The conventional wisdom that teenage mothering risks the future disregards the fact that the young mother's experience and understanding of her past as well as her anticipation of the future are intimately tied to the social world she inhabits.To recover the contextual and temporal nature of teenage mothers' lives, this interpretive-phenomenological study explored young mothers' self-understandings of identity and the life course as participants and members of families and communities. Implications of interpretive findings for a narrative conception of identity and the life course are described and applied to community-based, community-focused primary health care.