“In What Stumbling Ways a New Soul is Begun”

It is almost like a mantra for me: going off to college is where you can take your first baby steps as an adult – you can move out of your parent’s house and move into a university dorm, you can take harder “more adult” college classes, you can fall-in-love and fall-out-of love – meet new people who broaden your understanding, discover new cities away from where you grew up, see experimental French movies at the student union on Friday night, and come to understand better the wider world beyond your childhood.

It is an exciting time of life, when it all seems to lie ahead of a person just starting out –

– and who hopefully hasn’t made any major mistakes yet.

Now let me be clear: moving to new places away from your parent’s house and falling-in-love and falling-out-of-love – these are not the least important developments in this stage of life. In fact, they are absolutely crucial for a person’s development into a successful mature adult, in my opinion. It was totally that way for me. There was a lot at stake. Things could have gone one way or the other.

We are talking about young adults approximately aged 18 to 25. This is an important and delicate time of exploration and growth.

And sometimes young people get pregnant during this time, or even earlier.

This is far from ideal. It is not hyperbole to say it can be a disaster. But it happens all the time.

A 20-year old might be in prime physical shape to get pregnant or to impregnate, but a young person at that age is still far from a fully-grown adult. They are almost always unable to make a long-term commitment to a mate or offspring. Getting pregnant at this age almost ruins your life, or at least shrinks your life possibilities. When you become a parent as a teen, you are forced to grow up immediately. Opportunities for travel and education become difficult, if not impossible, at least for a decade or two. It especially affects the pregnant woman, as plenty of men in such a situation just walk away. If the mom is unwilling to get an abortion or give the baby up for adoption – and if she unwilling to just walk away from her responsibilities to her baby – then her life will be profoundly changed. But the man will most likely not escape this scene unscathed.

Let me explain this in a few examples.

In the past two months I have read two books about professional fighters. Both were ambitious young men with powerful physics who loved and earned success in the testosterone-drenched world of professional fighters: Rickson Gracie and Tim Kennedy. Both also got their young girlfriends pregnant without being married or wanting to become parents; essentially, it happened on accident, as is often the case. It blows my mind but the Guttmacher Institute claims that some 50% of all pregnancies in America are unplanned. In an era with cheap, effective, and readily available birth control, this is just the result of ignorance and irresponsibility. People are dumb.

Rickson Gracie got his Brazilian girlfriend Kim pregnant back in 1981 when he was 21-years old and she was 19. They were in a committed relationship at the time, but they were also in many ways still growing up themselves. The relationship survived the birth of their son, but it was strained by it. Taking care of an infant is a major responsibility, and young people might want to do other things on a Saturday night than change diapers and feed a crying baby at home. They might want to go dancing, or attend a party with friends. Instead they are at home with a baby. Yes, there is a severe opportunity cost to becoming a parent at 20-years of age. Rickson and his girlfriend struggled under the responsibilities of being young parents. They didn’t know what they were doing, in essence, and tried to figure it out on the fly. The results were decidedly mixed.

Did Rickson really want to be a dad at that age? No. Did he want to be married? Well, he loved his children, but he was young and unsettled. But he stayed with his girlfriend Kim even after they really should have broken up, which would be normal for people at that age, and Rickson went on to have several other children with her. Rickson paid for all the costs of the household – an expensive house in Pacific Palisades, flashy new automobiles, and expensive Los Angeles private schools for his four kids. Rickson lived this life until his youngest child turned 18 – and then he divorced his wife, left her everything, moved back to Brazil, and finally lived the way he himself wanted to live. Rickson had done his duty to his family. He was 42 when he freed himself from his wife, and he had been living with her for the sake of the kids since he was 22. 

That is twenty years. I am sure Rickson does not regret his children. But how he got into it, and how he spent so many years with Kim? Dunno.

It did not have to be this way. Maybe Rickson could have lived the way he wanted to live his whole life? He could have waited to become a father, husband, and provider until he was good and ready to assume those roles? Maybe he should have thought through using more birth control back with Kim back in 1981? Maybe he should have more and carefully lived his life and pursued his plan? Became a father – or not – exactly when we wanted to do it, which was probably not as a 22-year old man-boy in Rio de Janeiro surfing the nearby waves and ascending the world rankings in the competitive jiu jitsu world.

The same thing, more or less, happened to UFC fighter and Green Beret Tim Kennedy. The virtues of being a professional fighter – courage and audacity, strength and fitness, aggressiveness and confidence – well, these usually come combined with intertwined vices – recklessness and cockiness, more brawn than brains. So what does this mean to Tim Kennedy? Well, he was in love with his girlfriend but arguing with her at the age of 22; Tim was a man-boy struggling to find his way in the world, to grow up and to know himself. So Tim breaks up with this girlfriend and has a rebound fling with another girl, and in the process he ends up getting both of them pregnant around the same time. Neither of these young women were thrilled about this situation, to put it mildly, and Tim is not in any condition to marry or raise babies with either or both of them. So what does Tim do? He joins the U.S. Army and becomes a Green Beret. He sees combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and is gone for five years. The bottom line: these women raised the babies without him. 

Tim Kennedy has daughters born to two different women who are born almost on the same day, He is not a part of their lives. Little girls without a daddy – that often spells trouble, in the form of women with “daddy issues.” It would not be their fault. It would be the fault of the parents, especially Tim. This is not an ideal situation – especially for Kennedy’s daughters. Their father is pretty much a stranger to them, alas. It is all messy.

So after years in the army and serving in combat overseas, Tim Kennedy returns to civilian life a fully grown up adult. He is a decorated Special Forces operator and a successful UFC fighter. Tim eventually has children with another woman in which he does participate fully in their upbringing – the way it should be done, when he is fully grown up and married. Maybe he should not have got these two previous women pregnant in the space of a few weeks when he was 22? Maybe Tim should have better controlled the dispersal of his sperm? Become a father when he was ready and willing? Birth control? Heard of it, Tim?

I know, I know. You are asking for a measure of maturity and foresight from young people who often simply don’t have it (yet) – young men especially, much more so than young women. Be real.

But I am being real. Another mantra I repeat to my own daughters and students: Any fool can get a girl with child – it is something a barnyard animal can accomplish – but it takes a real man to be a father – to raise a baby into childhood and through adolescence and eventually to adulthood – to be present for the good, the bad, and the ugly of childrearing. Parenting is no small task. It leaves marks; there will be sacrifices. That is reality.

Back in 2007 my wife and I took a tour of the Community Memorial Hospital Labor and Delivery Room. My wife was just about nine months pregnant and was big as a house. We sat there at an orientation for soon-to-be parents just before delivery. At the end of the presentation we got up and walked around the ward and heard women screaming in pain from inside the delivery rooms. I noticed behind me a girl who was as pregnant as my wife (ie. big as a house) but must have been no more than fifteen years old. I was horrified. Was she taking this tour with the kid who knocked her up? Would he be next to her holding her thigh as she pushed the baby’s head out her vagina? Would he be encouraging his partner to “push! push!” while wiping sweat from her brow with a washcloth, as I was doing in that same place almost a week later? Nope. Who was this girl with? Her mom. How do I know? I could hear them talking in Spanish. They were “mamá” and “m’hija.” It was a shit show.

Right then and there I decided that my daughter would take this tour of the labor and delivery room when she turned fifteen. She would hear the women screaming in pain in the background, and come to understand that sexual intercourse was an adult activity which could lead her here to this labor and delivery ward. I would walk with her during this tour, or her mother would. This would be part of the education of my daughters, and I would see to it. They say babysitting is an effective form of birth control for teenage girls, as they recognize they want nothing to do with full-time parenting anytime soon in watching kids for a few hours for pay. The same would be true for watching a baby be born, amidst so much pain, sweat, mucous, and blood. If a person is old enough to have sex and become a parent, they are old enough to see the consequences. That is how I see it.

But alas the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. and I have not been able to get past “disease mitigation measures” to get my daughter a tour 15-years after her birth. I even had a tennis buddy who is a neighbor of a senior manager at CMH, and he asked her to set up a tour for me and my daughter. But no-go. There would not allow anyone extraneous near the labor and delivery ward. I am still working on it. We shall see. The hospital does have an online tour, but it is not the same without hearing the live voices of women screaming in agony in the background, in my opinion. 

Not that I was above possibly getting a woman pregnant by mistake in my youth. It happened to one of my college friends who with the girl secured an abortion. (What a miserable mess.) I knew it could happen to me. But of all things I was terrified of approaching my father and having to tell him I got some girl pregnant by mistake and now I’m going to have to do a, b, and c. The look of disappointment in my father’s face man-to-man would have destroyed me. I never wanted to have that scene. And I never did. I never got a woman pregnant until I was 38-years old. My wife got pregnant almost immediately after we tried. I wanted to be a father. I was married. We owned a house (well, a condo townhouse). I was well settled into my career. I was ready. I became a father. My life was never the same. Becoming a parent meant powerful payoffs and steep costs. I was willing and able to pay those costs. I still am.

But I shrink in horror to think about what kind of father I would have been at 19 or 22-years of age, not to mention what kind of husband I would have been. I suspect I would have risen to the occasion, for the sake of my offspring, and tried mightily, because I would have had to, but still…. foreboding fills me as I contemplate it. I suspect it would not have been pretty.

I reflect on this occasionally. I reason with myself that there are far worse things a person can do than bring a baby into this world by mistake. You can kill a person with malice aforethought and without need, for example. Yet the world is full of unwanted babies being raised by unprepared parents who do a poor job. Too often it is the woman doing the heavy lifting alone. It is such a huge responsibility to bring a life into this world! It boggles the mind. Who would screw this up? So I thought then and still think now.

As a young man I never lost sight of the fact that engaging in the sexual act could result in pregnancy. In all my days as a unmarried man in the dating pool – which lasted some sixteen years with many lovers – I never ejaculated inside a woman who was not on the pill. I always took reasonable measures. Even in the midst of sexual ecstasy, I kept in mind what was at stake. I guess a “wonder sperm” could have defeated all planned precautions, but my partners and I were pretty careful. There was a lot of sperm on a partner’s stomach or back. There were condoms and other accouterments. A small army of birth control pills. There never were any pregnancies, thank God. Maybe there was an element of luck involved. Who can say?

After I had as many children as I wanted, I happily got a vasectomy. I was 43-years of age. I was careful at the beginning and the end. I don’t mind at all shooting blanks, so to speak. It is wonderful, in fact. What a relief!

I might not have had the physical courage or burning audacity of fighters like Rickson Gracie or Tim Kennedy, but I was more cognizant of the dangers life affords – the pitfalls one might suffer, if one is not careful. I was cautious, and still am. It is both a weakness and a strength for me.

I have talked with a few man-boys who have gotten their partners pregnant while still teenagers, and I ask them what happened. “Did you ejaculate inside her?” Yes, he replies invariably. What were you thinking, I wonder. I suspect he wasn’t thinking at all, and probably neither was she. They were just feeling, letting go, and doing the deed. Or maybe they were so immature in their communication skills that neither felt able to bring up the awkward topic of birth control, and so they used none? Who knows. But let me be clear: I do not begrudge Rickson Gracie, Tim Kennedy, or their partners their sexual freedom. To indulge and explore one’s sexuality is a natural and healthy development, and youth is the time to drink deeply from the well of intense romantic physical and emotional pleasure. I feel sorry for those who never or rarely do. But still, be careful. Think what could happen. If you are careless, there could be serious trouble. The results could be dire: unwanted pregnancy. And afterwards? The deed was done; the risks went unheeded. It might just be dumb reckless ignorance between two individuals who were not ready to become parents, and didn’t want to become pregnant. But still, how many women become pregnant in this way? 

It is maddening. A life is created. “In what stumbling ways a new soul is begun,” the poet John Keats prettily put it. As commonplace as it might be, it still is painful to witness –

The physical process is much the same whether a married couple seeks to have his sperm fertilize her egg, or whether two dumb kids are screwing in the back of their parent’s car, or even if there is a rape. Intended or not, there it is: pregnancy. It is a fact. 

We humans have been getting pregnant for a long time. Much the same is true about our species and dying: we have been doing it for a long time. They are commonplace human occurrences. But to do pregnancy (and parenting) and to die (and the process of dying) well are not so easy to do. But we should try consciously to do them as best we can.

It is like I joked with my nephew years ago at a Thanksgiving Dinner when he was 17-years old: one day he probably will join the club of non-virgins. It is a large club. It is not hard to join. Almost all adults you will encounter are members of this non-exclusive club, and to join is not congratulating yourself about. Mature adults don’t brag about it. Because to lose your virginity by itself is not so important, in my opinion. But how and under what circumstances you lose your virginity… well, that is important. It’s enormously important. Learning to express affection and to be a lover in a romantic relationship is important. It is a crucial part of growing up under this general category: happy mature adults who know how to navigate sexual love and romantic intimacy, and to satisfy their emotional and physical needs in a mutually satisfactory manner. If a person never learns this, they are in trouble. Even if they do learn it, trouble might never be far away.

So here it is: hopefully my nephew will never join the club of unhappy teenage parents. And hopefully neither will he still be a virgin at the age of 25. There is a lot of growing up to be done during those delicate important years.

What will a person require to grow up healthily and happily in all this? To avoid mistakes which could come back to haunt a person for decades, or even an entire lifetime? Knowledge of human biology, education around birth control, meeting the right person at the right time, respect and affection for partner(s), common sense and a functioning libido, patience and tact, strong communication skills… and perhaps a good dose of good luck.

We could all use some good luck.

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All’s Well That Ends Well?