I woke up this morning remembering that 38 years ago I got married, for the first time. 16 years old and I walked down the isle with my high school boyfriend, 3 months pregnant, in a lavendar dress.
These days it's no biggie if a 16 year old gets pregnant, from what I read/hear she isn't even coersed into marriage, at least here in America. She may be counseled to terminate, or if she decides to keep her baby she can continue attending school with the baby.
Back in my day, in my family, my choices were 2. Get married, if the schmuck was willing, or get shipped off to the unwed mothers home. (I wonder if they still have unwed mothers homes anymore.)
So marriage seemed like the smart choice, but remembering how things turned out I wonder...
Attending high school in 1972, married and pregnant, put me in a category that wasn't well received, kinda like the scarlet letter. I was ostrasized by my peers, banished, excluded from social exceptance. What a way to start a marriage, a pregnancy, and senior year. Living in the attic of my in-laws house didn't give me warm fuzzies either.
It was painful enough that I had disappointed my parents, and they turned me over to a young, immature pot smokin man, but going to school in the middle of de-segregation (It was like someone put us all in a mason jar, black and white, shook the jar up and down a few times and watched while blacks buzzed on one side of the jar and the whites on the other side. Sounds like a Gary Larson cartoon, eh?) and nobody would talk to me, the girls especially would avoid speaking to me. It seemed as if I were invisible and that was indeed cruel and unusual punishment.
38 years later and I can still remember it, like it was yesterday. Time is certainly misrepresented, whoever said "time heals all" was full of c***, in my humble opinion.
Well, that is about all the reminising I'm gonna do today, and I've gotta say it really is a Happy Anniversary, because I'm not that forsaken girl anymore, and I'm not married to that man anymore, and thank heavens I'm not in high school anymore.
2 comments:
Hi! Found your blog. I think it is good to have a place to write what you think, to reflect, to perhaps grow. When you were talking about high school I thought was different up north in Elkton. So many there got married right out of high school. Many were pregnant before marriage. We had a 10th grader who got pregnant and continued in school. She almost seemed proud. How different in 5 years and also in the country people are treated.
I think if we counted just the baby boomers that got pregnant in high school it would be material for a movie of the week. I married at 17 but I wasn't pregnant. Why, pray tell would I do that? I thought it was the ideal way to get away from my stepfather's wandering hands. I had told my mother, didn't believe me. I told the guidance counselor at school, he called the police and the officer was only interested in my boyfriend's pot transactions going on at the local pizza joint. So, of course, pregnant within a month. I was so naive. I was a baby having a baby.
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