Podcasts

YR via RSS

For Educators
Teach Youth Radio
Curriculum

Youth Programs
CORE
Outreach

My Morning After Epiphany

"Maybe I did want to get pregnant."

By Stacey Leung

I was worrying about birth control one day, and thinking about the morning-after pill, when I was overcome with the sudden realization…maybe I did want to get pregnant.

The idea that teenage girls have babies because they need someone to love them has always made sense in theory to me, but I never completely understood it…until now.

I want a little girl.

She’ll be smart and beautiful. She’ll be extremely talented in all aspects — an artist, a dancer, an athlete, a writer, a singer — and everyone will absolutely adore her. She will be everything I ever wanted for myself, but couldn’t achieve.

I used to see ahead of me a career, and then a husband and kids. Now, I’m thinking that could happen in reverse order, and I’d still be okay with it. My mother would disown me, and my relatives would look on in shame, but their opinions never mattered that much to me in the first place.

The baby’s father could send child support, but his physical presence wouldn’t be necessary. All these years dreaming of the perfect Prince Charming and the stereotypically ideal mother-father-child family, and now, I don’t even want him in the picture! I want my little girl all to myself; no sharing.

Having a baby right now would be the easy way out of a real future, the same way suicide is an easy escape from loneliness. I wouldn’t have to make all these decisions about classes to take next quarter. I wouldn’t be forced to declare a major. And I wouldn’t be asked what I want to be when I “grow up.”

It scares me so much to have this realization. For a really long moment, that’s what I really wanted: a baby. It scares me that I’m willing to give up everything I’ve worked so hard for, and that I’d want to live vicariously through someone else, who, as I later put more thought into this, I’d end up resenting.

Instead of a morning-after pill, I got a morning-after epiphany.

When and if I do have a child, I want someone I love, not a window to what I could have become.

— Stacey “dreaming of motherhood” Leung is a freshman at University of California Santa Cruz.