When I was 17, I got Genie pregnant. I was lucky. I loved Genie and eventually she loved me. Anyway she acts as if she does, and what else is there to go on? We married. And our families helped. They needed to. It was a financial struggle and dauntingly steep learning curve. Thankfully, our immaturity was balanced by passion and my wife's ability to forgive. That was 37 years ago.
Pat-yourself-on-the-back hindsight is obnoxious. But please indulge my gloating. It's directed at those who said we made a terrible mistake. We're still married, still in love, still forgiving and being forgiven. As for the rest, it has been remarkably crazy.
I know there are huge drawbacks to marrying very young, let alone impregnating teenage girlfriends. I have a daughter and two sons and they grew up on our stories about how they should not do what we did. My daughter waited till the ripe age of 20 to marry, dropped out of NYU and had her first child at 22.
Some of her friends thought that she started having children "too young." But what did they mean? Biologically speaking, women in their young 20s are at an ideal age to conceive and have a healthy child. And now she has two children in school, looks as if she's about 18, and is getting two master's degrees from the University of Finland. There are plenty of ways to live well and plenty of people ready to frown on young child-bearing, even on young love.
Take the condom-clutching educators eager to explain -- for the millionth time -- the dangers of everything, especially unprotected sex. There are also the legions of the pious spreading the word on "abstinence," as if sex should be treated like a suspicious package discovered at an airport. Then there is the corporate world, with its materialistic gospel of career-is-everything; aided and abetted by over-priced colleges---that have made an art of blackmailing young people into thinking they will face certain ruin unless they spend a fortune on school. The schools have have a vested interest in making sure everyone waits for just about everything in life, except running up school debt while working for the modern equivalent of the company store.
The worriers and fretters frowning on taking young love "too seriously" can be wrong. Sometimes the results are middle-aged adults looking so very tired while pushing a stroller. And they are the lucky ones compared to the men and women who listened to contemporary wisdom about the impossibility of young love, who worked on careers instead and now search the personals looking for someone, anyone to be loved by.
For a society that pays lip-service to all things organic and natural, have we ignored nature's message about the right time to have children, maybe even the right time to fall in love? Maybe the most important parts of life can't be planned. I think life is more like a Jackson Pollock drip painting than a photograph.
When an art critic was telling Pollock that his abstract expressionism was straying too far from nature, Pollock retorted, "I am nature!" He had a point. The weird habit of trying to live as if our choices trump nature gets silly when carried to extremes. "Sensible planning" sometimes isn't sensible. Many of my friends will not live to see their grandchildren. They are belatedly discovering parenthood at 40, even 50, and have in effect planned themselves out of the most basic human experience: the continuity of life.
When I'm out shopping with my 13-year-old granddaughter and someone asks me if she's my daughter, and I tell them she's my granddaughter, I enjoy the incredulous looks I get. Have I been taking some sort of miracle vitamin, maybe drinking seventy glasses of red wine a day? No, I'm just the age most grandfathers were before life, love, sex and childbearing were separated into watertight compartments by dogmatic materialistic ideologues and self-interested parties who deny our natural life-cycle.
My granddaughter is nature too! So am I! And I'm having a lot of fun watching her try on shoes. It makes the tears of youthful parenting all those years ago worth it. Better yet, when I play softball with my 10-year-old grandson Ben, or watch him play his bongo drums in Central Park, I rejoice. And now that my children are grown, my wife and I are catching up on time alone together and we're young and healthy enough to enjoy ourselves, in other words revel in lots of friendly familiar sex and friendship.
Does this sound smug and self-satisfied? I'm sorry. But the point isn't that my life worked out. Of course there is a dark side to my life too. The point is that the one-size-fits-all-"wisdom" of your average parent and high school/college counselor is often bullshit.
I'm not hoping my grandchildren start having babies any time soon, but I am hoping they get better advice than to wait to embrace real life while concentrating on careers and money that in themselves have little value unless they help build a life where joy is the reason. And I hope they listen to their hearts when life happens.