I Am Not You - Yes I am by Jessica Allan Lavarnway

I Am Not You - Yes I am by Jessica Allan Lavarnway Glancing around my obstetrician's clinic, I saw another young girl, perhaps seventeen years old.  And my first thought was, "I am not you." I was not a teenaged mother. Sure, I was nineteen.  Sure, this was my second child. But damn it, I wasn't a teenaged mother. Every qualification I could think of didn't apply to me. I was married.  I had another child, yes, and she was born when I was fifteen, yes, but she was my adopted stepdaughter.  I had been to college.  I had been in the army.  My husband and I owned a house.  I owned my own car, which was insured.  I had health insurance, and a VISA card, and savings I could draw off of.  I was a stay-at-home mother, my husband's and my choice. I had grown up middle class, educated in private schools, and I had been attending college two weeks after my older daughter had been born, unbeknownst to me.  I had military experience, and emergency medical technician credentials.  I chose not to work. I volunteered at a local hospital and made charitable donations to the Salvation Army and the United Way.  I was not on AFDC.  I met none of the "low-trajectory" qualifications named in Kristen Luker's book "Dubious Conceptions".  I had read the book in college and found it interesting, if, at the time, irrelevant to my own life. I was not a teenaged mother. I didn't have a low paying job at Wal-Mart.  I had a G.E.D., by accident of having gone to college early.  I was married.  I was not on WIC, Medicaid, AFDC, or food stamps.  I had an education.  I didn't have a boyfriend who beat me and drank the rent money.  I even had to take clomiphene to get pregnant - if there's one way to confirm that a pregnancy was "intended", it's to take fertility drugs to make it happen. Unlike this poor, miserable creature sitting in the waiting room, I was not a teenaged mother. She and I were the only young women under the age of 25 or so in the waiting room.  As I watched her, fascinated with her morbid situation, I saw a tear slip off of her cheek and drop onto the copy of Parents magazine that she was reading. Damn it.  I have nothing in common with you.  Don't make me pity your situation.  Damn it, damn it, damn it.  I knew my empathy would be the end of me. And, girding myself, I walked over, sat down and introduced myself. Her story I won't relate here, for it is hers and not mine.  But it was no more "typical" than mine.  No story is typical.  They are all the combination of accidents of fate and choice over circumstance, and it is too horrible to categorize one as "typical". Once I married a man with a two year old daughter, my friends from college hastily decamped.  They quickly predicted that I would become a complete drudge and no fun to be around. They may well have been right.  I try not to think of how true that very well was, being a housewife and mother.  And, in my reluctance to find someone who wasn't as educated as myself, unlikely to understand the books I read, the cultural references I made, or anything I did, I spent six months in the seclusion of my own home, occasionally taking my daughter to the playground, rejoicing in my growing belly and the kicks that came, tentatively, but they came. My friends from the military quickly dispersed, as is the nature of military buddies - the relationship is, at best, transient.  They were now in Germany, South Korea, North Carolina, and Kentucky. So I spent those months alone. Was I in any way superior to them?  No, but in my insecurity, and my fear of becoming a typical "teenaged mother", I wanted to think I was. Eventually, towards the end of my pregnancy, I made friends.  They didn't read as much or as often as I did, they had none of the educational aspirations I did, and they had never married, but were living with a boyfriend and children, invariably in convoluted stepchild/biological child arrangements. But I saw myself in them. They delighted in their children as much as I did in mine.  They tried as best as they could to have natural childbirth, as I tried.  They loved pushing their preschoolers on the swings, as I did.  They expressed interest in what their older children did in school, they saved money for the hope of giving these children a better education, and they constantly reminded them to go out and make something of themselves, to chase their dreams, to try to be happy. As I did. There is no age limit in parenting, and there is no certain age that you have to be before you can be a good parent.  There is not, as I once preferred to believe, a minimum education level that you needed to attain, or a certain economic level, or anything else. All that it takes to be a good parent, teenaged or otherwise, is to give freely of yourself, to love your child more than anything else in the world, and try to do your best, day by day. Whether you're fourteen or forty, the same rules for being a good mother apply.  I wish every mother in the world the best of luck, for it's the hardest job in the universe.