Having a Baby Will Ruin Your Life

Written by Froggy_Moo Monday, 17 November 2008 22:45

“Having a baby will ruin your life.” She never actually came out and said this, but it was the underlying message in much of the advice my mother gave me while I was growing up. Of course, she knew first hand how hard it is to be a young mother. She got pregnant with my brother at 18, had him at 19. She married my dad two years later and had my other brother the following year. Eighteen months later I arrived. My parents had three kids by the time they were 24. No college education and in my father’s case, not even a high school diploma. Needless to say, we were poor and my parents had to work very hard for what little we did have.

While this scenario may seem extreme, it is far from uncommon among Hispanics. According to Dr. Suzanne Ryan, author of Hispanic Teen Pregnancy and Birthrates: Looking Behind the Numbers, Hispanic teens have the highest birthrate of any racial or ethnic group with 82.2 births per 1,000 teen females. This is in comparison to the overall birthrate among U.S teens of 41.7 per 1,000. That’s double the average teen birthrate! I am Hispanic and this is the world I grew up in. This is the world my mother tried to warn me about. However, as I got older, I didn’t need her to point these things out to me. I was fully immersed in the statistics. My two best friends both had children before the age of 18. In fact, they both had two children each before they turned 20. My cousin, who is two years older than me, had a baby at 18. My high school boyfriend’s brother fathered a child at the age of 16. This same boyfriend would often daydream about how we would have children of our own someday. Sooner rather than later in his mind, I’m sure.

Luckily, by this time I was already of the mindset that “having a baby will ruin your life” or at the very least, severely stunt it. And I had high hopes for my future, as did my mother. She would throw out career options left and right, lawyer, bio-genetic engineer, astrophysicist - things I had never thought of and had no personal exposure to. She taught me to dream big and to believe that I could do anything. She instilled in me a love and desire for education and a healthy sense of aspiration. I worked hard to put myself through college (obviously there wasn’t a family college savings plan) working full time, taking classes at night, student loans, summer school, etc. It took me seven years to get a four-year degree, but I never lost sight of my goal. I graduated from college in 2005 with a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. I beat the statistics. I made it through unscathed. No child, illegitimate or otherwise, to weigh me down.

Fast forward a few years and I am now at a point in my life where it would make sense to have a child. I have finished school, I have a good job, I’m married and I own a home. And yet, I can’t seem to shake that sense of dread attached to childbearing that I formed so many years ago. I can’t invalidate all the reasons that I used in argument against having a child earlier in my life. Even though I have come this far, my life is far from over. There’s still so much I want to do. Looking back, I can’t help but wonder whether I am childfree by nature or nurture. Perhaps it’s a little of both.

 

Want to talk about this article?  Join in on the discussion in The Childfree Life forum.

< Prev		Next >