A terrible legacy

Imagine a young pregnant girl who is being let down by people who are supposed to be protecting her.

A young girl who was in eighth grade a year ago has grown up being passed from one relative to another as her mother makes excuses for why this is s good thing. The summer before her last year of school, the mother once more sends her off. This time she sends her to live with a biological father and others who really don't want her while her mother goes back home with her husband and his children. The step father loves this child as his own, but lets the mother take the lead since it is her daughter.

The girl is lonely and homesick and ends up getting pregnant.

So what does the family do? They put her on a bus and send her to live alone in a rented house in the same town as her step grandmother. The reason this time is that it will enable her to finish school. As if there are no schools near the mother, or the mother cannot come live with her now that she is pregnant.

The girl gets some money from her family and the grandmother,  and eventually ends up moving in with the step grandmother because she is emotionally way too young to live on her own, but she works hard to finish school and makes plans to give the baby up for adoption to a loving couple through an adoption agency.

Now, suddenly, this child, who has never had a job and only finished school because the school jumped her from middle school to senior year in special education, has decided to keep the baby. Her mother promises to help her for only one year then she is on her own.

Anyone who has ever had a baby to care for knows how difficult that first year is. Believing this child mother (who is 18 in years only)  can be expected to care for her baby and find a way to support them both in twelve months knows how unlikely it is to be a success story. At best she will follow in her mother's footsteps and keep dropping her baby into other people's nests while it is growing up.

Her greatest skill is dressing herself up and looking pretty. This baby is not a doll for her to dress up and make pretty. In the beginning it will be exciting because people will give her lots of pretty baby things, but eventually it will be her and a crying, wet, smelly baby trying to pinch enough pennies to eat. She will be exhausted, frustrated, and trapped and two lives will be horrifically handicapped.

All because no one kept reinforcing what a magnificent and wonderful thing she was doing when she was picking out parents (who could afford to care for her baby and wanted to do so more than anything in the world.) Instead they kept showing her sonograms and telling her how few girls did it and telling her she didn't have to give it up. It was up to her.

And it is, but the loving thing would be to do what her own mother never did.  Instead of an extremely hard life that will leave her own child as bereft of a future as she has been, she could have given it almost everything she ever dreamed of.