Jen Bryant
Lessons
My son hunches over a math worksheet, brow furrowed in concentration. He solves an addition problem quickly, then reconsiders, doubling back. I watch as he erases carefully, then pencils a new answer over the gray smudge left behind. Pink eraser shavings dot the back of his small hand.
For the past few weeks, we’ve been doing our homework together on the back porch, taking advantage of a string of warm fall afternoons. I’m supposed to be working on my own paper, due tomorrow. Instead, I peer across the patio table at my son, waiting to see if he’ll remember to carry the one. He does.
At twenty-four, I’m the youngest parent in my son’s first-grade class and the oldest student in my Sociology 201 lecture. In college, I blend in until the bell rings, when the other students leave to play beer pong and I go home to wait for the school bus. At the elementary school, it’s harder to avoid detection. Last week at Back-to-School Night, the other mothers looked at me like I was something distasteful tracked in on the bottom of their shoes.
“Mind if I sit here?” I asked, gesturing to an empty plastic chair. My question was met with weighted silence. Their eyes slid over me before they turned away; there was a whispered murmur, then giggles. I stood at the back of the classroom instead, shifting uncomfortably in cheap flats. After the presentation, I put my name down on the volunteer sheet, then hurried past rows of shiny minivans to my beat-up Pontiac Sunbird.
This semester, we’re studying social problems. As I shift back to my own assignment, flipping through the index at the back of my textbook, a familiar phrase jumps out: teenage pregnancy.
It’s strange to see my experience neatly categorized as a societal ill, sandwiched between sexual violence and underage drinking, especially when my life feels so ordinary: homework, bike rides, bedtime stories. Tracing a finger across the words, I turn to page 273.
The textbook paints a dire picture – irresponsibility, promiscuity, immature mothers raising delinquent children. Less than 2 percent of teen moms earn a college degree by 30. Skimming the statistics, I wonder: Is this what my professors think about me?
Shortly after Back-to-School Night, my son asked if a classmate could come over for a playdate. “Tell him to have his mother call me,” I said, scribbling my number and a quick note onto a Post-it, “and we’ll set it up.” He slipped the paper into his backpack, practically vibrating with excitement. Weeks passed; his classmate’s mother never called.
Negative outcomes from teen childbearing also weigh on the child, the textbook warns. I steal a glance at my sweet boy and hope that the note he passed to his classmate was dropped on the bus or washed in a pants pocket, that the other child’s mother never took Sociology 201.
“Done!” my son announces, setting his pencil down with a satisfied smile. “Can I go play?”
I nod, and he takes the stairs two at a time down to the yard. His voice drifts up the stairs – “Cannonball!” – followed by the satisfying crunch of leaves.
One day, perhaps he’ll notice that I’m not like the other parents: too young, too poor, too uneducated. But for now, I’m not a social problem to be solved. I’m just his mom.
“Watch this!” he calls, cutting through my thoughts. Abandoning my studies, I close the textbook and join him.
Jen Bryant’s writing has appeared in The Sun, Ms., BUST, Hipmama, Matter News, Anodyne Mag, and elsewhere. She is an editor at MUTHA Magazine and a creative nonfiction reader for Mud Season Review. Originally from the South, she currently lives in the Midwest.