A. Getting pregnant is not the equivalent of doing drugs or driving drunk. Being a parent is difficult, but it’s not an inherently harmful thing, as doing drugs and driving drunk are. It’s something that most people do at some point. It’s something that most people find enormously difficult, but ultimately very rewarding.
Being young, without argument, adds certain difficulties to the equation. But it’s not by any means a direct ticket to misery and failure. It’s more like a handicap- it makes things tougher, but it doesn’t have to be a deal breaker. The ultimately outcome is about what you are able to do with your circumstances.
B. Nobody lives a perfect life. A parent may dream all of their life that their kid will go to Harvard. That doesn’t mean that your kid will necessarily have all you dreamed for them. Your kid, for example, may decide on a military career instead. This may be a great disappointment to the parent, who sees their dreams of that Harvard grad disappear into thin air.
But the military career is not inherently bad. It still has the capacity to be meaningful and joyful. It does’t have a lot of things that being a Harvard grad would provide, but it has its own ups and downs, its own challenges and triumphs.
So when your kid goes away to Iraq rather than going away to Harvard, do you not throw them a goodbye party?
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Yes, very different - I live in a city of over half a million, surrounded by cities of the same size more or less. Friends and family tend to be spread out over great distances and while we help as much as we can with any problems that arise, after working all day and commuting for up to two hours each way, most simply don’t have time to do those sorts of things. I could do more of it now that I am disabled/retired but prior to that there probably would have been no way.
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Interesting. I live in a city of three million, and know almost everyone on my block. We’re lucky to live in a good but not wealthy neighbourhood. Most people are pretty friendly.
I said that. And I was clear that I said that the teen’s parents who keep parenting them to help them grow up. And in time, as all teens do, they do grow and mature with parents helping them. How did you possibly get that I said the baby helps them mature? It’s time, experience and SUPPORTIVE PARENTS of their own.
You are way off. For one thing, the story was about my ex-MIL’s reaction to the results of her son’s extra marital affair. Of course I am in the story since it was my marriage, but the total mention of me was this sentence “My ex-husband sired a child with a girl he was sleeping with while we were still married (tho headed for divorce - the news of the pregnancy made me hurry it up).” And, I don’t know why you think I was concerned about the “young woman and her child” since I didn’t care a fig about her and still don’t - I don’t even know what her name is or what happened to her. If she wanted to keep a baby sired by a man who didn’t want it or her, she was free to ruin her life all she wanted, but that story was about my ex-MIL’s response to the fact there was going to be a baby.
My ex-husband was an abusive asshole. If I were to spend time wishing suffering on anyone, it would be him.
I just don’t think there is enough separation between doing the best they can in a bad situation and “Hey, we’re having a grandkid!”.
And, obviously, I’m not talking about them here.
This is the part I think is just wrong. Parents are allowed - encouraged, required - to control every other facet of their children’s lives until they turn 18, except whether or not they are going to have to raise another child?
How would it break up the family if the teen just quietly has the baby and life goes on?
Teenage pregnancy is a potentially life destroying mistake just as doing drugs or driving drunk are, yet apparently the parents have no say in how they get to pick up the pieces after a pregnancy.
This is why I think that people who love babies are unrealistic - teen pregnancy doesn’t tend to work out well at all. But I don’t think anyone here has said anything other than “it can work out” or “they just need support” or “it’s just a handicap”.
Having your child decide to serve their country rather than spend 4-8 years in college might end up being a disappointment, but that is a choice that child makes after they are an adult, and the choices they make then are not the parents responsibility. If they manage to not get killed or maimed in some stupid war, the military is a good career choice, not a mistake. Even if I was disappointed that my daughter was going off to war, I’d still support that decision tho I don’t know about a goodbye party as I’d probably rather the last days were spent quietly at home. Now, when she came home…
A teen pregnancy is a mistake, and it tends to result in the teen mother not finishing school and therefore not getting a decent job. If she’s really lucky, she might be able to marry a man who will support her and her kid(s), but I imagine that’s not very likely. A teen keeping a baby can and does result in delay of retirement for parents, which in the house next door to me resulted in the grandfather having a stroke at 67 and death at 72. And apparently it also can result in the baby itself having health problems, dropping out of school, ending up and jail and if female, having a teen pregnancy.
We know everyone on our block, but not well enough to clean house, make meals or babysit just because someone had a baby. If nothing else, we’d come close to doing that all the time, given the number of babies we have here.
It may be because our neighborhood is going thru transition. My husband has been here since 1984 and I’ve been here 20 years. Since then, only two families are the same ones as when I moved in as all the rest retired and moved away. We just don’t have much in common with most of the folks here - if nothing else, many of the adults don’t speak English very well.
Because, if the parents were parenting before, and if, as all teens do, she was going to grow and mature in time, the only thing different there was the presence of a baby. That is what made it look like you think having and raising a baby was going to make a mature responsible adult out of that teen mother, instead of a whiny child who resents having to get up early for feedings and not having any social life.
Ahhh, so this is your sample? This single example of over-the-top lunacy is what you are talking about? ONE person, who happened to be your MIL went mental over a baby, and you managed to extrapolate that to include just about everyone?
Maybe you should have reworded your OP to:
You might have gotten some more reasonable responses if you had asked this question instead of the other that was obviously worded to garner reaction.
This may be what you don’t get. You CAN’T have a baby quietly and life just goes on. It’s a tremendously complicated and emotional process that takes up a year of your life. You spend 4-5 months feeling the baby move every hour, at least. You literally can’t move without remembering you are pregnant: your center of balance changes. For the people around the pregnant woman, the growing pregnancy is also constantly in front of them. I know that in the last few months of my pregnancy, people talked to my stomach, not my face: the fact that there’s *a person *in there is incredibly distracting.
Birthing a baby is a different all-consuming experience, both physically and mentally. This is true no matter what your plans are for the baby: adoption doesn’t make birth less dramatic.
For those that keep the baby, a new baby changes everything in everyone’s lives, permanently.
None of this can be done quietly. Abortion, adoption, or birth, they all demand a strong emotional response from everyone involved. If there are no positive emotions, then you get an unending stream of negative emotion: intense anger and resentment and hate. That’s what would tear a family apart. So people find whatever positive emotions they have about the pregnancy/new child and express those as hard as they can so that the negative is not the only thing out there.
I get the impression that curlcoat thinks having a termination of pregnancy or birthing a baby are akin to having one’s tonsils or appendix removed…insofar as they all dispose of something unwanted from the body…minimum of fuss, and a day later all is well again.
I’d bother to take offense, except it’s curlcoat, and there’s no value to be had in disabusing her of her errant views.
Plus what I meant by “break up the family” was this: despite everything the parents try to do to persuade the teen to abort/ give up the baby, she is hell-bent on keeping and raising it. By law there is no way they can force her to give up the baby if she doesn’t want to (I’m not saying the law is good, or fair, just that that’s what it is).
At this point they have two options: they can do what Manda Jo said and try to look for positive things about a bad situation, or they can go right for the negative to the point where life is hell for everyone involved, possibly alienating their daughter to the point where she’ll never talk to them again even years later when the parents are ready to forgive and forget.
No, it’s just like your pit thread - you pick out one part of a thread and try to make a point with it. That is what is known as an example, it is not the point of the OP. I didn’t even remember that incident until I wrote that post, as it happened over 20 years ago.
I am not interested in garnering your sort of reaction, I am trying to understand why some people seem to be able to completely ignore everything else simply because someone is pregnant.
I meant quietly in the sense of public display.
That’s just weird. I’m sorry but to me it just seems like you became unimportant.
I think this might be part of what I don’t get - why is it that when someone has a baby, it is supposed to change the lives of everyone around them, no matter how uninvolved they might be in the mother’s life.
If they are happy that there is going to be a new baby, why would there be any negative to cancel out? If they are not happy about the new baby, but have accepted that it’s going to happen and want to support the teen, why would they go about pretending to be excited in public? Are these people who are planning parties for bad idea pregnancies really all just pretending?
But does looking for the positive mean they have to put on an act?
Because in our culture, to be quiet about an upcoming child would be expressing utter and total shame and regret.
No, the banal things I was talking about became uninteresting compared to the much more interesting fact of an impending birth.
It’s not “supposed to”, it’s not an arbitrary social convention. Having a child transforms the life of the family. That is going to change every relationship they have. I mean, do you complain when someone falls in love and gets married and now expects you to treat them differently, to include their spouse in invitations, to respect the fact they they now have to take their spouse’s concerns into account when making plans, to prioritize spending holidays and free time with their spouse over their friends? It’s the exact same thing. They can’t pretend their life isn’t utterly changed, and there’s no reason to expect them to.
No, they aren’t pretending. They are really happy. They are also really sad, angry, resentful and scared. Once the child becomes an inevitable reality, they are focusing on the positive emotions because they want to create the most positive atmosphere possible for the child to be born into.
Let’s say your sister married a man you didn’t entirely approve of. He used to drink, and he hasn’t been sober that long. He’s got an ok job, but you’re worried he’s not motivated or talented enough to grow that into a real, adult position. Basically, you think there is a real chance this will end horribly, with your sister attached to a drunk, lazy bum and no easy way out of the situation.
When she first tells you she’s marrying him, you have a VERY BLUNT conversation. You lay out all the problems you see, all the possible alternatives to getting married right now, you reassure her that if she changes her mind she’s always got your support however embarrassing it might seem.
Then, what do you do? You shut up and focus on the positive. Because if after that, she’s still going to marry him, you want to be as welcoming as possible. Because it could all go horribly wrong, but it could also all work out ok, and if you continue to be Ms. Doom and Gloom about it, you’re sure to poison the well; the marriage will never work if every time he comes around he’s reminded that the family thinks he’s a bad idea and makes him unwelcome. So you focus on the positive. You talk to the guy and take the time to discover the things your sister saw in him, and you find a way to actually like him. You help your sister plan the wedding with a smile, and you go in your best dress and dance with everyone. There may be a voice in the back of your head saying “God, I hope this isn’t as bad of an idea as I think it is”, but you aren’t pretending: you’re both worried **and **happy, because, hey, your sister is overjoyed and he’s a pretty cool dude, whatever his weaknesses are.
Same thing with an impending baby. It may be the worst idea in the world, but even then, there are positives to focus on: all children bring a measure of joy with them. Focusing on those positives and dampening the negatives carries the greatest likelihood of the whole thing working out in the best possible way.
Really?? Hmm. OK, for example, I think I’ve talked about my next door neighbors, who had four sons, three have moved out and two have come back with pregnant girlfriends? So we had six adults and a teen living in a two or three bedroom house (I don’t know which setup theirs has) - adding babies to this is not a good idea, right? Yet for the first two, they put up those It’s a Girl and It’s a Boy banners over their garage, announcing to the neighborhood that there had been babies born there. Most of us had no idea what was up, until word got around.
Were they celebrating these births? Or were they just trying to avoid looking like they were expressing utter and total shame and regret? I tend to go with celebrating, since they haven’t had any problem expressing regrets since then. Loudly, in the street and front yard.
And what do people do who are not happy that a pregnancy has been thrust upon them, but are not all the way to utter and total shame and regret? Those are the ones that I thought would just quietly get on with life, discussing/announcing the pregnancy to family and close friends only, not throwing a party, etc.
I guess I’d just have trouble being considered banal, even by myself?, simply because I happened to be pregnant.
I said “no matter how uninvolved they might be in the mother’s life”. If I’m not living in that house, the only way someone having a baby should change my life is in the ways you list above regarding spouses. Yet I’m expected to completely baby-proof my house (which I’m not even sure I’d know enough to be able to do), provide child appropriate foods, toys, etc and to expect that the child is going to be at each and every event from now until the child itself decides it doesn’t want to go. Babies born into social circles disrupt everything, which wouldn’t be an issue if we were all of baby-making age and bent, but we range from early 20’s up to 90. Why do the mothers expect that we will all be happy to go to some child friendly restaurant each time, watch their kids, and modify our routine? We didn’t even do that when one friend had a stroke last year - when he was able to come out and socialize again, he didn’t want anything to be different, much less expect it.
I don’t think those are the same things. For one thing, I’m not living with my sister, so I’m not going to be affected day to day by her decisions, nor do I really have any right to be interfering in her choices. Also, unless she rushes into having children with this man, it is a lot easier to get out of a bad marriage than it is to get out of children that she shouldn’t have had when she did.
And that measure of joy thing - perhaps you have never experienced it, but there are babies born into families who receive no joy from the birth. Not every family greets a baby or each baby with joy, but in your scenario at least my sister is joyous about marrying Mr AA so maybe it’ll work out. She also isn’t going to be taking on more than one “needs work” husband at a time, whereas girls/women who have their dumb idea pregnancies celebrated tend to see no reason why they shouldn’t have as many of them as they feel like having (there are four young children living next door right now).
“There are 10 of us crammed into this house, we have no money, you’re too young and irresponsible to be a parent, we’re worried about your future and that of the child, we have too many children to take care of already, this baby is a bad, bad idea” and “Thank goodness the baby arrived safely, everyone is well, s/he’s perfect and beautiful and we love him/her and we want to share the good news with everyone” seem contradictory, but are two states of mind that can be experienced at exactly the same time. I suspect your banner-flying neighbors go through both. There are some people who wouldn’t even think about the negatives (I’m thinking of a family I know who were genuinely overjoyed at their 14 year old daughter’s pregnancy) but they tend to be halfwits who have made many, many poor life decisions and this is just another. It’s not an attitude I associate with the words “otherwise successful and intelligent”.
Scenario:
She has a baby too young, no education, too poor.
Keeps baby.
You kick her out, or continuously shame her, or do other destructive behaviors, rather than support and parent her.
She goes down a bad path, maybe loses all her chances for an education etc.
Eventually she grows up, but not in as good a place as if she never had the kid.
Scenario:
You hold down the fort, keep doing what you would have (parenting, but with the extra work because of the baby) and come out the other side with a mature kid who can move forward and take it from there. Teach her to grow up and help her learn to be a good parent. A few tough years, but with support (so she doesn’t become homeless, drop out of school etc) and a teen mom, she will stop being a teen mom and just be a mom.
That’s what support, if she chooses to keep the baby, can do. Help her during a rough patch until her maturity catches up with her circumstance, and let her continue her life as a functional adult, plus a kid.
Having the kid doesn’t mature her. You prevent having the kid from ruining her chances or derailing her life. Then, since you’re still in her life, you have a chance to parent her, kep her in school etc, so she grows up, moves out, supports herself and kid.
And if there’d been no mention of the pregnancies, if it had all been kept very hush-hush, and then when the babies came they went out of their way to be discreet about their very existence, that wouldn’t suggest shame and embarrassment to you?
That’s not how it works. Strong positive and strong negative emotions don’t average out to “meh”. You keep lots of strong and lots of negative.
I was not banal. TPS-Report cover protocol changes were banal. Most of life is banal, pregnant or not. When you are very pregnant, it’s more interesting than the day to day bullshit of life. That bullshit is not me, it’s the conversation.
No, they don’t expect you to do those things, they simply expect you to do those things if you want to socialize with them in those ways. These are people you know casually, people you describe as “uninvolved” in your life. How many uninvolved people do you have over at your house? How often do you meet uninvolved people for dinner? You don’t have to keep being friends with people if you know longer have enough in common with them to make it rewarding. When you are talking about distant friends and relatives–uninvolved people–cutting them out of your life ought not be particularly painful.
One thing new parents do is to shrink their social circle because they don’t have time or opportunity to maintain it. But that’s not expecting you to do anything.
You started this whole thing with why do “close friends and relatives” get excited over pregnancies: how does a sister not qualify? We are talking about people in that degree of closeness and their reactions.
So if your sister had a “bad idea” pregnancy, you’d hound her every day about what a bad choice it was, put her on adoption agency mailing lists, suggest worst case scenarios up in every conversation, and generally not let her have a moment’s peace until the birth began? You would never mention the pregnancy at work or to your friends? You’d dismiss her happiness and make sure to remind her that she was making a mistake every time she mentioned the upcoming birth? Do you not see how that would undermine any chance of it all working out, and for the good of the child at some point you’d want to start encouraging a more positive attitude?
And the cases YOU STARTED WITH were the ones where people were “inexplicably” joyous. The ones where there is no joy at the birth? They don’t celebrate or go gaga. And what you said at the end–at least she’s joyous, so maybe it will work out–that’s exactly the answer to the question you posed at the beginning. People focus on the joy hoping that it will help it all work out, because focusing on the negative certainly won’t improve the odds.
You may have hit the nail on the head with your last sentence, as it may just be those who are not otherwise successful and intelligent who are the ones who are genuinely happy at the arrival of a new baby no matter what the situation. And maybe those are the ones I’m seeing that are confusing me. OTOH, I don’t get how otherwise intelligent people could experience "“Thank goodness the baby arrived safely, everyone is well, s/he’s perfect and beautiful and we love him/her” and still get to sharing it with the world if the circumstances are otherwise bad. On yet another hand, I’m not one to put up banners on my garage for any reason, so there is that too.
Or maybe it’s all hormones. I never had much of those at any time in my life, so I’ve never been influenced by something so much that I have been tempted to throw the rest of my life down the drain. And certainly not something that could potentially ruin the lives of others.
OK, then the presence of the baby has nothing to do with it? Good parents are going to produce a mature child with or without a baby? And, the question that started all of this - is it necessary to celebrate the bad idea pregnancy in order to be a good parent?
No, I wouldn’t have known anything about it at all, until I actually happened to see a new baby/child over there, as it happens now since the first two. I don’t even know for sure how many they have these days, since apparently only the first two were worth banners, but there are at least two more. So, why the banners for the first two and none for the others? I can’t imagine that they are ashamed of any of the subsequent babies.
I was asking about those who don’t have any strong emotions on the subject, whether positive or negative. If the parents of a pregnant teen are resigned to her keeping the baby, but neither angry nor excited, would you think they were ashamed and embarrassed if they didn’t hold a baby shower, or post banners?
Oh. You didn’t experience this talking to the belly thing at non-work times?
Business people, friends of my husbands, people like that. Some of whom would show up to the house with surprise kids and then get upset because we weren’t set up for it. I imagine because the assumption was that everyone has & loves kids, therefore there was no reason to warn us they were bringing any.
But, even if we are talking people we know well, or relatives or something. Those folks should know that the homeowners do not and never had kids, yet I have seen it happen when I’ve been at the homes of others, particularly relatives. It just seems bizarre to me that anyone would expect a non-childed person to be ready to properly take care of and entertain any young child.
For the reasons I already posted. If my sister was going to marry some really bad guy, even after we’d all made sure she knew what she was getting into, I imagine there would be a shower and the wedding but I can’t see anyone gabbing on to friends about how excited they are that their sister is going to marry this questionable person, or putting up a banner. I just don’t think that a bad marriage and a bad pregnancy are close enough to the same thing to be able to use the marriage as an example.
I don’t know where you got any of this.
Dunno about mention but I certainly wouldn’t be gushing with joy about it.
If I am not living with my sister, I’m not sure how me having a positive attitude about her making a big mistake is going to make any difference? If I am neutral on the subject then it might be that if she does decide that adoption is the better decision, she would feel more comfortable talking about it with someone who isn’t acting like her having a baby is the best thing since sliced bread.
Yeah, that’s true. Screwed up there - forget that part.
This part tho, I guess I don’t believe this. Nothing is set in stone, so if there are people who are not expressing joy over a pregnancy (or marriage), who say their peace and then stay out of it, can provide contrast? a place to go if a decision is being rethought? I think I feel that acting as if this bad idea pregnancy is just as wonderful as one that has been planned for, and will result in a healthy baby born into a stable family with resources to raise it well, doesn’t leave any room for second thoughts. And like with the girl scout troop, it can simply makes anyone looking in from the outside think having a baby no matter what the circumstances is no big deal.
Well, I can see someone other than me has this viewpoint. Curlcoat, you’re all right with me. Nice to see a woman other than my partner be so militant.
All these others may deride and try to degrade you. But you are not alone any more. Believe it.
