I've always wanted children. A little girl and a little boy would be perfect, but as long as they're healthy, that's of course what matters (don't panic, mum, I'm not pregnant). I have, however, always wanted my children to be born at the right time, as I'm sure most people want. But I've had different opinions of when the right time has been. When you plan these things, your future typically looks like this:
1. You've finished your education
2. You have a husband/wife
3. You have a home of your own
4. You have a stabile income to provide for your family
However, things doesn't always work out the way we want them to, as we all know, and since I became 15-16 up until now, I've thought a lot about the consept of children having children. Teen mums and dads trying to raise a child on their own, and I've had a lot of opinions on how I well I would manage if I did get pregnant at a young age.
At 15 years old, I thought having children was no problem. "I've babysat before, I could be a mum now," was the thoughts that went through my 15 year old mind. "I can do anything I set my mind to." It's a nice thought, but no, sweetie, you can't. I cannot begin to describe how glad I am that I didn't have a child at that point. The learning curve would have been so steep I would have cried myself to sleep and I would probably not even be a proper mum, as my parents would have had to do a whole lot of the work for me.
I then turned 16. I had started on a new school and in less than a month from my birthday, I had a boyfriend. With becoming sexually active, came the pregnancy scares. We talked about it and tried to act adult about it, but as far as that went, I think he was the most adult of us. At the time I thought that he was being an irresponsible idiot for wanting to have an abortion if I became pregnant. I thought that "if you think you are old enough to have sex, you should be old enough to deal with the potential consequenses. Three years later I see how right he was. I was the irresponsible one. Keeping a child at that point would be unfair to the child. We wouldn't be able to take care of it on our own and we wouldn't be able to get the education we wanted becacuse of that. The scariest thing is that it would have been my choice, and if I had become pregnant, there's a possibility that I would have been stubborn enough to put him through the one thing he was dead scared of, just to prove to him that I was right, that we could do it. That thought has haunted me. Having a child out of misfortune and spite, instead of love. Of course, we would have loved that child, but the circumstances of how it came to be would have been dreadful. How could I think that at 16, we would handle becoming parents if we had to?
I turned 17. About four months after my birthday, I became single. I grew up a lot that year and started to see things a bit more clearly. I understood a bit more of the burdens of having children. I still thought that I would have been able to handle it if I did become pregnant at this point. I mean, after all I was 17 years old. I saw that it wasn't easy, that it took a lot of work and money, money that I had no chance of getting hold of, but I still thought that I could have done it. I probably could have, but not in the way that I would have wanted to.
I turned 18. Got my drivers license. I worked a lot and that was probably the point in my economical history where I would have been most likely to handle having a child. I would have had to keep living with my parents if I became pregnant at this point, but the thought of having children started to appeal to me on another level. The thought that someone would be completely dependant on me to survive and become a decent human being was endearing to me. However, there was something else that put a definite stopper to my positive thoughts. I wanted to move abroad to study. I had been single for about a year and had no plan changing that, since moving to England would mean meeting a lot of new people. And now that I had a definite plan about what I wanted to do for university, I knew that if I did get pregnant as the result of a one night stand or something, I would have to make the decision of having the pregnancy termintated. I had no issues with that, seeing as there were little to no chance that I would get pregnant.
I moved to England and I turned 19. I'm now 19 and 5 months and I have 7 months left as a teenager. If I get pregnant now, I'll be 20 before the child is born, as long as it's not premature. But you know what? The thought that was so inviting a year ago, scares me to death at this point. The thought of someone, a small innocent child, being completely dependant on me to even survive is so frightening that there has been times lately that I have thought "do I really want to bring a child into this world someday?" Because it is a scary world. Between the government corruption, overpopulation, my own congenital heart defect that I don't know if is genetic or not, and the amount of complete and utter idiots that inhabit this world, I'm scared to put another human being onto the world and having to take care of it and take responsibility for it's actions until it turns 18 years old. I'm not sure if I want to put a child through the suffering it is to live in this world.
At some point, in 6-7 years, I will be ready, but not yet. The words do not exist that are strong enough to explain how extremely happy I am that I didn't get pregnant while my head was in the sand. If I had, I wouldn't have been where I am today. I would have been somewhere else, somewhere equally or more exciting and wonderful, but I wouldn't have the same oportunities. I would be able to watch a small, beautiful child of my own grow up to discover the world that I have come to fear just a little, but I wouldn't be able to do the same. I wouldn't be sat in my own room, in a flat that I pay for, writing this stuff to procrastinate to get out of doing an assignment that's actually quite interesting! I wouldn't be learning about how the world works from a criminological point of view and I wouldn't be able to go to class and learn about things that has fascinated me my whole life. I would be changing diapers, working a minimum wage job and living life day to day, not living abroad, doing what's going to give me the chance of getting a high end job, making me able to single handedly care for my future children. I think I'm better off as I am at the moment.
Don't misunderstand me, I have nothing but respect for those that choose to go through with their pregnancies when they are teenagers and I think that if I would have had to, I would have embraced motherhood gladly and never looked back. I mean, since I've never had children, I don't actually know what I'm talking about, but I have a feeling that when I do have children, I will thank myself for doing it the way that I always planned. I think that when I have children and I get to experience all the things that comes with motherhood, I will thank everything that's holy that I didn't get pregnant as a teenager. I think it's brave to have children as a young adult, but these are my thoughts about my life, and I'm glad I haven't gone down that road yet, even though I'm sure I wouldn't have regret it if I had.
Just as a little side note at the end, if you've read through all this mess, first of all, I can't believe you could actually be bothered following my mess of a thought process all the way here. Second of all, I want to say that if you have read all of this, it's probably going to seem as if I do nothing but think about babies. I do. You do a lot of thinking from the age of 15 to 19, and I don't think about starting a family as much as I seem to, just so that it's been said.
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