Soapbox

I’ve been resisting writing this post for a long time, but here it is.

I was a teen mother and pregnant as a teenager twice. Amy was born when I was 17 and Isaac was conceived when I was 19, and born two months after I turned 20.

There is my bias, disclosed.

When you are pregnant as a teenager, you are subjected to a certain amount of harsh treatment. This is deemed acceptable by society, apparently, because no one disagreed with family acquaintances calling me a slut and no one thought anything of the midwives at the hospital treating me badly. Nor did anyone listen to my complaints about the doctor who attended Amy’s delivery shouting at me, or the brusque treatment of the midwife in attendance, who provided no support, merely barking orders at me.

That kind of treatment is to be expected when you’re 17 and obviously too stupid to keep your legs closed.

The treatment from medical staff didn’t change once my daughter was delivered and I was chastised for feeding her too much, for attempting to breastfeed too often, for undressing her, and for co-sleeping and for not agreeing to midwife home visits for the first 6 weeks post-partum.

When Amy went on to scream and refuse to sleep for her first months, it was apparently because I was a teenager mother (or maybe because my milk wasn’t good enough – depending on who was asked), rather than certain ASD qualities and a preference for being awake.

I was made to feel stupid and lesser, by all but one professional I came into contact with. The exception being an older clinic nurse who had seen it all and seemed merely impressed that I had a supportive partner and breasts that lactated magnificently. A far cry from the later clinic nurse who we stopped seeing.

If you’re a teenager walking with your newborn baby through a supermarket, shopping isn’t all about the strangers cooing over your gorgeous baby. No, it’s about the sideways looks, the slight sneer and the almost palpable relief that people exhibited when they saw that I was with a partner.

My second pregnancy was fraught with similar issues. The only thing worse than being a teen mother, apparently, is being 19 and pregnant with your second baby.

No one cares about your backstory, or what you’re doing with your life, or your plans and goals – no, as a young woman, your entire worth is tied up in your reproductive system and what you’ve done with it.

And lest you think that I am alone in these observations, a quick conversation on Facebook showed that if anything, I was treated quite well, in the scheme of things.

Think about that for a minute.

People were telling me that midwives would refuse pain relief to teenage mothers, in order to “teach them a lesson” and prevent future pregnancies.

Stories of judgement, of being made to feel unfit, of terrible treatment – these are the stories that young parents bring to the table.

Isn’t that a spectacularly crappy way to start your parenting journey?

Frankly, it saddens me. Teenage parents are not any less capable than older parents. Parenting is a great levelling field, where ostensibly, everyone starts off on an equal footing. Young parents do not love their children any less fiercely, nor is their age a barrier to being a good parent.

Anyone can be a great parent. Age does not change that.

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Pinterest seems to be the new OMG HAVE YOU SEEN IT thing lately, which, okay, fine.

It took me a while to get into it and then only a few moments to forget about it again. This probably says more about how my brain works than any particular thing wrong with the premise of Pinterest. I’m not a designer home kind of girl and pretty things usually just make me grumpy that my house is falling down and my finances are limited at best.

Every few weeks though, I would click through to Pinterest to see what was happening in the gardening and food sections. Gardens and food are something I can do and there were some nice ideas.

Ignoring the fact that I seemed to see the same pictures pinned over and over and over and fucking over again, I was able to peruse photos of walkways and overgrown vegetation and delicious foody things.

Until, one day, I found something that looked interesting. So I clicked on it, to find it’s source, so that I could read more about it.

Source: Google.com

Huh. Just one image, snagged by a Pinterester, using Google image search. There was no accreditation for the original photographer, and nothing available to tell me what on earth it actually was, or how to cook it.

Slowly as I found myself clicking on more and more things, I was finding more and more images grabbed from Google, with nothing about the original author.

And okay, I get that kittens or fuzzy bunnies or whatever maybe don’t technically NEED a source, recipes.

Artwork, crafts and awesome ideas however, definitely DO.

It’s like a giant game of Chinese Whispers, once things have been pinned half a dozen times, no one knows what it was originally about.

I am a big believer in not watermarking images, instead choosing to resize to “Internet friendly, but you can’t print it out”. I think watermarks distract from a photo and make things look messy.

But Pinterest makes me want to start watermarking things. It also makes me want to put a giant padlock on my site and disallow third party search engines from collecting images that Pinteresters could then pin, with no thoughts of accreditation.

Also, I think Pinterest enables people to use images in blog posts and then only give source credit to Pinterest. I’m sorry, but “found on Pinterest” is not source credit.

NO, NO IT ISN’T.

I’m calling you out Pinterest. I think you’re damaging for artists, for craftspeople, for food bloggers, for photographers and for people with interesting ideas that they kindly share with the Internet.

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