16, pregnant and still hoping. . .
Over the weekend, MTV had a marathon of their series 16 and pregnant. With a few minutes on my hands and nothing else to watch except reruns or sports (OMG, I hate sports) I decided to watch a bit of the show. Maybe I should have opted for sports.
Hour after hour passed as I listened to the hopes of these poor girls who seemed to have no clue about reality. “I’ll change him. Once the baby comes we’ll be a family, he’ll love me” seemed to be the most popular and enduring refrain. I wondered if these kids read too many romances where every plot has a HEA. I then wondered if we’re protecting our children too much, keeping them from understanding what happens in the real world, not warning them sufficiently about the enduring consequences of their actions.
When I was sixteen, I wasn’t even dating anyone much less thinking about having sex. It wasn’t that I didn’t like boys – I did. A lot. Thought about them all the time. I also thought about what I didn’t want – a life of poverty and struggle and being married to someone who didn’t love me but went ahead with the wedding because he had to.
Maybe I saw too many movies where things didn’t turn out well for the poor pregnant girl. The most memorable one I remember was “A Place in the Sun” with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. My mother was watching it one night on one of the old movies channels and I decided to join her.
Montgomery Clift & Shelley Winters in “A Place in the Sun”
www.filmreference.com/Films-Pi-Ra/A-Place-in-…
In the film, Montgomery Clift is poor and really wants Elizabeth Taylor who’s stinking rich and gorgeous. Settling for Shelley Winters, a sweet girl who works in a factory and loves him, he learns she’s pregnant with his child. Things tank big time from there. She ends up dead; he ends up executed for her murder.
Not the path I wanted to take. Frankly, I didn’t think any guy was worth my life or my happiness or my future. When I did start dating regularly and guys would pressure me for sex, I always came back with “Sure. Are we going to raise our baby at your parents’ house or mine?” You’d be surprised how quickly that cooled their hormones. The few that quipped, “Neither, we’re not going to have a baby” got this response: “You’re right, because I’m not sleeping with you.”
Did it make me unpopular? Yep. Do I regret it? Nope. I knew they didn’t love me. If they had, they would have understood the word ‘no’ and that I wasn’t ready for sex. That I didn’t want to be used.
Later in college when I met a guy who respected and genuinely liked me and I had adequate birth control, I finally took the plunge. My girlfriends were the same. We all decided no guy was worth altering our life plans. Somehow, we all knew we wouldn’t be able to change him. If he was an SOB before he got a girl pregnant, he’d be an SOB afterwards.
If I learned anything from that sad, sad MTV series it was that the guys were immature jerks and the poor girls and their children will be paying for their misplaced hope for a very long time.
With any luck the series will change some girls’ minds about being used by a guy, having unprotected sex and bringing another innocent into the world.
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