News Clips: What Being a Teen Mom Felt Like

So a few weeks ago I got pregnant, had a baby and raised it into a beautiful, successful adult that helps people at the Norwell Food Pantry. I'm a very proud mother, but I was also a teen mother. And for anyone who didn't see the baskets of flour or hear the screaming electronic babies, last week was the developmental psychology unit in psych class, also known as the Flour Baby Unit, where Norwell teens, male and female alike, get to experience what it is like to be a teen parent. This simulation is meant to create empathy for teen parents as we, hypothetically, would now know what they have to go through.

I came into school on Monday with a blanket stuffed up under my baggy sweatshirt in a lumpy imitation of a baby bump. Even though it was lumpy and I had magically entered my third trimester of pregnancy over the weekend, I was still super anxious that people would stare at me walking into school and judge me for being pregnant. Even though I obviously wasn't. My main concern was WHAT WILL PEOPLE THINK ABOUT MY MAGICAL PREGNANCY? And I didn't think it would be anything good, so I covered my lumpy stomach with my lunchbox and speed walked into school away from the random, older/adult couple out taking a nice morning walk.

Being "pregnant" itself just made me feel so incredibly BLAH. And if that was what a blanket did to my energy levels and self-esteem, I can't imagine what an actual baby would do! The only thing that made me feel better (other than ice cream and pickles of course) was joking about it with my friends and random people I saw in the hallway who happened to notice my protruding "belly". Carrying around the sack of flour after “giving birth” was surprisingly more difficult than I thought it would be. I, a self-centered teenager, had to keep track of something else and its "well being". I had to make sure underclassmen not only avoided bumping into me, but also my baby! It was hard.

But then. There were the electronic babies.

SO MUCH CRYING. SO MUCH RESPONSIBILITY. AND SO MUCH ANNOYANCE.

Teachers and students alike did not harbor any love or any feelings of compassion towards those poor, defenseless electronic babies. At random moments, the baby decided to start crying, signaling it needed to be fed and burped, or rocked, or changed, or it just wanted to cry, and you had to hold it. Every single time, we had to go through the motions and see what it needed, and the cries had usually escalated to screams once we finally figured out how to help it. I was lucky, because I got the electronic baby on Saturday, so I didn't have to walk around school with it crying. Instead, I got to sit on my couch and feed it while watching TV. Sadly, becoming a parent does not allow me to become a hermit, and with a real baby I would have had to leave the house at some point.

I did have to hold my friend's baby while she went to the bathroom during class one day. And I can tell you that those were the most nerve-wracking three minutes of my life. It didn't matter that the baby smelled nice or made cute sounds--- all that mattered was that there was a chance of it crying, and then the class would stare at me, and then I wouldn't actually know what to do as a new parent, and I would die, and the world would end.

But it didn't. And it won't. Because there comes a time when you're taking care of this baby that’s cried so much and you want to just close your eyes for a minute so badly that it doesn't matter what the people around you say. What matters is taking care of that baby, and I only had an electronic baby for one day---not a human, living, breathing baby that actually goes to the bathroom and whose bottles need to be washed and whose neck you have to clean of neck cheese and whose well-being is solely in your hands UNTIL YOU DIE.

But hey! Teen parents still deserve those scathing looks and remarks about their poor decisions and inexperience in life. It's not like they deserve your support and understanding and respect for taking responsibility of their child and being a mature adult. Keep in mind, Teen Mom the TV show is not an accurate portrayal of real life. And the Easter Bunny isn't real.

So, to all of us, the joking about being pregnant and having children at this age was harmless, but only because none of us are actually pregnant. If a teenage girl who was actually pregnant heard our joking and laughing, would she think it was harmless? No, because we're joking about her life. And even though it makes us feel better about our awkward situations, it would make her feel so much worse about her own.