‘What was she thinking?’ is the question most parents ask when they find out that their daughter has done something against all the knowledge and values they believed they had instilled in their children. Gardy Chacha poses this question to teenage mothers.
The first time we met Susan, mid last year, she was four months pregnant at a seminar for young mothers organized by White Ribbon Alliance (WRA) Kenya. Being 16 and pregnant, she said, was not something she ever imagined. “It is not how I imagined my life.” Susan had been contemplating an abortion. She however received counseling at the meetings and calmed downed.
It has been seven months since that first meeting. Susan is now a mother to a daughter. At 17, she is not considered an adult in law so she cannot legally hold a job to fend for her daughter. The Kenya Demographics Health Survey (KDHS) of 2014 shows one in four women aged 25-49 gave birth the first time by age 18. That proportion bulges to one in two women by age 20. So Susan is not exactly alone.
Clearly, parents — as well as young people, have their work cut out as everyone works towards ensuring their teenage daughter never becomes a statistic. The right place to start would be to understand the mind of a teenage girl in the weeks, months and years before pregnancy. We sought the help of two teenage girls to do this.
1. Peer pressure
The first time Susan knew about sex, she was 13. Her Science teacher may have mentioned something before that about sex but it never quite registered in her mind. “The first time I knew what sex was, I was actually doing it,” she says. “I was friends with four girls who introduced me to a boy.” The four girls were all Class 8 dropouts. Two were teenage mothers themselves while the other two had sex with reckless abandon. Susan recalls her desire revolving around the four girls. Everything from their sense of fashion and lifestyle pulled her in.
2. If my parents don’t want to listen to me…
Doreen, 18, lives in a typical middle-class neighbourhood in Kitengela. Growing up, she says, there is nothing (of material value) that she really lacked. What she didn’t have was a thriving relationship with her parents. “Both mom and dad are work people. They were never around. And I was in boarding schools. I really didn’t have friends or anyone to talk to.” And so when a seemingly handsome boy made a move, Doreen fell head over heels for him.
“The feeling of a warm embrace was what I needed. Someone to listen to me; to complement me; to tell me that I was beautiful and valuable beyond anything imaginable,” Doreen recalls. Then she fell pregnant. And that was the first time her mother spent close to a day with her: “asking why I did what I did; how I could have gone too far without telling her,” Doreen says. But that ship had sailed. “I wish she had given me that much attention as I grew up; not after getting pregnant.”
3. Travails of life
The first time Grace Muthoni fell pregnant, she was 16. “I thought he was a good man; a man who had money and who could take care of me,” Grace, now 20, says. Grace had lost her parents when she was a toddler. Her grandmother took her in and they lived in Kariobangi – just off Outering Road in Nairobi. She sat her KCPE examinations in 2009. But she couldn’t progress with education as fee was not forthcoming.
“We were poor. I was at home, doing nothing with my life,” Grace says. Girls her age dressed fancily and looked stunning in make-up. “I wanted to look like them. I wanted to be womanly like them.” She needed money to buy clothes and make-up: things her grandmother was too poor to provide. “Why not get a man who can take care of my needs?” she debated in her mind.
When a rich suitor showed up, Grace was ready to move in with him and start a new life. Only that the new life ended immediately she fell pregnant.
4. Emotional rollercoaster
There were days that Susan was a bundle of emotions. “These were the days when I wanted my mother to be more welcoming,” she says. “I wanted her to listen to me and find out how I was doing.” As for her father, she never even hoped for a conversation because he had always been a man of few words. “He only spoke through action: like when he would cane me for punishment,” Susan recalls.
Instead of getting a listening ear from her mother, Susan was met with a wall of stoic questions: “Who are those girls you spend time with? Where have you been and with who?” “I wanted her to sometimes welcome my friends and even talk to them and find out why I was friends with them,” she says. The emotional baggage stemming from unresolved previous emotional turmoil eventually made her stop caring about ‘what mom thought’.
5. Money, wealth and resources
Tabitha Mutheu got pregnant at 16. She was in Form 3. “If you had a 16-year-old daughter, what would you do to prevent her from falling pregnant?” we ask her. She says: “I would never bring her up in Kariobangi.” The manner in which she responds; amid spasms of raw emotion; and her voice breaks, is evidence of raw wounds that have never quite healed. According to Tabitha, growing up in a low-class society predisposes a girl first hand to teenage sex.
Tabitha, like Grace, grew up in Kariobangi. Apart from the that she was raised by a single mother and not her grandmother, just about everything else about their lives match. “I was in high school courtesy of a scholarship. When school opened, girls showed up with expensive clothes and had everything a girl needs. I on the other hand had nothing. I desperately wanted to have the good things the other girls had.” Tabitha became receptive to advances from a man who showered her with money and gifts. But when she fell pregnant, the man vanished into thin air, never to be seen again.
Tabitha believes that had she been able to have what other girls had, perhaps she wouldn’t be so willing to go into a sexual relationship.
6 . Parents don’t want to address sex
In African societies, sex has for a long time been a taboo subject. Susan, Doreen and Tabitha say their parents never quite broached the subject of sex and sexual desire.
“Like I said, I found out what sex was through having sex,” Susan says. Tabitha’s mother, on the other hand, addressed the subject in ‘parables’ and ‘proverbs’. “It was not direct neither was it really informative. Plus the air around the subject was such that we couldn’t talk about it freely,” Tabitha says. But like all of them learnt sooner or later, a girl will find out what sex is: whether through the right or the wrong channels. The secrecy around sex, Tabitha says, just makes a teenager more curious to find out more about it – by engaging in intercourse themselves.