Reply #3: Recently finished a book by a (former) teen-age mom

[shrike]

She collected the stories of teen-age moms and included her own.

You forgot to include the scars that form when very young women, still children themselves, raise children. I'll start out by saying that the young women profiled in this book are heroes. All of them managed to get some kind of education, get ahead in life and keep their families together. Along the way they had some godawful experiences.

The one that still haunts me involved a girl who, at 13, became pregnant by a man more than 10 years older than herself. When she became pregnant with their third daughter, she decided to give the child up for adoption. Everyone she knew, including her own mother, told her what a terrible person she was for doing so. The father consented to the adoption, but afterwards announced that she would give no more of "his" children away. So he married her, at long last.

She found out, too late, that he was sexually abusing the two daughters she had left. One of them hung herself in their basement when she was 15. The other started drinking, but eventually joined AA and got clean and sober. This woman concluded by saying that she would be delighted to meet her third daughter if the girl sought her out, but that she truly believes she made the right choice in giving her up.

My own personal experience has been that young girls who raise their babies themselves get stuck in adolescence and childhood somehow -- I've met women in their 30s, 40s who were once teen mothers, and it was like they were still teenagers, doing reckless, irresponsible teenage things (and yes, I realize not all young mothers are like this.)

So it is not an easy answer all around. Lord knows I don't have them. But it's an imperfect at best world and I suppose we all do the best we can.