I have lived in the midwest my entire life. Actually, I spent my childhood in the same house and have only recently moved out. Having been raised in a decently small town in northern Illinois, I grew up with certain expectations about motherhood. One is to get married in her early to mid 20's and start having children soon after. But while growing up in your teenage years, having a child is taboo. This at least has been what I have observed as being communicated to me. Growing up I did have quite a few friends who got pregnant young. Either they got married at 16, or had an unplanned pregnancy young. During this time I had a lot of preaching from my family. I was told that if I was to get pregnant while living at my parent's house, then the guy better be willing to take care of me because I would not be having a baby as a teenager out of wedlock in their house. It was also a blunt topic of conversation at larger family dinners that you get married first, then have a baby. Anyone who did things out of order would be shamed. I was fine with this, as I had no intention of having a child young. I saw the limitations it put on my friends who did this, and I did not want to be held back by that kind of responsibility so young.
I am now 24 and a senior in college, and I have been dating the same guy for seven and a half years. All but one of my friends from high school have children, most of them are on their 2nd or 3rd already. And now the rhetoric is starting to change. "So when do I get to be a grandmother?" my mom asked me one day while I was home visiting. I was in shock. I have gone for years of being threatened with all the terrible things that will happen to me if I got pregnant, and now I'm being asked when I am planning to do just that? My mom's best friend has a daughter who was in the same year as me in high school, and she is now pregnant. "All my friends are getting grand babies". This conversation happened last spring when I was 23. That seemed to be the magic number. Now everyone; friends, family, co-workers, are asking "when are you guys getting married?" "when are you going to start your family?". It is just all so strange, it is like a switch was flipped. As a young girl 21 and under, to be a mother was a disgrace, but after that it seems to become an expectation. But my boyfriend does not seem to get the same pressure that I do. Maybe it is because he is not a close with his mother as I am with mine, or that it would be odd if his guy friends and co-workers to ask him about such things. In our reading An Odd Break with the Human Heart the author addresses this social pressure to become a mother, "now that I am in my late twenties everyone wants to extol to me the glory of babies" (Mitchell 55). She talks about how her mother, uncle, even children in her family are asking her about the subject.
Though I do intend to have children someday, I do not feel that I should be having so much pressure to get started now. I have not even finished school yet! I wonder, how do women who do not want children at all feel about this social pressure to become mothers?
Its obviously your own choice, but a lot of woman do not realize this fairly obvious notion. Perhaps there are people pressuring you to have a child, but it's all up to you whether or not you do. I think that some woman just need a little bit more confidence to take charge of their own lives and stop letting people corner them into doing things they ultimately may not want to do.
ReplyDeleteI wonder, Brandon, if you feel different kinds of social pressures that prevent you from making particular "choices"? I put the word in parentheses as (we have talked about in class), there are so many constraints and expectations on both sexes that it is offer very tough to even perceive alternatives beyond what society is communicating to you. I certainly felt trapped that way and didn't really feel I had genuine professional choices beyond being a nurse or teacher. Even though there were women in other professions that I probably saw, they certainly were not part of my reality and so didn't seem within my reach.
ReplyDeleteI get the weirdness you are expressing, Diana. This on/off switch about who we are (our social identities) totally flies in the face of social constructionism which takes time and a lot of interaction over many years to shape us into a particular kind of person and, then, suddenly, I should be someone else??? One of the reasons obvious choices to some people may not seem so obvious to us -- we haven't had time or the appropriate interactions and communications to develop an alternative identity.