Seventeen, Already Someone’s Mother

Everyone, at some remove, knows a girl who got pregnant during school. You hear about it secondhand, the details already smoothed into anecdote by the time they reach you—Alex from the parallel class suddenly developed a latex allergy, or someone convinced herself a baby would hold together a relationship that was already obviously finished. It never holds anything together. Everyone knows this. And yet.

At seventeen I was doing all sorts of reckless things I had no real business doing, and the possibility of actually serious consequences felt theoretical—something that existed in cautionary pamphlets and other people’s lives. Which is, of course, exactly what every seventeen-year-old thinks. The gap between knowing the risk and feeling the risk is wide enough to drive a lot of bad decisions through.

Pauline is twenty-two, a student, and became a mother at seventeen—mid-school, mid-everything, with the full logistical weight of another person landing on her before she’d had much chance to sort out her own situation. You can meet that fact with condescension or with genuine respect, depending on how you’re built. She talked about what it was actually like on the web series Auf Klo—not the abstracted, PSA-ready version of the story but the real texture of it. Maybe that’s worth something to someone currently in the middle of it, trying to figure out whether the future still belongs to them. It does. Probably.