Young, gifted and pregnant

When Bee Lavender had a child at 18 she went from 'good kid' and scholarship student to being shunned as 'human detritus'. But this teenage mother would not put up with that ...

One cold, clear night in the spring of 1990 I let myself into my parents' home, quietly walked through the house without turning on the lights, and taped a note to the bathroom window. It read: "I'm pregnant. I'm sorry."

I was 18, and the first person in my American, working-class family to attend university. That alone had been an almost impossible struggle, in part because I grew up in a place that did not value education. Girls like me did not break away from my hometown, but I had departed with four substantial merit scholarships.

More importantly, I had survived cancer by a narrow margin, and my health was precarious. Having a child was a disastrous choice in every possible way.

There was a predictable, defined way for me to succeed in life and make my parents proud. I knew that I was supposed to study, complete my degree, and get a job in government. Pregnancy had no place in this plan.

Having a baby was not consistent with continuing my schooling, and I asked a professor for advice. She frowned at me over her bifocals and said, "Becoming a mother at your age is anti-feminist. You have no place here."

I went to the student support centre to talk about a plan to stay in school and the adviser offered what would turn out to be the standard perspective that would follow me the rest of my adult life: "Drop out. Go home."

Leaving school meant forfeiting all of my scholarships, and everything I'd worked toward my whole life. It meant admitting defeat, and accepting the judgment of others that I was a failure.

When I left that note on my parents' bathroom mirror I was convinced that I had thrown away my future.

I dropped out of school and moved back home.

In some ways I was more mature than other people my age, but I operated with the fairly straightforward juvenile mix of fatalism and optimism common to my peers. It had taken extraordinary effort to be that exceptional poor kid with stunning academic achievements, and that is not something a docile person can pull off. I was defiant, oppositional, a rebel with a strong sense that nobody was the boss of me. A complicated pregnancy was something to manage and control, just like my education had been, and I threw myself into the process with the same attitude I had applied to studying history.

Doctors, interns and nurses looked at my long blond hair and round, innocent face, listened to my silly, childish voice and assumed they could tell me what to do. They were wrong.

The maternity clinic gave me my first taste of how the world would treat me from then on. People could appraise my status with one glance - too young, too poor, too strange.

I had private insurance but I was treated like a welfare patient, a critical distinction in American hospitals. Social workers were assigned to my case. Strangers asked intrusive questions about my sexuality.

It was a profound shock to go from being the good kid, the honours student, the girl who talked about youth leadership on television, to being perceived as human detritus.

During the hospital tour we were told that after giving birth we would be grouped in wards according to our preferred parenting style. For example, people who planned to breastfeed and keep the baby in the room would share. It was entirely predictable that after my own bloody and precipitous labour I would find myself rooming with two girls who were giving away their babies, and a crack addict who did not know the proper names for her own body parts.

When I left the hospital clutching the scrap of humanity that was, bewilderingly, my daughter, I had no clear expectations of what the future held. I figured I would sort it out along the way.

The first night I went out to a restaurant with my parents, a stranger approached to coo over the adorable infant and, when they realised that my mother was the grandmother and I was the parent, to recoil in visible disgust.

This would be a routine part of my daily life, something a friend summed up as the Nanny Syndrome. Strangers routinely assumed that the child in my care was a sister or a niece, or that I was babysitting. If they figured out otherwise they were swift and harsh in their judgment - obviously, I must be stupid at the very least to have had a child so young.

Every single public outing for the next six years involved some well-meaning or just plain rude adult doling out advice like "staying in high school is really important" (thanks - I was still hearing this years after I'd finished graduate school). Strangers routinely tried to interfere with my disciplinary efforts; toddlers are unruly at best and my own child was a fleet-footed wonder. The general public actively informed me that I was too strict or too lax; whichever, the comments were never about my actual behaviour but instead what I looked like: too young.

My daughter thrived - I even have proof. The maternity hospital enrolled us in a longitudinal drugs study as members of the control group. Experts periodically evaluated her growth and my parenting skills. We were analysed on an objective scale, and my child was in the top half a per cent for cognitive and physical development. They said that I had spectacular mothering skills and was clearly adept and comfortable making correct choices. It was too bad I couldn't carry their report around with me to offset the looks of passersby.

I wanted some kind of badge that would prove that I was worthy, a good parent. I cut off my hair, discarded my beloved wardrobe of vintage dresses and punk T-shirts. I bought respectable, boring clothes and new spectacles. The costume never really helped that much. Wearing the stuff I liked made people think I was about 14 years old, but the change didn't add more than a year or two to that visual impression. I just looked like a very young teenager with a really bad fashion aesthetic.

After my daughter was born it only took about a week before I realised that education was still the only way out of my hometown, and that becoming a parent just made me doubly responsible. I went back to school full-time when she was four weeks old, and finished my undergraduate degree in half the allotted time.

The trouble with this plan was the fact that I was neither a minor nor an adult but rather existed in a murky middle realm where social workers wanted to investigate my home life in exchange for an extremely limited amount of cash support that probably would not have allowed me to be a proper student anyway.

Instead I chose a hasty wedding, not for love, but cash - the young man in question was serving in the army and his pay doubled upon marriage. That pragmatic union protected me from the intrusion of social services. We did not live together, and the vague legal alliance lasted long after we'd misplaced each other's phone numbers.

Life on campus was not fun, nor did I expect it to be. Other kids were experiencing their first taste of adult freedom, going to rock shows, drinking, taking drugs, dating. I studied and looked after my daughter. One of my professors informed me that I was a writer, that reading my work was like walking barefoot across broken glass, that it would be a colossal mistake to study anything else. I glared at him and shrugged off the advice - I was a mother, I needed to be practical.

I picked a graduate programme based on the excellence of its daycare rather than a particular interest in the field of study, and marched off to my pre-parenting destiny of landing a stable career in government service.

Along the way I found that it did not matter if I looked respectable: the fact that I had a kid placed me outside of the social norms for my age.

When my daughter started school, all the other parents waiting to collect children at the end of the day were at least 15 years older than me, and even the nicest were condescending. Those who weren't polite just flat-out refused to accept my small family as equal to their own; my daughter was routinely denied play dates because the parents did not want to mix with me.

This phenomenon did not diminish with time, education or career success. It didn't change because I drove the right kind of car or owned my own house. I was 25 when I had a second child and dropped right back into the experience of talking to disdainful, overbearing strangers who informed me that I was "too young" to have my son. By then I would retort "Really? You should meet my seven-year-old," just to see their look of horror.

And if you are talking to a stranger who became a parent at 36, is it polite to ask them if the child they produced was an "accident"? Why is it more acceptable that people asked me that question all the time, and still do?

My observations about being a teen mother in the US match what I see happening here in the UK; the shame imposed by the culture at large is a common experience. Seven years ago, I realised that the one element missing from my early life was a group of peers, people making hard choices but moving forward. I started to create a safe space where young mothers could give each other support, advice and advocacy. The site is run by and for people who need the resource, and the achievements of individual members has been fantastically impressive.

In countries where contraception and abortion are widely available, teen pregnancy is not an "epidemic" but rather a statistically insignificant deviation from the overall trend of delaying childbirth. If you set aside the shocking, rare and illegal cases that make the news, the picture that emerges is optimistic.

Young mothers do face challenges. They are trying to grow up while raising children of their own and need to sort out education, careers and relationships. But they are also in peak physical form to deal with the gritty daily reality of the experience. Their bodies are naturally equipped to endure childbirth, they do not need as much sleep, they are more flexible in their attitudes toward all aspects of life.

In the UK and in the US there is a significant connection between poverty and teen pregnancy, but focusing on one at the expense of the other is backwards thinking. It makes much more sense to address childhood poverty at the roots than it does to criticise an 18-year-old with a baby on her hip - because any policy or societal attitude that penalises that young woman will hurt her child, and the cycle will never be broken.

One-size-fits-all social engineering will not work - why not try talking to that girl about what she really wants for her life? In my experience it is likely she will say something along the lines of "I want to go to law school but I don't have enough childcare." The specific goal will be different for each person, but it is certain that her dreams did not die when she went into labour.

How can we solve the problem of teen parenting? By recognising it is a choice, not a problem. Young women juggling family and career are no better or worse off than the mums who are more established and find that children introduce an unfathomable amount of chaos to their lives. Raising kids is hard work. We're all in the same situation, no matter how old we are or how much money we have in the bank.

I'm not advocating that teen parenting is ideal - it was a hard choice, and is not something I wish for my own children. But young mums have enough to worry about without being told they are failures. They're not - they are mothers and perfectly capable of making good choices for themselves and their families.

Nowadays I rarely hear much public criticism. I'm within the zone of propriety - I look old enough to have a 10-year-old son.

But every so often someone realises that the grown-up girl standing next to me is not my sister, but my child. Then the whole routine starts again.

· Lessons in Taxidermy: An Astonishing Tale of Sickness and Survival by Bee Lavender is published by Phoenix at £6.99.