our tiny studio flat. I won't deny that I was impossible to live with. We split up just after it was too late to have another termination, I've always suspected that was deliberate on his part. Not that I could have done that again.
I spent most of the rest of my pregnancy in a homeless hostel. A girl was being beaten nightly in the room down the hall, I swear the people downstairs were dealing drugs. I'm a middle-class girl from the suburbs...I was terrified to leave my cell-like room.
I wanted my baby adopted. I couldn't cope. I had no money, no home - it was terrifying. I couldn't afford maternity clothes or bras let alone all the crap you need for a baby. A £100 maternity payment covers next to nothing. My mum bought everything from car boot sales and collected hand-me-downs from co-workers. I appreciated it - don't get me wrong, I couldn't have managed at all without it - but it was largely tat and I was terrified of the long term. I did not want to be a single mother. Everyone said I'd feel differently after the birth. I didn't. I begged and pleaded, I went to Social Services...I was ignored.
Unless you have "been there done that and got the t-shirt" you can't hope to understand what it's like. Trying to live on £30 a week, no friends, no partner, precious little family support...just trapped staring at 4 walls 24/7 with a screaming poop machine.
Eventually my ex reappeared...if it had just been me I probably would've told him to go to hell but I was desperate...to not be alone, for my daughter to have a father (it is not true that a child doesn't miss what they have never had)...history repeated itself and at 20 I had my 2nd daughter and found myself alone for good. People seem to think that if you're a teen mom you're easy, that you have an endless string of boyfriends. My own grandmother thought that of me! If only she'd known...that was it for me. End of my f***ing life. Too broke to go out and meet people for one thing.
My kids are 16 and 19 now...they're doing great but it's been tough every damn inch of the way. My youngest took being fatherless very hard and cried herself to sleep over it more times than I can count. I was full time at home until early 2010 - I hated it but I worked really hard to be a good mum, throwing parties, activities throughout the school holidays, all the day trips I could manage, even home-schooling them at times. Being a full-time mum IS a full time job, not just sitting around watching TV all day. I've redecorated my house, taken IT / Admin courses, grown my own veg, made my own jam...loads of stuff. My kids are intelligent young women...don't you dare suggest they should never have been born.
My ex has never paid a penny of child support. With a history of violence and crime I was told I would be putting my kids at risk if I gave consent to the CSA. My parents have done a helluva lot for us (although I still haven't got over things), it could have been so much worse. The only reason Erin is able to be at Uni is because of them - for one thing I'm not eligible to sign as guarantor on her tenancy as my income is peanuts! She literally couldn't stay in Uni if it wasn't for them.
I had to go *back* to work part-time when my kids were 11 and 14. I say *back* because I had only ever worked for 4 1/2 months when I was 16...it hardly counts! I have been working as a cleaner for very nearly 5 years. I desperately need to get a full time job but with a 15 year gap on my CV and no useful employment experience it's next to impossible. I'm under qualified to be a shelf stacker for heaven's sake! The first 18 months I was working it was a split shift arrangement - I hardly saw my kids and my eldest had to do everything.
I have qualifications; just cos I was a teenage mum does not mean I am stupid. I got my GCSEs, I have a respectable 137 IQ, I am midway through a degree with the Open University. Yes, by a lot of people's standards (including my own) I made some seriously bad decisions...but who hasn't?! Society has decided to be sympathetic to people who choose to put alcohol or drugs into their bodies but condemn those who overeat or have babies cos wow, eating food and having sex are so unnatural and much more of a choice compared to shooting up heroin...
People judge teen mums so harshly yet hardly anyone gives consideration to condemning the boys / men who are 50% of the responsibility and who, more often than not, walk away...or the families that turn their backs on their daughters. No one thinks what a bloody hard thing it is to do, to have a child when you're little more than a child yourself. A pregnant teenager has all the aches and pains and potential complications of pregnancy as an older mother AND is more likely statistically to have a premature or underweight baby (yeah, I went overdue and my eldest was 9lbs 11oz) but this little bastard on Twitter thinks he has moral superiority for not giving up his seat on a bus?! It makes me sick.
One last word: one story that has stuck in my mind for years is that of Beckie Williamson - pregnant at 12, a mother at 13, diagnosed with bone cancer at 14, terminal at 15, died in September 2004 just weeks after she turned 16. There isn't always a 'later' to be having children in. Sometimes one brief chance is all you get and you just have to deal with stuff when it happens. In my own instance, Benign Mature Cystic Teratomas of the ovaries (big cysts, basically) damaged my fertility at 20 and pretty much ruled out more kids when I was 29. At 36/7 some of my old school friends are just starting their families. If I'd waited it would have been too late.
My choices were my choices, my mistakes were my mistakes - I'm still paying for them and always will be. Quit f***ing judging me and those like me. No one has the right.
