Category — Bio

Thanks to Shamelessly Sassy for the inspiration for this post. I hadn’t thought about this in years. I know my oldest child doesn’t think I know what it’s like to be 18, but I do. I don’t know what it’s like to be young in her world, it’s true. But I remember mine. It’s not easy to have little personal power, to be unable to easily articulate what’s wrong, and to not have enough depth of perspective yet to see where you’re contributing to your own pain. It gets better, though. I promise.

Dear Carolyn at age 18,

Yes, I know your ego’s wounded right now because your ex-boyfriend of a year — the first boy you ever slept with — is the first boy who’s ever dumped YOU. You haven’t found anyone else you wanted to date, either. And you’ve been having a spectacularly crummy senior year of high school. You studied your butt off for 12 years, and people are now convinced you’ve managed to coast by on fiendishly clever cheating. You made a 30 on your ACT, and people figured you must have cheated on that too.

And to be honest, you did cheat a few times in school. Three times in 12 years. Once on a biology test, when you gave answers to an old friend who was begging. Once on a history test when you were too bored by the material to study. And once on another teacher’s history test, when you were too contemptuous of the teacher’s stupidity and her read-from-the-book style of teaching. You had gotten a bit lazy; let’s admit that. But the reaction from the world around you is way out of proportion. It is mob mentality. Cheating doesn’t deserve respect. But it doesn’t deserve hatred, either.

Kids you’ve known since kindergarten are shunning you in the hallways. Teachers, for god’s sake — teachers are starting rumors that you bought teacher’s textbooks so you’d have all the answers. Nobody at school will date you. No one will talk to you. And no one trusts you. Remember the library lady? When you were studying in the library, looking at your notes and repeating the information over and over to yourself, trying to memorize information for a big test, the librarian yanked your book away and shrilly insisted that you were trying to pass answers to someone taking a test across the hall. You looked up, astonished, to see that the classroom door across the hall from the library was open. The librarian made a huge, loud, arm-flapping scene and never believed you. Sorry  to tell you, but she fully intends to glare at you the rest of the year. The library, which has been one of your havens, is going to be another place to endure.

And oh, Lord, that stupid correspondence course. You are such a nerd, you wanted to take two years of Latin but it wouldn’t fit in your schedule, so you decided to take one of the required history courses by correspondence course with a nearby college so you’d have room for your beloved Latin. You don’t know it yet, but that is going to be a big heartache for you. You aren’t going to manage your time well and you will get behind. A teacher will overhear you asking a friend if he’ll do one of the homework assignments for you. She will go ballistic and call the college, trying to get you thrown out so you won’t graduate. But you don’t need to worry. You are smart and brave, and you will own up to your mistakes. You’ll get to the phone first and confess to the college professor who administers the tests. The prof will be so pissed at some nosey high school teacher’s interference that she’ll tell you, “We don’t care who does the homework; that’s mainly so you know the material well enough to pass the test. You just let her call me.” The professor will send that teacher away with a bug in her ear. You’ll pass the course with an A+.

Of course, that teacher also happens to be the counselor for the whole high school, so she doesn’t help you at all with college apps or scholarships, and you’ll end up with just one measly $500 grant you get on your own. But that’s OK too. You’ll learn to depend on yourself.

And the senior prom. You’ll invite that stupid but delicious boy from the Delta who you met through your friend, Karen. I wish I could tell you, “MISTAKE!” He’ll drive down for the weekend and stay with another senior guy he knows. But the other guy, Chris, is one of the cool kids who hates you for being nerdy smart. They’ll decide to play a funny prank on you, calling on the day of the prom to tell you the cute guy can’t come because his crazy mom grounded him and locked him in his room. You believe in being a decent person and you’ll try to be nice because you figure he’s upset and embarrassed, so you’ll just say you understand. Then you’ll go to your room and cry your heart out, because after the senior year you’ve had, it’s just too much. I wish I could tell you not to cry, because that silly ass of a boy will show up in an hour, laughing. And you’re a nicer person than I am now, so you’ll go with him to the prom anyway because you don’t want to miss it and you’ll be damned if you’ll let anyone’s behavior make you sit at home. You’ll even wear his green and yellow corsage with your purple and pink dress (yeah, he knew the colors). He is so pretty, but he’ll spend most of the prom looking at his reflection in the mirrored walls instead of at you.

And it’ll get worse, I’m afraid.

Even your best friend, Kathy — who spent years riding around in your Thunderbird, drinking beer and ogling boys and listening to your Commodores 8-tracks — will hate you for a while. She’ll ask you to postpone going on the senior trip to Florida with all the rest of the class for a few days because she can’t get off work from her part-time job the weekend after graduation. At first you’ll say yes because you love Kathy, but then you’ll start to resent having to sit around, waiting for her. So you’ll call her back and confess that you really don’t want to wait. You’ll offer to give her some of your saved money to help her afford the trip, because you think that’ll solve the problem. It still won’t work, she’ll tell you tearfully; she is required to be at her job that weekend. At that point you’re kind of crumbling because this is KATHY after all and would it kill you to wait, but in the background, you heard her bitchy older sister screaming how selfish you are and, “No wonder she doesn’t have any friends!” And while Kathy is telling her sis to shut up, you’ll scream back and hang up. And that’ll be it for you and Kathy. She’ll offer you an olive branch later on, but by then you’ll be too shell-shocked to do more than hug her. It’ll never be the same.

A word of advice to you: When you don’t feel good, stay home. As luck would have it, it will happen to be the day the school officials announce you are salutatorian. Good thing, because you will later hear there was a virtual student and teacher uprising over that.

I know 18 looks bleak for you. No romance, no friends, hatred simmering in the air. But you know what? These people who are so eager to judge you and so delighted to hate you for being book smart and socially awkward won’t matter more than a grain of sand in the big picture of your life. And they’ll have stumbles of their own. They’ll also be misjudged. They’ll go on in the years to come to have divorces, jobs lost, money squandered, children go astray … all manner of pains and shames and mistakes of their own. And you’ll figure out — many years later — that they have NO IDEA of everything else that is going on in your life to make you seem so self-centered and distant. What seems like stuck-up to them is just you keeping family secrets.

They don’t know your stepfather lost his business and is a vodka-soaked falling-down drunk or that your mom holds a cocked loaded pistol to his head some nights and asks you whether she should shoot him and that sometimes you just say, “I really don’t give a shit.” They don’t know that your stepfather sometimes goes out into the pasture and tries to fuck one of the cows, who always kicks him and breaks a few ribs, and you come home to see him with taped-up ribs and hear them having THAT fight again. They don’t know that your mom and stepdad are less than a year away from a divorce and that your mom will spend the next year going quietly nuts at home and making tearful calls to you at college. They don’t know that sometimes you drink tequila or Jack Daniels until you puke and don’t remember much the next day, when you’re still drunk anyway.

And you will never, ever have to see the people from one of the loneliest years of your life any more if you don’t want to. In fact, I can tell you that you’ll last see them in 1979. Twenty-nine years later, you won’t have seen any of them since graduation, although you will come pretty close to attending one class reunion before deciding to let it go. Not because you think you’re too good. Because you don’t want to think about those days ever again.

Ginny and Jae, prom 2008

I’ve been prying staples from my teenager’s wall this week, pulling down her collage of images from magazines. Scraping candle wax off her nightstand. Emptying “her” bathroom drawer of lotions and eyeliner pencils. Sorting the tangled necklaces, stray playing cards, and other detritus in her room into logical piles and then packing them in cardboard boxes. Washing and folding the few clothes she left behind. Sewing the torn seams in her lime green cotton skirt and repairing the loose buttons on her new black sweater.

Having something to do has helped, because I’ve been in a fog of grief.

On July 28, I was sitting in front of my computer in the new office building where my work group had moved. The phone rang, and it was my 18-year-old, Ginny, asking me if I could take the call away from my desk. I was busy, so I told her to just spill it. And she did.

She was moving out. Right then. With only her clothes, her computer, her guitar, some books and jewelry, and her tall dresser.

She was moving to Georgia to live with her 21-year-old lover, Jae. They sprang the move on me like this because Ginny was afraid I would not let her take her stuff and also because I “can be intimidating.”

She is walking away from tens of thousands in college scholarships here in the Memphis area. She left without even having a driver’s license yet. With stitches still in her gums from wisdom teeth surgery. Without her ADD medication. Without any money.

I didn’t get to hug her goodbye.

There wasn’t a fight that pushed her toward the door. There was never a lack of love and acceptance for the fact she’s gay (Jae is a girl and has been a welcome guest in our home). The letter Ginny left behind said that I had laid out a path for her that she wasn’t willing to follow. That path was a college major she chose, at a private school she agreed was her best option, paired with our state’s lottery scholarship. I had promised to buy her plane tickets to Georgia at least once a month to visit her girlfriend as long as her grades remained good enough to keep her scholarships. I would help with gas money if she wanted to drive over on other weekends.

It wasn’t enough.

We continued to treat her like a child and would not let her grow up, her letter said. That’s the part that made me sigh. She was referring to how she graduated from high school by the skin of her teeth, and only then because the family spent an exhausting year putting pressure on her to study. She worked hard — eventually — and a few weeks ago told me she was resentful I had not appreciated her efforts more. That’s the part that made my jaw drop and my own anger rise.

In her words, I could hear Jae’s coaching. Because Ginny knows what her girlfriend does not:

• With help from her father, we paid $85/week for twice-weekly private art lessons for a year so she could pursue her passion and beef up her portfolio for college.
• We spent $35/hour we could ill afford on algebra tutoring sessions two or three times per week. I took off work when needed to be sure she got there.
• Her stepfather took her to free before-school algebra tutoring five days a week (including when he was off work on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays), rising at 5:30 a.m. to make sure she was there by 6 a.m. Those were the tutoring sessions we found out she was skipping to go sit in the school library or run out to Starbucks every day — tutoring sessions that would have earned her a point added to her grades each day simply for attending and asking a question. I stopped the skipping by threatening to attend with her and checking her school records daily.
• She skipped out of her first period class many times, earning groundings the two times we found out. The second time, we gave her four major chores to do at home and told her the grounding would be over when she finished the work. (It could have been done in two weeks but she dragged it out for much longer.) We even helped with some of the hardest work.
• She got to go to her senior prom, in the $400 dress she was dying to have, even though it was during one of those grounding periods.
• We celebrated her graduation with her girlfriend coming over, us all eating out, and an expensive necklace Ginny had asked for a few months before. (I would have done more, but money was tight and we could charge the necklace at Kay’s.) We told her over and over how proud we were that she’d had finally dug down inside herself and found the drive and determination to study subjects she hated in order to meet the goal of graduation. I was so PROUD of her. She smiled and hugged us back, shrugging over the necklace. She never wore it except for that night. She wanted a $2,000 new laptop but knew we couldn’t get it right then.
• She was going to get primary use of one of our cars. It’s the car my husband traded in his beloved convertible for because he thought it would be a safer choice for our Ginny. I’m still driving a 2000 car; it runs fine.
• We’ve let her sleep late and be a little lazy this summer because it was such a hard senior year for her and all of us. We’ve made her look for a job but not pushed her very hard.
• We’ve paid for unlimited calls, text messaging, and web access on the new cell phone she got at Christmas so she can talk all she wants to Jae.
• We’ve sat through many a family gathering or meal while she texted Jae or kept the phone glued to her ear.
• We bought her new glasses, the expensive frames she wanted.
• I took her shopping for new clothes for her birthday. Two day of shopping, even though I was exhausted from my own work. It felt good to be at a point in my life where I could finally afford to get a few luxuries for my children. I buy my clothes at Wal-Mart. Hers came from Dillard’s.

She’s right there’s been a lack of respect and gratitude here, but it hasn’t been on our part. I’m angry at her, but there’s nothing you can’t forgive your child, especially when you know she’s immature and naive, in love and in lust, addled by the nagging voice of her selfish lover buzzing in her ear, her own actions driven by her heart instead of her head.

I’m just hollowed out with sorrow. I’m braced for how the real world is going to treat her, for all the bruises she’s going to get with vulnerabilities she doesn’t even know she has.

We aren’t going to help her with money unless it’s an emergency. We’re going to give her the rest of her belongings, of course, as long as she makes advance arrangements to pick them up. I won’t store her things here indefinitely because that’s just enabling her to play adult without responsibilities, and also because it knifes me in the chest every time I see something of hers.

And we’re going to pay for her health insurance premiums as long as our health insurance lets us (at least another year, longer if she does go to school somewhere full time). She is, and always will be, my daughter. I sent her a list of contact information and begged her to pass it to Jae, just in case of emergency.

Ginny eventually gave me an address, after much prompting, but I don’t think it’s accurate. I did a reverse directory look-up on it and it belongs to someone I don’t know. I suspect it’s for one of Jae’s friends or relatives. The address I found online for Jae is different and jibes better with my memory of the street name Ginny once mentioned. But I’ll use the address she gave.

So right now, I don’t know exactly where she is, who she’s with, what her real plans are, or if she’s safe and well cared for. And I can barely breathe.

Hey Internet buddies! I got tagged for the Six Random Things About Me meme a while back. I’ve hesitated about participating because I blurt so damned much about myself that I wonder what I *haven’t* said already. And all the blurty things I usually think of are soooo unflattering (like wondering if I got a boob job whether that would perk The Gals up or just weight them down further in their slide toward my waist).

But I feel silly today, so here goes:

1. I can write backwards. And upside down.
2. I love to get the tweezers and pluck my husband’s stray hairs. Now when I stand next to a man and see the sunlight glinting off his ear sproutage, I just think, “Aw, what’s the matter — doesn’t anyone love you?”
3. I have absolutely zero talent at styling my daughters’ hair and never have. My 18-year-old still remembers when I seared the tip of her tender ear with a curling iron WHEN SHE WAS THREE.
4. I can’t stand for anyone to touch my bellybutton, and I get absolutely weak-kneed squicked out if I see people touch theirs. (Imagine how well I did with ultrasounds when I was pregnant.)
   

   Photo credit: whimsical truth

5. I can’t snap my fingers with my left hand. The right, sure. But the leftie just won’t work that way.
6. UPDATED to add #6, since one of my random things is that I apparently can’t count.

I don’t tag others very often, so I’ll just invite anyone who likes to participate to have at it. Here are the meme rules if you want to play along:

• Link to the person who tagged you.
• Post the rules on your blog.
• Write six random things about yourself.
• Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
• Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.
• Let your tagger know when your blog entry is up.

C’mon — get random with me. :o)