Education does not float in a void: this chapter illustrates the clear leaning in the current context of Aotearoa New Zealand for particular, stubborn discourses that translate the legal right to education in particular ways.
As a teenage parent, I remain struck by the persistence of the connec-tion between aborconnec-tion, provision for teenage parents in Aotearoa New Zealand and anticipated criminality. This occurs not only through particu-lar forms of research (see SmithBattle in this collection) but also through legislature. In Aotearoa New Zealand, provision of abortion is legislated by way of the Crimes Act 1961;14 at the same time, initial provision for teenage parents as students was funded by way of initiatives aim to decrease crimi-nality (see Hindin-Miller in this collection). As I write this chapter, and survey other chapters, this assemblage of teenage parent–child of teenage parent– criminal –intervention feels much like that other ‘feeling’, that of being ‘a problem’ (Luttrell 2003). I recognize and celebrate that funding, of some kind, has been made available from respective governments to ensure the young people who also happen to be parents can access edu-cational provision that acknowledges their particular needs. All students are entitled to this recognition of and accommodation of their particular needs – be they gifted, living with a disability, parenting, or something else again. Yet teenage parents, as Pillow (2015) notes, remain ‘caught’ between discursive demands: to be a good parent and bond with their child, to be a good student with sustained attendance and to perform results, to be a productive consumer whilst completing their education, to be a good citizen and pay their own way, to be a good member of their community, notwithstanding that its norms around childbearing and rearing may be hopelessly in tension with current policy discourses.
In this chapter I have touched – and felt – a number of educational contexts which have been touched – felt by – me in the course of my own educational journey. Te Kura – the Correspondence School – and its teach-ers: my experience with Mrs Barton’s letters tucked inside my sets of work
14 That the forty-year-old abortion law remains within the Crimes Act is intensely problematic for many New Zealand citizens. Yet it is one that then Conservative Prime Minister – Hon Bill English – had ‘no interest in rectifying’. Given this, the complex stories of the more than 13,000 women per year who terminate pregnancies are often ‘hidden’. For example, the story of A Mother (<https://thespinoff.co.nz/
parenting/13-03-2017/to-the-staff-of-wellington-hospitals-te-mahoe-clinic-this-is-what-you-did-for-me-when-you-gave-me-an-abortion/>).
exemplified the stance called for by Luttrell (2003: 176) – a stance of inter-est and curiosity rather than discipline and punishment in regard to the education, health and well-being of both me and of my infant daughter.
Many years later, as I commenced my doctoral journey, the opportunity to engage with the Young Parents Access Project in Corio was something of an encounter with myself, a finding of myself in the literature concerning the apparently inevitable trajectories of teenage parents, a witnessing of schools that would not accept the inevitability of that narrative (Kamp and Kelly 2014). More recently, in visiting Karanga Mai – the Teen Parents Unit just north of Christchurch15 – I talk with young parents who are beginning their own journeys of learning. My host introduces me to the students, ‘this is Annelies; she is a teenage parent too’. We talk about their aspirations, for themselves, for their study and their children. We visit the children, play-ing in the childcare centre that is co-located with the TPU. I imagine what it might have been like if I had completed my education in such company rather than alone at my parents’ dining room table. I don’t know that it would have been better for me; for me, solitude within the care of my family worked. And yet, the ‘how’ of continuing one’s education really doesn’t matter; what matters is that a trajectory of learning is taken, one that allows access to high-quality, supportive education that meets the changing needs of a given student-parent-child multiplicity as they journey through life.
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15 The story of the genesis of Karanga Mai is the focus of Chapter 11 of this collection.
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3 What’s Happening to My Body?: The Growing, Glowing and Grotesque Teenage Belly
abstract
As I write, I am thirty-seven years old and pregnant with my third child. I have taken the
‘right’ girl path – degree, PhD, career, marriage and babies. My path professes the victories of post-feminism and neoliberalism. It also screams of the mainstreaming of social ideals for women. My path is virtuous only because I suppressed, ignored and optimized my own fertility at the appropriate moments. For women of my age our bodies often become time bombs we frantically race against. Just as the mother under twenty is thought to be foolish, the mother over forty is frequently thought to be selfish.
My personal pregnancy journey will demarcate this chapter. I will use my story of pregnant embodiment to explore and question the possible experiences of teen mothers. I will discuss the corporeal assemblage of mother and baby during pregnancy to problematize how this might be experienced for teenage girls whose bodies are merely evolving to matu-rity. The physical expansion of the body during maternity undoubtedly presents challenges for all women, but this must be particularly acute for teenagers living in Western contexts obsessed with healthful slenderness.
Equally, the bulging belly implies a symbolic weight as much as a physical one, loudly proclaiming ‘the sexually active girl’. Teen mothers make unique decisions around ‘corporeal generosity’ (Diprose 2002; Hird 2007) where they negotiate giving to their growing babies while also giving to their own developmental and aesthetic needs as teenagers. Although research and policy have focused on controlling the behaviour of the teenage girls’
body, they have remained silent about the changes and needs of the female body (Pillow 1997). In this chapter I question how a teen mother might negotiate the space that is her own body when presented with the unpre-dictable corporeal challenges of maternity, combined with the normal
maturation of the body during puberty. At moments, I will reference the Irish context I am writing from, but much of the discussion is applicable to other Western contexts and beyond.