Teen Mom; The Dirty Thirties Edition

MTV’s Teen Mom is everywhere these days. Frankly, I couldn’t be happier to see a show that chronicles what life is like for young mamas that don’t fit into some silly demarcated high-school stereotype of “slut” or “bad kid” or “rebel” or any other negative and derogatory idea society has concocted around young women who get pregnant. Even though, I admit, I’ve cried at more than one episode. Not exactly a gleeful response, I know, but an honest one. Until recently, I hadn’t understood “reality tv” having anything to do with actual reality. You know, the one in which many of us live. Not The Hills or Jersey Shore.

The issue of teen pregnancy and single parenthood have been around since before we had names for them, yet here we are, in the Age of Information, acting like it’s some sort of new phenomenon; a plague upon the civilized population. Young people’s bodies have been telling them to bring forth new life since time out of mind, and there’s really nothing wrong with it, in-and-of itself. Sex and sexuality and procreation are biological, even if you are a teenager. This is how the human species survives, after all. Ideas such as what age a person should be, how much money a person should make, or whether a person should be married before starting a family are all societal constructs. These are young women taking responsibility for their actions and their choices, and managing to do so under intense public scrutiny, and for that my hat is off. The grace under pressure that these women exhibit and the fact that they are willing to be so open and honest about the sometimes-lack of grace, displays a maturity far beyond that of many grown women.

So, it’s not that young women can’t be mature, it is perhaps more that most of the time they’re not expected to be and so they get away with being mindless bims most of the time?? If we mollycoddle our girls they’ll stay innocent and won’t have to be mature “before their time,” like who’s to say when their time is??

Their stories are not unlike my own, but thirteen years ago there was no Sixteen & Pregnant. There was no Juno. There was nothing out there that even vaguely resembled my life as a teen mom. In fact, it was so controversial, if not completely verboten, on most mainstream television networks to show a pregnant teenager, and if there were one or two who cropped up now and then they were usually asinine hood rats that even I wouldn’t have hung out with had they existed in real life.

And, just so we’re square, I don’t give a rip about Bristol Palin. I’m going to go there and then I’m going to drop it, because she will never be a true Teen Mom to me. To see Bristol being photographed with Maci Bookout and Farrah Abraham is a disgrace to the hard work these two women do every day, because they might have help from their families and from MTV and from other sources unknown, but they struggle for what they have. They don’t give $30,000 lectures on the virtues of abstinence, making a solid living off of a “do as I say, not as I do” platform. They might have come from comfortable homes which had comfortable incomes (with the possible exception of Catelynn Lowell, who is dang-ola a sight more put together than her mother), but they weren’t raised with the proverbial silver spoon of having what the Palins have. These women work regular jobs, where they don’t make someone’s annual salary in one day, and go to school, and deal with extended family issues and family court, without the help of a team of celebrity attorneys and a virtuous right-wing spin protecting their fragile, first-daughter reputations. So to me there’s no comparison. The moms of MTV are far more real, more genuine and set a much better precedent for what a teen mom can be than Princess Palin.

I said it. It needed to be said. Moving on . . .

I’ve addressed the topic of the movie Juno before, and how much I enjoyed the fact that there was a story about a smart, self-aware, non-"slutty" (for lack of a better description) girl who discovers that her reproductive organs work (surprise!!) and has to live out the consequences, good times and rough times. I know that without Diablo Cody’s opus we would not have a show like Teen Mom. It amazes me that someone like Diablo Cody, a person whose work I enjoy but listening to her when she opens her fat mouth I do not, could be the catalyst for young moms to come out of the closet, so to speak, as regular people with regular problems rather than as women ruined before the age of consent both surprises and delights me. This is how it really is, folks. I understand that it may come as a shock to many of you out there, but not all teen moms are crackwhores, or anything else even remotely sinister. And I am madly lovin’ the fact that we’re finally beginning to understand that as a society, al beit slowly. I never thought I’d say this, but thank you Diablo Cody and MTV!!

So, is parenting in one’s teens easier than parenting in one’s twenties or thirties?? Are older young moms really any more savvy or mature than Maci, Farrah, Amber and Catelynn, or are we just older?? Frankly, I think we’re just older. Perhaps we have some tidbits of wisdom to pass on down, but a struggling parent is a struggling parent no matter what age, and unless you’re financially secure, married or not, chances are you’re experiencing struggles not unlike the ones seen on Teen Mom. Shoot, I haven’t been a teen since the 1990s, but I was a teen mom. There were times I was a great mom and there were times I was a shitty mom. There still are. I’m still broke, I’m still trying to finish college. I’m living with my mother on a part-time teacher’s salary. My life is no J.Lo movie. Perhaps if I’d married one of the losers who’ve asked things would be different, like I’d be on Xanax or in therapy or have had a nervous breakdown by now, but when it comes to parenting age ain’t nothing but a number. I gave up a great deal of my young adult life, which in some ways has made me mature and in others, immature. Now that my daughter can brew coffee, turn on the news, wash her own face and pack her own lunch, I don’t have to get up with her every morning and supervise. Some days I wish I had, but whatev. Some days I wish I hadn’t. In either case, I now have the option of staying in bed (on days when I don’t work) until she needs me to drive her to school. I have the option of being lazy from time to time, and I take it, and I’ve been called lazy and immature for it. And guess what?? I don’t care. You come on up in here and live my life, walk a mile in my silver spiked heels or my smelly Chuck Taylors and then perhaps we can talk. Until then, shut up.

I feel a sense of solidarity with these four young women I’ve never met. Our lives are different and yet so much the same. I’m confident that by the time they’re my age they’ll be much more established, more successful, more directed and more mature than I am, but for the time being I feel certain parts of their lives running parallel to how mine was back when I was a younger mom, and my compliments to their moxie.

In closing, I would like to throw out there that I often think that part of the reason young parents catch so much flack is not from the mistakes they make, or their age, or their income (or lack thereof), and more that so many parents who fall into the other end of the high-rick pregnancy spectrum, who have to go have in-vitro fertilization to conceive are pissed off that these young women don’t have to try; they have to try not to. I rarely like to drop the jealousy bomb, because I think it’s kind of a cop-out as far as reasons to be upset go. Any time one person doesn’t like another person, someone assumes it’s a jealousy issue. News flash: sometimes people just don’t like other people. That being said, I think there are a lot of moms age 36+ who are seething that these young women don’t even have to try to have the thing that they think they want most, and that chaps their asses so hard they can’t even see straight. Never-we-mind that perhaps their bodies are telling them that it’s time to slow down, and that if they wanted kids they should’ve done it back when their bodies were screaming for them to do it. But, no. These Baby Boomers and early Gen-X yuppies have to have it their way, and when someone else gets what they want they get upset and take it out on the person who has what they want.

Anyway, all that being said, I think I might not actually be done. The rest is going to have to wait, however.

Good night, y’all.