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Surviving an Unplanned Pregnancy

© Trula Breckenridge

Though I am a former teen mother I find myself sometimes doing the same thing I get so angry about when other people do it. The thing I am talking about is being surprised at or underestimating teen mothers. It doesn't happen often that I do this, and when it does I am instantly ashamed that I would even have a glimmer of a stereotype about teen mothers lurking in deep corners of my mind. It's time to admit that I do, and try to banish these thoughts from my brain.

Whenever I see a teen mom or a young mom out in public I always speak and say something pleasant about her baby, because I remember how much a kind word meant to me when I was a young scared mother out in the world. I recently struck up a conversation with a young mother who, at first glance, appeared to be about 17, 18. Her child was a toddler not quite 3 years old. As we began to talk she revealed that she was actually 23 and had an older child who was 7 years old, and also that she was a full-time student. I asked her did she go to Tri-C, one of the local community colleges (which has open admission, anybody can go to this school). She replied that no, she's a first year student in medical school, and while she found the classwork stifling after spending 5 years getting her bachelors she was looking forward to the residency training in a hospital in the later years.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. Her smirk let me know that she could tell that I was surprised and quite used to my reaction. I apologized for the blunder of assuming that she was a student at the junior college. Was it a fair assumption? Some people would say so. Everyone knows how hard it is for most teenage mothers to just finish high school, let alone college, let alone medical school, right? But I, of all people, should have known better than to assume anything at all about this young mother and what she was capable of. I did, after all, finish high school and went on to a university. I wasn't alone, I knew many other young mothers at college as well.

To be honest, my jaw dropped when she said medical school because my astonishment was tinged with a lot of jealousy as well. Here she was, a medical student with two kids, one degree already under her belt, while I at 29 am still struggling to complete the a bachelors I started years ago. When I was 23 with a 7 year old and a baby graduate school of any kind seemed as far away as the moon as I juggled classes with employment with motherhood. I set my jealousy and astonishment aside and congratulated this woman, and asked her how she managed to pursue her dream. She told me that her mother stood by her when she got pregnant at 16 and told her, one baby don't stop no show. You are going to finish high school and be somebody. You are already the most important person in the world to this baby and nothing is more difficult than having and rasing a child right so you can do anything else you set your mind on doing.