16 and Pregnant: The New Batch
Just when we think we're out, MTV pulls us back in. Hot on the heels of the Teen Mom finale, we are blessed with our own little bundle of joy: a new season of 16 and Pregnant. Baby mama drama!
The first victim mother to be featured is Janelle. Janelle, like every suburban 16-year-old, just wants to be a teenager and do irresponsible things without thinking of consequences, like going to sock-hops with her friends, boogey-boarding, and looking wistfully out to the horizon, wondering what her future holds for her. And also having awesome make-up sex with her boyfriend without any form of birth control.
Well that last thing kind of answers the question for what the future holds for her, because Janelle is pregnant as hell. She also tried to hide it from her mother for three months, to no avail. How did her mom find out? It's either her amazing maternal instincts, or the fact that Janelle had a giant bump on her stomach due to having a living being inside of her. A mother knows! So instead of going to her sock hops and doing the mashed potato all summer, she'll be decorating her unborn child's room. Same diff. However, Janelle's a determined young girl, and she refuses to let this baby inhibit the time she spends partying.
The only thing that is keeping Janelle from surfing is her stomach! My goodness this girl has to get her priorities straight. Speaking of priorities, Janelle's boyfriend, Andrew, needs to take his head out of his ass. He's just your run-of-the-mill former model who had two (surely fabulous) apartments in New York. And somehow he ended up back in suburban North Carolina with no job, getting rejected from McDonalds because he's "overqualified." Overqualified? Am I missing something? Is being a hunky downtown New York model grounds for overqualification from operating a deep fryer? Because I didn't know former models were overqualified to do anything except snort cheap coke. Now he has a baby on the way and he basically can't be bothered to even pretend to care to be a part of its life, much to the chagrin of Janelle's mother. Because Janelle's mother can smell a future deadbeat dad from a mile away, and boy are her instincts right.
As an aside, why does EVERY. SINGLE. FATHER on teen pregnancy shows have a gigantic handlebar mustache? For all you guys out there, if you don't want your daughter to get preggers at the puerile age of 16, do not grow a handlebar mustache. It has an eerie butterfly effect.
So after that conversation, Andrew slinks back to his house (four hours away), and Janelle doesn't hear a peep from him until she goes into labor four weeks later—where she texts him from the hospital while in labor. These kids and their texting! Andrew decides to stumble up from his house to "be there" for his child's birth, only to meander dopily back to wherever it is he came from.
So Janelle has her burden bundle of joy in a 12 hour labor marathon, and it's cute and sweet and oh-so small! Except this baby just loooooves to poop itself and stay up all night crying. You know what motherhood is like to Janelle? Motherhood is like fucking prison. Where the baby is that mean security guard that beats you for making a shiv out of a toothbrush, your room is solitary confinement, and your mother is the mean warden. Wait, what?!?!
You know what else is like prison? PRISON! Andrew gets a DUI, goes to jail, gets out, calls up Janelle DRUNK the same day he gets out of jail, thus ending his and Janelle's relationship—forcing Janelle to raise the baby as a single parent (with the the help of her mother). A lot of help from her mother.
Where the struggle for being a teen and being a mother continues, with Janelle wanting to go out and be a regular kid, and Janelle's mother demanding she care for her baby. This will always be present throughout these shows, as the innate instinct to be a kid will usually outweigh the demands of motherhood. Beer bongs are fun! Breast feeding is not! It's not rocket science.
In the end, though, as is always the case, Janelle realizes sacrifices must be made, and she will be there for the baby as much as she can. And even though we know that this isn't the case (Farrah from Teen Mom, anyone?), wouldn't it be pretty to think so?