Here at the Teebird, I am overhearing a job interview for some organization that serves pregnant teens/teenage mothers. Apparently, preggo teens get free yoga!
According to my upbringing, teen pregancy is shameful, trashy, and does not merit one free yoga. In fact, having sex at all prior to getting an acceptance letter from a prestigious college was considered trashy, wrong, and a path that lead you not to the gates of the Ivory Tower, but to the line outside a welfare office. There were several girls at my high school who did have kids, but they were brown and were not NPR listeners and did not have the lofty goals and dreams that I did. The message I got was that I was better than them, and that my people did not reproduce until we had a bachelor's degree in hand.
That's how I was raised. And I believed that. Still sort of do. It helps explain how I was when I was a teen and excuses me from being such a primadonna striver asshole (which I was).
I'm not faulting my mom. Obviously, her line of thinking worked. No teen sex/pregnancy here!
So, who's right?
My mom was once asked if she'd volunteer in the department at the local hospital that teaches teenage girls how to care for their babies and she told them no, that she had such distaste for teen moms that she had no compassion and no desire to help them at all. Shortly after, her hospital volunteer career ended all together.
So I come from a pretty hardcore "legs shut until an educated, employed man comes along" household philosophy.
I can't help but think, no one ever gave me free yoga classes for doing everything right.
Posted by Zerd at June 17, 2008 05:02 PM