Too bad. I had my cake all baked and ready to go.
Way to
disappoint,
Time.
Pregnancy pact aside though, there might be an interesting story behind why suburban high school kids choose to have babies in the first place.
When I was in high school, it happened a lot. And the closer we got to graduation, the more pregnancies there were. I used to joke that babies had become some kind of contagion:
touch a boy? Oop! You're pregnant.Having a baby felt like a Next Step, a path that came to us so we wouldn't have to stare into some gaping void and ask, "What do I do now?"
I'd say it betrays a problem in how we perceive the future in general. The country demands that kids go to school for at least twelve years. What next? Nudged forward by their parents, a lot of kids decide to go to college.
After college, so many of us flail around confused because we've run out of prescribed steps: it's all you, alone with your decisions -- and the doors that slam behind you when you choose one thing at the expense of something else.
What if you're a kid out of high school who's not really thinking about college? Next logical step: find work, get engaged, make a baby, not necessarily in that order.
I got engaged. Oh yeah, and there was some college in there too.
Lucky for me I never got around to conceiving, because I probably would have been one of those "This is a sign, let's keep it!" girls. And I probably would have dropped out of Berkeley and moved in with my fiancé in Iowa.
Today I could have been standing barefoot in a corn field somewhere, waiting for homie to get home from blowing coke with his
DS-Max chums, and watching little Alice and Tom play catch. Wouldn't that have been something.
