When Faith Rosetta looks back on her pregnancy, she feels (among other things) a certain self-aware sense of amusement - the pregnant girl isnt an archetype you expect to bump into in the dining hall. In fact, pregnancy is so far outside the realm of possibility for most Yalies that Rosetta says she often wasnt sure that her classmates even registered what was going on.
“What’s wrong with that girl?” she says, imagining their internal monologue. “She’s funny-shaped!” Because when average Yalies see a swollen belly, they don’t think, pregnant. They think, shit, time to lay off the sustainable beef burgers.
Having a baby is hard, and having a baby while in college is harder.
Having a baby while a student at an Ivy League college is not just hard
but also practically unheard of, which only makes it even more challenging
— schools don’t necessarily have mechanisms in place to accommodate
undergraduate parents and their needs. But, perhaps more
importantly, becoming a parent wholly derails the popular vision of
what college involves: being up all night studying one night and up
all night getting drunk the next, coasting on parental funds, and trying
to drum up career plans. The typical campus discussion of sex is
so far removed from its procreative function that it’s startling to see a
reminder, complete with fat feet and diapers.
So even when classmates do get what’s going on, they don’t necessarily
know what to make of parents in their midst. The standard reaction?
“Cartoon eyes and dropped jaws,” in the words of Fitz Shaw, a
junior at Columbia and the father of four-month-old Sawyer.
Of course, before his daughter was born, he would probably have
done the same thing. Rosetta has been dealing with parenthood for
over two years now; Shaw is just learning the ropes. Neither could
have predicted the path that their college careers would take.
In high school, Rosetta says, she was “a badass.” Or, rather: “I
thought I was.”
Until her junior year, she didn’t expect to go to college—she figured
she’d “drop out, have babies, and wait tables.” Her mother, who raised
her as a single parent, had been unable to finish college, and her father
had an eighth-grade education. College, Rosetta figured, was something
you only did if you had money.
In eleventh grade, though, the New Mexico native transferred to
the Native American Preparatory School. There, one of the first admissions
presentations her class received was from a Yale representative,
who spoke “so beautifully” and impressed Rosetta so thoroughly
that she immediately set her sights on the university. She applied, was
accepted, and decided to attend. She may have been a badass, but she
was also valedictorian.
After the initial culture shock of arriving on campus, Rosetta
thrived — settling in to Timothy Dwight, her residential college; making
friends; getting to know her dean. But following the tumultuous
autumn of her sophomore year (a friend’s death, followed in quick
succession by the death of her father) she decided to take some time
off from school. During her year off, she met a dancer named Eyje at
the Gathering of Nations, the country’s largest powwow: “We started
hanging out,” she said. “And never stopped.”
He was from the Syracuse region in New York, and the two eventually
made a cross-country road trip between their respective homes,
stopping along the way in Oklahoma City. Rosetta is pretty sure that
her daughter was conceived there, at the Red Earth Powwow.
When she realized she was pregnant, “everyone” told her to get
an abortion. Her family insisted that she finish her education; they
warned that her boyfriend wouldn’t provide for a child. Her mother
presented her with information on clinics and costs.
“But,” said Rosetta, “I was a badass.”
Of course, that’s a glib summary of her decision: the reality was
more complicated than adolescent rebellion. She describes her views
on abortion as “pro-choice — but pro-life for myself,” and says that
it was also important to her to take her boyfriend’s pro-life views into
account. And her mother supported her fully once she had made her
choice. So while many Ivy League students would have balked at adding
parenthood to their list of accomplishments, Rosetta took the path
less traveled. She decided to keep the baby.
Shaw’s parents met at Yale Divinity School. He spent his early years
in England, while his father earned his Ph.D. at Cambridge, and then
leapfrogged around the U.S. — Alabama, Colorado — before coming
to New York in 2005 to study painting at Columbia. He had met his
girlfriend, Zena, when they were both sixteen, and they gradually progressed
from friendship to dating to a long-distance relationship. She
went to Carnegie Mellon, and they visited each other as often as they
could — “We were together all the time,” he explained.
In November 2006, Shaw and his girlfriend found themselves in
the same situation that Rosetta had faced the year before. And, like
Rosetta, they made the unexpected decision.
Shaw says that he’s pro-choice, adding that his mother worked for
years with Planned Parenthood and is adamant about reproductive
rights. But, he points out, “choice” also entails the freedom to make
choices other than abortion. In the end, his girlfriend “couldn’t bring
herself emotionally” to end the pregnancy, and he supported her decision.
They “half-considered” adoption, Shaw says — but it’s hard to
give up a baby that you’ve thought about (and physically carried) for
nine long months.
With his tattoos and piercings, Shaw acknowledges that he’s the
last student most would pick out as a father. Fellow students, especially
older students, are shocked — they can’t imagine themselves,
much less one of their younger peers, as parents. But he’s found professors
to be relatively unfazed. He’s had to approach them about missing
school to visit his baby, among other things, and says that they’ve
taken the situation in stride — “or maybe they just thought I was a
grad student.”
But Rosetta can vouch for the importance of supportive faculty
members. When she returned to school after learning of her pregnancy,
she immediately told John Loge, her residential college dean. He
understood — and with good reason.
Rosetta was surprised but reassured to hear the story he proceeded
to tell. In 1964, after his sophomore year at Yale, his girlfriend became
pregnant; he stayed home in southern California to marry her and
finished college at UCLA. In other words, becoming a parent while in
college might be hard, but it had been done before — and Loge himself
had a good idea what she was going through. After hearing that,
Rosetta says, she “didn’t feel as strange” as she had at first.
Loge shrugs off any praise, saying that he just provided the support
that any dean would have. In fact, 1963 — the year before he left
— was the first year that Yale established the position of residential
college deans. Had he had a relationship with his own dean, Loge
speculates, he might have felt able to remain at Yale. Bureaucracies
can seem impersonal, but Loge believes that shared human experience
is an important part of his role. “Yale isn’t just about academic subjects,
it’s about people,” he said.
Shaw says that
sometimes he
feels bipolar.
“I’ve cried
more, and been
happier, in the
past year than
ever before. It
is,” he added, without a trace of irony,
“an emotional rainbow.” Still, he doesn’t
want to be anybody’s cautionary tale. He
calls Sawyer his “adventure.”
Sarah Brown, the CEO of the National
Campaign to Prevent Teen and
Unplanned Pregnancy, agrees.
“Having a baby is one of the most
important and profoundly moving experiences
that humans have,” she said. But
she worries that the prevalence of unplanned
pregnancy suggests our culture
is “not taking this seriously enough.”
According to her organization, women
in their twenties now account for the
largest number of unplanned pregnancies
in the U.S. — which is why the National
Campaign has recently broadened its
mission to include the issue of unplanned
pregnancy among young adults as well as
among teens.
“Babies are great,”
Brown said. “You
just want to eat their
little hands, and thank
God.” But what happens
eight, or eighteen
years down the line?
It’s a question that gets
sidestepped in the pop
culture vision of accidental
babies as a shortcut
to cozy domesticity
(RIP the Heath Ledger/
Michelle Williams/Baby
Matilda dream team) or
a coming-of-age catalyst
(Judd Apatow’s “Knocked
Up”). And while any parent
could be great, or bad,
statistics strongly suggest
that the odds are stacked
against younger ones.
Shaw acknowledges
the challenges of the path
he’s chosen — one that
combines the pressures of
an Ivy League education
with the difficulty of being
separated from his child, currently with his
girlfriend and her family in Houston. Still, he
says that he expects to remember his college
career just as any other student would — his
has just been harder, because of “a million
other worries.”
Because, while individual people like residential
college deans might be supportive, the
undergraduate experience fundamentally
wasn’t designed for people with children —
and therein lie the difficulties that face student
parents. This can mean struggling with
practical issues, like housing. Rosetta was
disappointed to find that Yale didn’t provide
family housing to unmarried undergraduates;
Shaw wanted his pregnant girlfriend to
move in with him at Columbia but the university
wasn’t able to accommodate. And,
of course, there’s the inevitable question of
time. Make small talk in any college library
and you’ll hear plenty of time management
sob stories — all college students think of
themselves as “busy,” and “stressed,” and
“sleep-deprived.” But for parents, this is
more than whining. There are no extensions
on four-AM feedings.
Parenting also raises more abstract issues
— like the sense that having a kid
might make you less credible as a student, or the desire to compartmentalize
the most important
parts of your life. Rosetta had
to fly to New York the week
after her daughter was born
to interview for a teaching
fellowship. But she only told
the committee that she had
been on a medical leave;
she didn’t want to reveal
that she had just given
birth.
Rosetta says that she
seriously considered
leaving the baby at home
in New Mexico with
her family. And, while
she decided not to in
the end, both she and
Shaw say that they are
tremendously grateful
to their parents (and the parents of their significant
others) for providing crucial emotional and financial support.
After he graduates in 2009, Shaw plans to move to Pittsburgh to
be with his girlfriend while she finishes her degree. Looking farther
down the line, both he and Zena (who’s also an artist) would like to get
MFAs eventually. Having to plan a future around two other people is
harder, he said — but it “doesn’t rule anything out.” He likes to think
that he’s just going through a universal experience a few years earlier
than most of his peers.
Rosetta, who finishes her Yale career in December 2007, plans to
remain in the New Haven area with her daughter and boyfriend. She
juggles waitressing, student teaching, and studying as well as parenting
— but while it took a while for her and her boyfriend
to figure out how to balance their baby
with the rest of their lives, they’re finally settled,
a unit. Ultimately, she said, the challenge is “not
just having a baby, but having a family.”
Donna, known to all as
the Timothy Dwight
College card-swipe
lady, stops by to say
hello and ask after Rosetta’s
20-month-old
daughter. She’s napping
at home, but Faith
promises to bring her by soon.
“People know me by my baby,” she says. “I’ve met
people who I wouldn’t have otherwise.”
As for Hanawenh (whose name means “butterfly”
in an Iroquois language), she’s got a head start: Rosetta
jokes that she’s already completed an in-utero semester
at Yale. And she’s known how to hold a book — to tell
whether it’s right-side up, and how to turn the pages —
since she was six months old.
Rosetta tells these stories knowing they’ll get a smile. Because it
seems that pretty much everyone, Donna and Yalies alike, is a big fan
of babies. They coo and crowd around and are disappointed, for instance,
on the rare occasions when Rosetta doesn’t bring Hanawenh
along to meetings of the Association of Native Americans at Yale.
Though they might not understand what students like Rosetta and
Shaw have been through, they’re awed — and a little daunted by the
way it relates to their own lives.
As a friend wrote on one of Shaw’s many Facebook photos of his
daughter, “all im gonna say is my baby better be as cute as her.”
