Parenting & Family Quote by David Soul

There is a whole social contract hiding inside that offhand “no choice.” Soul frames his marriage less as a romantic decision than as a switch snapping shut: pregnancy triggers obligation, obligation triggers adulthood, and adulthood arrives before you’re ready. The line “I was still a kid myself” isn’t just self-description; it’s a quiet indictment of a culture that treated youth as a luxury you forfeited the moment you made a mistake. He’s not asking for sympathy so much as establishing the rules of the era he came up in: consequences were public, moral, and permanent.

What makes the quote work is its blunt, almost resigned pacing. Each sentence narrows the hallway. Married at 20. Still a kid. “Those times” (a small phrase doing heavy lifting) sets the context of mid-century expectations: responsibility was enforced by family, community, and law, and “doing the right thing” often meant sacrificing personal development. “So I left school” lands like an unstated cost, the education that disappears without ceremony.

Then comes the pivot: “the only thing I could do was sing.” It sounds empowering, but it’s also a confession of limited options. He casts creativity not as a dream pursued but as a job that remained available when the usual pathways closed. The subtext is starkly modern: sometimes “finding your calling” is just surviving the consequences of a system that gives you one narrow door and calls it character.