Amy Benfer

Big fucking deal, I thought as I watched. A show about a young mother and her teenage daughter, called “Gilmore Girls,” as if they were the permanent junior auxiliary, the adjunct understudies to the just plain Gilmores. And I was not thrilled to see the “girls” swapping sweaters, dancing around the living room to XTC and, when they fought, retreating to their respective rooms with the same Macy Gray CD. What were the scriptwriters thinking? That parenting a teenager as a young mother is just like living with your favorite college roommate?

But I must admit that I did find parallels to our own lives that were downright eerie — so eerie, in fact, that I fear if I ever decide to write my memoirs, I will find that the television rights already belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino of Dorothy Parker Productions. To begin with, Lorelai Gilmore and her daughter, Lorelai Gilmore, called Rory, are, like my daughter and I, 16 years apart in age. Like me, Lorelai has never been, nor as far as we know, ever attempted to be, married. They live in a small town in Connecticut, 30 minutes out of Hartford, where Rory attends an exclusive private school called Chilton. We spent four years in a small town 30 minutes out of Hartford where I attended a private university. Lorelai goes reluctantly into debt to her parents to finance Rory’s education, and they in turn demand that she involve them in her life; I was financially dependent on my parents for my education, and they in turn demanded that they have a say in how I was raising my daughter.

Christ, Lorelai, played by the exquisite Lauren Graham, even looks like an actress I would choose to play me in the movie of my life — she’s even got my coloring: shoulder-length brown hair, blue eyes and perpetual red lipstick. Thank God, unlike me, she’s tall.

Of course, there are some differences. Lorelai never went to college; I did. Lorelai is from an upper-middle-class family in Connecticut; I am from a middle-class family in Idaho. Rory and Lorelai are 16 and 32, respectively; Sydney and I are 11 and 27. Lorelai works as the director of a quaint New England inn; I work as an editor at a San Francisco Internet magazine. But the basic premise of the story is the same, and it is one that is almost never told: How does one assert one’s independence as a parent when one is, in some ways, still in need of financial and emotional parenting oneself, in a culture that sees teenage mothers as nothing short of monstrous? And later, how does one deal with tensions of being a grown-up former teenage mother who has somehow, in most ways, become part of the middle class?

On the very same night that we watched the first episode of “Gilmore Girls,” Sydney and I had gone to one of those fake Mexican restaurants for tourists around the corner from our apartment, each making the other swear that we wouldn’t tell other people that we had a sudden craving for blended drinks and seafood fusion enchiladas.

“Excuse me,” said the waiter. “Miss, did you know that she just put a napkin on your head?”

I knew that she had put a napkin on my head because, when she wasn’t looking, I had balled up mine and thrown it at her.

“How old are you?” the waiter asked my daughter. “12? 14?”

“Eleven,” she said.

“And you are her sister?” he asked me.

“Mother,” we said, together.

“I thought you were her sister,” he said. “Sister? Or friend?”

“Mother,” we said again, together.

“Mother.” He giggled and brought her a free lemonade refill. “Mother,” he said again, stepping back to survey each of us, as if he could deduce our story if he simply stared long enough.

In the opening scene in the first episode of “Gilmore Girls,” Lorelai is sitting in a cafe. A Lothario in his 20s attempts to pick her up. She shuts him down, only to see him trying to pick up her daughter, Rory, several minutes later.

“Hey,” Lorelai says. “That’s my daughter.”

“Your daughter?” he asks.

“My daughter.”

“Hey, that’s cool,” he says, “I’m traveling with a friend …”

You can see why the executives at the WB saw “Gilmore Girls” as an idea with legs. Two really great pairs, in fact.

The network had been asked by its advertisers (in this case the Family Friendly Forum, a consortium that includes Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson) to create a “family-friendly” show as an alternative to the network’s usual sexy teen fare. And if you are a WB producer looking to fit a family show into a lineup that includes Sarah Michelle Gellar and Katie Homes, what better way to do it than to define “family” as a unit composed of two young, beautiful, sexually available women? (Or “girls,” as they would have it.)

Next to the idea that one will be picked up by two gorgeous, identical-twin nymphomaniacs, I am told (I have been told, complete with leering glances), the idea of meeting a gorgeous mother-daughter duo ranks high on the list of male masturbation fantasies. (I really don’t know how any of the men who have said to me, “Hey, when you are 34 and she’s 18, you’ll be hot,” expected me to respond, but they have said it all the same.) And while certain single and divorced parents of all ages see PTA meetings as a dating opportunity, the presence of an especially young woman is viewed as a very special coup indeed for certain kinds of men — like for instance, the distinguished-looking 40-something divorced father who hits on Lorelai in Episode 2. Or the cool 30-something high school English teacher who does the same thing in Episode 3.

So far, Lorelai has demonstrated the good sense to refuse to hook up with anyone affiliated with her daughter’s school, but we do know she is certainly available. We learn she is a little bit slutty, too, when Rory asks her mother, upon learning that she has been accepted at Chilton, “What did you do, sleep with the headmaster?” We learn that Rory is not when Lorelai teases Rory about her plus-size eggshell fishermen’s sweater by saying, “What is that, a mumu? Could you not find any armor to deflect those with X-ray eyes?”

The whole thing is a little grating, not to mention insulting, and you sometimes wish that someone in the scriptwriting department had had the imagination not to portray the chick who got knocked up in high school as a slut, forever promising to teach her daughter dirty cheers, with her daughter forced to play reluctant parent. But given the dearth of popular portrayals of mothers as spunky, attractive and sexually active, it’s also somewhat refreshing. (And for the record, I stopped watching “Jesse,” the Christina Applegate vehicle about a slightly younger, working-class former teenage mother, around the time she starting insisting that she couldn’t date her hunky neighbor because Mothers Don’t Date.)

But putting up with Lorelai’s rather frisky dating life is more than worth it when it comes to her ideas on marriage. Cornered by her mother, who is berating her for having never married Rory’s father, who is now a successful Internet mogul in California (of course), Lorelai replies, “By not getting married, we kept our bright futures.”

I would like to see this motto emblazoned in 20-point font and underscored in red in every last textbook and advice manual for pregnant and parenting teenagers. Not that I am a proponent of absolute, one-size-fits-all advice, mind you, and I am sure there are some very good marriages out there that have their origin in a broken condom at 16 — just as there are interesting, intelligent mothers who happen to be very young. But Lorelai’s mother espouses the idea that the sanctity of the nuclear family, the irreducible need of a child for two parents, is so great that it is worth compounding the very real difficulties of an untimed pregnancy with the extraordinarily bad gamble that the cute boy with the motorcycle whom you like — or even love — in high school is in any way suited to be your life partner. That’s ill-informed at best and dangerous at worst. Teenagers have enough romantic delusions as it is. They certainly don’t need adults to pretend that a shotgun marriage makes economic sense.

“I had to figure out how to live,” Lorelai tells her mother. “I had to do it myself.”

In Lorelai’s case, she worked her way up from chambermaid to executive director of the Independence Inn. (In my case, I worked my way through two years of high school, four years of college and two years of freelancing at night while holding down some very bad day jobs, like working customer service in a bank and editing the phone book.) It’s a seductive formula for creating a character — an upper-class girl whose breeding makes her elegant and attractive to viewers, and whose prodigal pregnancy makes her interesting. In this, she conflates two of the most pervasive American myths: She has the taste and pedigree of someone who was born knowing what to do with the silver spoon in her mouth and the independence of someone who has pulled herself up by her bootstraps.

It’s not as if Lorelai’s parents had nothing to do with her eventual success — all of the skills that facilitated her rise from maid to manager are the skills that one acquires from undergoing 16 years of parental training in how to become an lady. And what kind of quaint inn would hide in housekeeping a gorgeous woman with an eye for the right crystal, one who knows a good mushroom risotto when she tastes it and has perfect pitch for how one talks to valets, businessmen with scratched cars and little old ladies looking for the best antiques in the city? (If she had been a mechanic or a plumber or a waitress at Denny’s, it’s unlikely that she would have been able to trade in her good breeding for upward mobility.)

The most visible “difference” between Lorelai and her parents seems to be that she is upper middle class and they are landed gentry. She has a sprawling white house stuffed with antiques and Laura Ashley prints, drives a new Jeep and eats out every night in a funky cafe around the corner. They have an even bigger white house with a gate and oak paneling, kitchen help whose names they can’t remember and a country club membership.

Nevertheless, the scriptwriters insist, week after week, on framing the conflicts between Lorelai and her parents, and Lorelai and Rory and the Chilton set, in terms of class. In every episode, Lorelai breaks some social code and is ritually humiliated for her haplessness.

On Rory’s first day at Chilton, for example, Lorelai oversleeps because her fuzzy clock doesn’t purr on time, forgets to pick up her cute blue suit with the flippy skirt from the dry cleaner and ends up meeting with the dean of Chilton while dressed like a rodeo queen, in a pink tie-dyed T-shirt, Daisy Dukes and cowgirl boots. Of course, she has a respectable gray flannel coat to cover herself with, but her mother is waiting for her in the dean’s office and insists that she remove her coat. In a later episode, she is late for a PTA meeting and is chastised for being one of the women who — horrors! — voted to amend the dress code to include scrunchies in Chilton plaid. (“They must be one of the scholarship families,” murmurs one Chilton grande dame to another, prompting Lorelai to a spunky display that threatens to escalate to fisticuffs.)

These slapstick moments provide grist for the plot mill, but they ultimately fall flat. A true outsider is one who does not know that one should wear the blue suit with the flippy skirt to the first day of school, or if she does know it, she doesn’t own it, or is proudly defiant that she isn’t one of those rich bitches who follow the WASP dress code. A woman who can afford both the suit and the dry cleaning, but forgets to pick it up, is an insider with a time-management problem and maybe a few issues with handling responsibility.

It’s not entirely unrealistic. We don’t get the benefit of seeing the years between 16 and 32, after Lorelai had rejected her parents’ money and before she came into her own. Presumably, a good many of these years provided the kind of material that makes for hardcore social documentary, not prime-time lifestyle drama. There are already more than enough of those stories in circulation, so many, in fact, that telling an airbrushed, sanitized version about teenage pregnancy is nearly revolutionary.

The truth is that there are teenage mothers — not a lot, but some — who do find themselves in a different, better place 10 years later. Including myself, I know three of them.

We are not all so telegenic. If they were filming my life, it would be set in two rooms, with no Laura Ashley in sight and, most days, laundry and books and old essays and journals strewn about in such a way that navigation, even in daylight, is something of a challenge. If they were filming my friend Tonya, you would see a three-bedroom apartment in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., where she works as a corporate recruiter by day and writes her fiction on weekends. My friend Deb, a physicist turned computer geek, lives with her new boyfriend in Connecticut and drives a new VW bug. I don’t expect we’ll be inviting in any camera crews, but that’s OK, because two of the three of us are writers, and fiction is better suited to capturing the nuance and ambiguity of daily life anyway.

After all, “Gilmore Girls” is not about nuance, it’s not about art, it’s television. I don’t fault “Gilmore Girls” for presenting the pop version of affluent former teenage motherhood any more than I would critique “Married … With Children” for its version of shoe salesmen, or berate the “The Cosby Show” for not accurately portraying affluent African-American life. After all, don’t all Americans have the inalienable right to find themselves caricatured beyond recognition on television?

And in the meantime, anyone want to buy the rights to a book about a 27-year-old former teenage mother from Idaho?

Gaby Rodriguez, the author of the memoir “The Pregnancy Project,” soon to be a Lifetime movie of the same name, lives in Toppenish, Wash., population 9,000, 75 percent Latino, with a casino and a discount movie theater where second-run movies cost $3; where 98 percent of the students at her high school qualify for free lunch and teens compete with their parents for jobs at Dairy Queen and Taco Bell, and in migrant labor.

When Eleanor announces she is pregnant at 16, it is taken for granted that “her future” can’t include a child until well after college and a suitable marriage. When Gaby, the youngest daughter of a woman who has seven children between the ages of 14 and 35, and 31 grandchildren by the time Gaby is in her early teens, does the same, it is greeted as the expected outcome for a girl like her.

Abortion isn’t an option considered by either girl: “[M]y parents would more likely kill me if I had an abortion than if I were just pregnant, because that’s very against their religion,” says Eleanor (emphasis mine). Gaby, who describes herself as “very pro-life” says she “really had no idea what Planned Parenthood did” until she walks into their office at 16; after reading their literature, she decides it is “designed to make girls feel okay about getting abortions.” But while Eleanor’s pregnancy is real, Gaby’s is not: As part of her senior project, she decided to fake a pregnancy, with the help of her boyfriend, Jorge, her mother, the school superintendent, and a belly sculpted from clay and padded with fabric.

Each girl faces both stereotypes and discrimination: some quite similar, others inflected by each girl’s very different class and cultural expectations. Although Eleanor’s parents work with African AIDS orphans as their life’s work, they see their daughter’s pregnancy as shameful. Eleanor and Lam marry, are given summer jobs at the camp his parents run to force obese children to lose weight, and are paid with lodging in a “one-room cabin heated with wood, with the kitchen up the hill in the main house, and the bathroom a hornet-infested latrine six cabins away” — not exactly comfortable for a pregnant woman who visits the latrine several times a night. As part of the deal, Eleanor has to “pretend I’m twenty (yeah, lying — what a great example), and we have to be married and pretend the marriage came before the baby, so it doesn’t look like I got knocked up by accident or anything.” Another counselor, Jen, mocks her for her perceived stupidity about birth control and alleged sluttiness — though she’s got where she is with one partner and a broken condom — and informs her, “If I had a baby, my dreams would just go down the toilet.”

Although Eleanor herself is seen as damaged goods, her baby — assumed to be that much-sought-after commodity, a white, healthy infant  — is much in demand. Lam’s parents, who lost a child in infancy, want to raise the child as their own; her parents would like her to give the baby to “perfectly prim, older sister, Sarah — just hand it over like a sack of potatoes.” After all, says Sarah, “We’re young and we live in a beautiful home.”

Nolan ends her novel with a surprising but very satisfying and believable twist that profoundly underscores the idea that demanding “perfection” in parents or children can be its own fatal flaw, and that sometimes passion, determination and a woman’s connection to her own child can mean more than a perfectly groomed nursery.

While many of Gaby Rodriguez’s friends and family decide her teenage pregnancy is unremarkable — “they’re used to teen moms,” says one classmate to her best friend — it is likewise assumed that she has “ruined her life.” Gaby points out, “Pregnant or not, I was still in school and getting great grades. I was in the top 5 percent of my class, with a 3.8 grade point average. With everything they knew about me, why would they be so quick to write me off as another statistic?… Didn’t they believe in me enough to know that, even if I were pregnant, I’d still find a way to go to college and achieve my dreams for me and my baby?”

Although young mothers are statistically less likely to finish high school and go to college, it may be comparable, she says, to the four-minute mile, which was once thought to be an impossible goal for a runner. But within three years after the first runner came in at four minutes, 16 others did the same. Why not see the academic plans of women like, say, President Obama’s mother — who earned a doctorate and raised two children, one of whom became president — as “the four-minute mile of teen pregnancy”?

Gaby removes her fake stomach at an assembly in front of all her classmates and a single local reporter. By the next morning, her story has spread across the wires, and she’s fielding competing offers from “Good Morning America” and the “Today” show, culminating in a contract for said Lifetime movie and this very memoir, helped along by credited ghostwriter Jenna Glatzer. At the assembly, she writes, there were “about seven girls” who were actually pregnant. “I hoped they would know I wasn’t trying to embarrass them or betray their trust,” she writes, “but that I was honestly trying to give them a voice.”

Gaby Rodriguez is sharp and compassionate; no one could credibly accuse her of naiveté or the desire to exploit teen parents, with whom she is intimately familiar through her family and community. But one can’t help but wonder why outsiders saw her — a teen who could have been pregnant but ultimately was not — as such an extraordinary mouthpiece for understanding teen mothers. Might it have more than a little to do with exactly the kind of prejudice she described in her book? No one was clamoring to interview her when she was one of eight presumed teen mothers at the school. Why did it take revealing she was not a teen mother for her to gain the authority to “give a voice” to those who were?

“The Pregnancy Project,” in this light, brings to mind “Black Like Me,” the 1961 book by John Griffin, a white man who impersonated a black man in order to describe the prejudice he encountered in the South. In part, the revelation comes from seeing how the exact same person can be treated so differently, depending on the circumstances. But at the time, Griffin surely benefited in part from white readers who conferred more authority on a white author. One can’t help but wonder if Rodriguez similarly gained moral authority to talk about a group of women who experience prejudice once it was established she was not a member of the group. In her book, she quotes a teen mother on a message board who writes: “When you get pregnant as a teenager, a lot of people give up on you and treat you like garbage, no matter how smart or nice or hard-working you were before. Nobody wants to ‘encourage teen pregnancy’ so they feel it’s their duty to make you suffer.” That writer remains anonymous.

Charlie, however, is the only person she knows who, from birth, has been able to understand both the universal language common to all classes, and the three distinct, class-based languages. This gives her often unwelcome insights (her neighbor’s racist rants about immigrants; the exact nature of the snubs she and her friends get from the Counsel girls at the prep school with the slippery marble steps). And like her 6-year-old sister’s ability to heal wounds, it is a talent, according to her parents, which will be fatal to their entire family if discovered.

With her voluptuous best friend, Brooklynn, Charlie frequents secret clubs, like one at which the hand stamp is embedded with hallucinogens and the comely youth of all classes mix freely. It is there that she meets “predatory,” silver-eyed Xander, “dangerously boyish and beautiful Max” — and hears and comprehends a language she has never heard before. Futuristic punk, medieval dynasties, social commentary, swashbuckling revolutionaries and a dash of magical powers combine to make this a swift, sequel-friendly read.

But what is “Teen Mom” really teaching us? And what does its popularity tell us about our current moment? 

The sober reality show has been a surprise hit for MTV, a channel that seemed one Jell-o shot away from a life-long coma, and heroines Catelynn, Maci, Farrah and Amber have graced the covers of tabloids all season long. (Maci’s back with her baby daddy! The details behind Farrah’s boyfriend’s tragic demise! Exclusive photos from Catelynn and Tyler’s tearful reunion with baby Carly!) Cynically speaking, the cast members of “Teen Mom” are nearly perfect lab specimens for a tabloid: They have youth, beauty and baby bumps. They also have exes, family drama, incarcerated parents, adorable toddlers — and, frankly, they need money. The show has caught on not only with MTV’s core teenage audience, but also with 20- and 30-something women. In an age when the American middle class is once again obsessed with perfectionism in parenting, some may be sucked in by the novelty of young mothers raising children with so few resources. Others are simply sucked in by the nonstop drama and soapiness.

These girls’ high visibility upends history. Teen mothers were always shoved to the back of the frame, often literally sent away, and certainly rarely given the spotlight. And those stories that are told are incomplete: Too often, tales of teen parents start and stop when one is 16 and pregnant, and neglect to tell the story of what it’s like to be 19 with a 3-year-old or 26 with a 10-year-old. “Teen Mom” goes further than most any show ever on television in documenting ordinary struggles of young parenthood.

This season alone, it showed us the ambivalence and embarrassment of Maci, a Tennessee girl from a middle-class family, as she asked her son’s father, Ryan, for child support, and took us into a riveting meeting with their mediator, in which they bargained for time with their son while Maci wept. Catelynn and Tyler — high school sweethearts from hard-drinking, hard-living parents who gave their daughter Carly up for adoption in hopes of creating a better life for her — might represent one of the most sympathetic portrayals of birth parents ever committed to film. They’re a graphic reminder that for the parents left behind, the grief doesn’t end when the baby leaves the frame, even when it feels like the right decision. One of the season’s most poignant moments was Tyler — a tough teenage boy who had cried over pictures of his daughter alone in his bedroom, who had a father in jail, who kept promising his girlfriend they would be better parents to their own children someday — sitting in a diner across from Brandon, the man who was what he most wanted to be: Carly’s father. And rather than detail his own pain, Tyler, in a lovely moment of empathy, asked Brandon what he had sacrificed to be a parent.

Then there is the on-again, off-again couple Amber and Gary, who have become the id of the series, confirming the worst stereotypes about teen parents. This season we saw portly, passive-aggressive Gary toy with the idea of leaving volatile Amber for another teen mom he met in the diaper aisle at Walmart; we saw screaming fights, one of which concluded with Gary taking the sheets off the bed, another that included a car chase with the baby on board; we watched Amber moving in with her new boyfriend, fresh from work release in jail; and finally, we saw Amber, who has been taking martial arts classes, beat Gary and kick him down the stairs. But the most haunting moment came when we saw their little girl, Leah, witnessing yet another fight between her parents, and telling her mom to be quiet — in just the same tone we’ve heard Amber use toward her all season long.

But if ever a documentary has been accused of distorting its subject matter, “Teen Mom” is it. The idea of tracking the experience of being a regular teen mom pretty much evaporates the second that mom is on the cover of OK! magazine. And the tabloid money does matter, in no small part, because one of the biggest arguments against teen parenting is that it creates poor families, and thus any realistic portrayal of teen parenthood must scrupulously follow the money: How much is it, and where is it coming from?

Three seasons in, it’s easy to become distracted by niggling details that may or may not reflect how much impact the show has had on each family’s personal finances and relationships: Why does Farrah spend so much time in the beauty shop? Why does she have a new Mac laptop? What make and model car are the girls driving? What part of town are they living in? I absolutely do not mean to imply that these girls, some of whom come from middle-class families, and all of whom support themselves to varying degrees through jobs and financial aid, are not entitled to support their families, or buy themselves hair cuts or computers. (Interestingly enough, the only mention we’ve seen of government assistance is when Farrah files for Social Security from her daughter’s dead father, and when she receives aid for day care, due not to her income, but to her mother’s domestic violence conviction). But if these families are meant to make a larger point about teen parents as a group, it profoundly matters to know not just if they are managing to survive, and eventually maybe thrive, but how. Yes, there are many different ways to succeed or fail as a teen parent, and very few have tried to ask the right questions. The answers can include school, family, jobs and good parenting. But once the options include “sell your family’s story to a tabloid,” you’ve pretty much polluted your sample.

Aside from the issue of who is paying for what, canny viewers may wonder just how much these families’ characters and images have been shaped by producers at a painstakingly edited show. This season, Maci and Farrah have seemed the most realistic and complicated characters, while Amber and Gary have started to look downright villainous. And it may be worth asking why Catelynn and Tyler, the only couple to release their child, seem consistently the most sympathetic characters in the show. Also, one wonders if the very act of exposing their lives before a national audience might have made all concerned more likely to solve their problems in the offices of counselors, mediators and therapists, and participate in therapeutic retreats — or to take it even further, to wonder whether many of those sessions would have happened at all without outside intervention.

Creator Morgan J. Freeman says he wants to capture these same girls and their families each year, not unlike Michael Apted’s “Up” series, a landmark of documentary filmmaking, in which British schoolchildren from different social classes, born in 1964, have been filmed every seven years since the age of 7. It is a laudable goal, and 21 years after giving birth to my daughter at age 16, I would dearly love to see a series that depicts all of the different ways these stories can turn out. But putting aside the ethical dilemmas, it becomes valid to ask: What are you documenting? Has the series already passed the tipping point after which they are no longer capturing the lives of teen moms, and instead are looking at the lives of young celebrities who happen to have young children?

We saw this with “Jon and Kate Plus 8,” which morphed gruesomely from a show about their family in which cameras happened to be present into a show about their family breaking up, thanks to the pressures of the cameras. The reality TV fame cycle is so well-established that one might speak of a series as having a half-life of sorts — the amount of time it takes for the show to go from publicly documenting people’s ordinary lives to documenting the private lives of public figures. In the case of “Jersey Shore,” it seemed like a matter of weeks.

Each season, with “Teen Mom,” it becomes more difficult to tease out the impact the show itself has had on the lives it depicts. After the episode in which Amber beat Gary aired, the producers were criticized for standing to the side during an incident of domestic violence (one also wonders if they would have done so had Gary been the one hitting Amber). But the most chilling moment was hearing Leah speak. Not merely because we could hear echoes of her mother’s words in her own, but because by hearing her speak, it forced us to scroll back and replay all the earlier scenes we had witnessed thus far from her childhood, and realize that she was no longer an infant. She is a real girl, who is old enough to understand the trouble her family is in, and we are watching it. It makes me wonder if reality TV, in a way, might be creating a whole mini-soccer-team of Mary Kate and Ashleys (minus the extravagant amount of cash), children who literally begin their lives on TV and stay there throughout infancy, childhood and maybe young adulthood. The further this series goes on, the more difficult it will be to separate what it is telling us about the lives of teen mothers from what it is telling us about the lives of parents and children who live under public scrutiny.

Apparently, the couple told Us Weekly before their own family, and Sarah Palin’s official response — “Bristol believes in redemption and forgiveness to a degree most of us struggle to put in practice in our daily lives” — might give a cynical reader reason to believe that Mama Grizzly is still caught up in that “struggle” bit. The Washington Post’s Reliable Source sees a ray of light in the announcement, however, and basically says: Who the hell else could they be with? “The two have shared a completely unique experience: Small town teens catapulted to worldwide fame through the convergence of an unplanned pregnancy and her mother’s overnight political ascendance.” But if being a co-conspirator in a media maelstrom were all it took to build a strong marriage, the Gosselins would be our most steady couple.

Bristol and Levi are just one of dozens of tabloid-ready couples whose lives we “know” far too much about. But the Gosselins and the Jolie-Pitts don’t have a family member who regularly flirts with running for the highest political office in our country. And thus we betcha whatever path their private lives take will eventually be served back to us as a political narrative demonstrating good Republican family values.

Before the unfortunate demise of their relationship, Bristol and Levi were more or less toeing the Republican Party line on unplanned pregnancy: Condemn the premarital sex, but offer redemption to those who go on to have the baby, get hitched and make a proper family (hence the shotgun engagement on the eve of the Republican Convention). During the Bush years, as you may remember, this philosophy formed the backbone of the Healthy Marriage Initiative, which started from the premise that two-parent families tended, statistically speaking, to make more money and provide more stable homes for children, and thus decreed that the best way to make poor, unstable single parents into stable, affluent families was to marry them off to one another.

But as it turns out, things didn’t quite work out the way they planned. Just last week, conveniently enough, Women’s eNews ran a feature by Julie Marsh that concluded that marriage isn’t exactly the magic pixie dust young parents are looking for. Yes, two-parent families may be, statistically speaking, more affluent than single-parent families, but married women also tend to be more educated in the first place. Encouraging poor parents with little education and few job prospects to better themselves by marrying each other just gives you a family headed by two poor, uneducated parents. Marriage might not hurt, but it is basically irrelevant: What that family needs is at least one person with a decent education and a good job. Plus, having money doesn’t guarantee a good relationship. As one young mother told Marsh, “You can have a man that got a lot of money and do you dirty and that’s not cool.”

There’s no rule that says young parents can’t have both: a good marriage to the parent of their child, in which they mutually support each other’s goals to finish school and/or come up with enough resources, economic and otherwise, to keep everyone reasonably happy and cared for. But in practice, all too often, when two people slap together an idealized family as the solution to an unplanned pregnancy, it just means that one or both partners (most often the mother) delay getting the education and work experience they need to support their family solo, a shaky proposition given that women who marry in their teens are much more likely to divorce.

How does this all apply to Bristol and Levi? People’s lives don’t willingly conform to statistical norms, so perhaps this particular marriage will turn out just fine. All those months of public vitriol might make an interesting addition to baby Tripp’s scrapbook (file under: Parents’ “youthful indiscretions”). Then again, it’s possible that in not choosing to marry when Bristol’s mother’s political ambitions were the virtual loaded gun over their heads, they came to a better-planned, more thoughtful decision to be together. One might also point out that the “problem” many government programs, rightly or wrongly, seek to fix isn’t necessarily young parents, but poor parents. And right now — thanks to speaking fees, tabloid interviews and skin mags — neither Bristol nor Levi is poor (though one presumes that the job security of “professional tabloid star” may turn out to be even more rickety than “child actor,” and one positively cackles wondering what rules govern the allowable behavior between an “abstinence educator” and the father of her child in the weeks leading up to her wedding). If nothing else, consider it an experiment in the impact a decent speaker’s fee can have on teen parenting.

Bristol and Levi’s lives, of course, are their own, and as private citizens, I wish them well. Still, there is no getting around the truth that their private choices will eventually be served back to us as political parable. While I’m no fan of one-size-fits-all prescriptions, I’m still of the mind that a college diploma and decent job skills are a much better guarantee of young family’s healthy future than a marriage license.

“Women are starting to get the message that mother’s milk is really important,” Nancy Mohrbacher, the author of “Breastfeeding Made Simple: Seven Natural Laws,” tells Newsweek reporter Maria Dolan, an understatement of vast magnitudes. With studies that credit breast-feeding for virtually every good — it will make your child smarter! — and an inoculation against every ill — prevents cancer, ear infections and obesity! — it may be more accurate to say that women are “getting the message” that offering one’s child anything less is tantamount to just begging for an unhealthy kid with crappy SAT scores. But what about adoptive parents, gay male parents, and others who have trouble producing milk in house? “Just because he was adopted, my little one should not have to miss out on the antibodies and heath breast milk provides,” mother Sarah McNeil tells Dolan.

Parents like McNeil are fueling a boom in demand for the milk of others. Over the past decade, demand at milk banks — which accept human milk and screen for diseases, including HIV — has quadrupled. And those who can’t afford the milk bank’s prices — up to $3 an ounce, keeping in mind a baby can need up to 30 ounces each day — are turning to new, unregulated programs like the Milk Share website, which connects those who’ve got milk with those who need it, thanks to the miracles of ice and Fed Ex.

Although I come from a long line of women who breast-fed their babies, and have plenty of sympathy for those who can’t nurse their children for whatever reason, I have to admit the idea of helping oneself to the milk of others seemed to me to be, at first, a bit of overkill. Yes, breast milk is awesome stuff, and common sense would tell us that human milk is likely a better fit for human babies than milk from a cow or a legume, but the fine print of all those studies tells us repeatedly that it is nearly impossible to discern why, exactly, breast-fed babies tend to do better. Is it really some magical properties inherent to the chemical composition in the so-called liquid gold? Is it because babies tend to get more face time with mothers who are hauling around their food supply? Or is it because right now, breast-feeding is most fashionable with affluent, educated women? But most of all, I wondered just who was producing all that liquid gold: Could this be just another example of wealthier women helping themselves to the bodies of poor women?

After poking around a few of the websites mentioned in the article, I got some answers. The first American milk bank, according to this piece produced by La Leche League, was founded in Boston in 1911 and was staffed — surprise! — primarily by unwed mothers who were paid for their milk. Earlier “lactariums” in France also housed wet nurses and their children in hospitals. But today the Human Milk Bank of America accepts only donated milk and, according to its ethical guidelines, “does not condone, and in fact, questions the practice of buying and selling human milk as a commodity” — in part, out of worry that a woman might feel pressured to provide milk to others at the expense of her own infant (their fees cover only screening, handling and processing). More than 50 percent of the bank’s milk goes to doctors who use it to feed sick children, especially premature babies; babies with a medical prescription for breast milk typically covered by insurance companies. The Milk Share site also explicitly forbids paying cash for milk over and above the cost of packaging and shipment (the downside to its program is that the milk is not screened, and one has to trust that the donor prepared it properly).

In a fair and ethical world, breast milk would go first to the babies who need it most — those who are sick, premature or who have severe allergies to other milks. But providing more democratic access to breast milk for all children may be just a question of simplifying the logistics. One of Dolan’s sources points out that opening more centers would make milk significantly cheaper for all parents, as shipping costs are among the highest expense. In Brazil, according to La Leche League, more than 40 percent of all mothers donate to milk banks; their milk is collected at their homes on a weekly basis. The upside of the breast milk fetish may be that women who produce more milk than they need, or have extra stashed in the freezer, may prefer to see their milk go to another infant, rather than down the drain. There’s plenty of evidence that the milk is out there: According to La Leche League, a single advertisement asking for donations in a baby magazine generated more than 300 calls per day — so much that they had to warn potential donors not to get angry with overworked staff.