The 1960s, “The Girls Who Went Away”, and me. 2

Continued from the previous post …

By 1968, the small Northern California town where I lived had seen enough pregnant teens that parents had given up all pretense and stopped sending their daughters away.

The high school still kicked us out as soon as the administration learned of our condition, but we had the right to join the other losers in the small portable building in the parking lot that served as Continuation School.

For a kid who’d been an active participant in high school … I wrote for the school newspaper, served on the Student Council, appeared in school plays, and so on … and who earned good grades through hard work and brain power … Continuation School was not only a step down, it was the same as being shown the door out. I attended for a short while, then decided my time was better spent at home reading good books and therefore working my brain a bit.

Unlike many of the girls in Fessler’s book, my friends and I weren’t hidden away. The neighbors knew without a doubt what the deal was and just how slutty we had been, but no one much cared.

My best friend, V, was one month further along than I was and had been impregnated by my boyfriend’s best friend. She was the third girl … that we knew of … to carry a child for this nineteen-year-old Lothario. His most recent child had been born a few months before and the mother had chosen to parent. We knew her, of course, and saw her with her baby around town. (The other child had been relinquished, and that girl had moved away.)

V’s mother took the news of the pregnancy with resignation. Her older daughter, V’s big sister, had also been a pregnant teen and still lived at home with her three-year-old, so V’s condition seemed almost predestined.

Another good friend was pregnant by her boyfriend, a recently returned Vietnam vet, and a wedding was in the works for them even though her mother made no effort to hide the fact that she detested the young man and thought him far below her daughter in social status and brainpower.

My mother had been polite enough to my boyfriend, but she was far from impressed. He was cute, that was certain, but didn’t have much going for him in the ambition or future departments. As far as boyfriends went, I think she figured he was about par given the pickings in the little town, but had hopes I’d outgrow him when I went off to college.

That, of course, didn’t happen.

Continued …

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