12-15: High Expectations, Crushing Disappointment
When you are 12 years old, it feels like you are on the cusp of
something big. Finally, it seems, things are about to start happening. It is
almost your turn to live the golden, legendary teenagerhood promised by
Grease and John Hughes, Seventeen and "90210," Christopher Pike and Sweet Valley High. Elementary school is over. The storied, vaguely glamorous
corridors of middle school are now yours to roam. You brush elbows daily
with the rock-star cool older siblings of your friends and take classes as
exotic-sounding and famously hateful as Algebra, Home-Ec, and Biology. You
have a locker now, and a team to root for, and you can eat whatever you want
for lunch. There are school dances to go to, notes to pass, crushes to
have.
Everything is exactly like you thought it would be. Only it sucks.
Between 12 and 15, that "almost, but not quite"
phenomenon is the story of your life. You go to the movies with your friends
on Saturday night, which feels cool and teenagerly, but getting there and
back necessitates mortifying carpools involving mothers and minivans. You
get invited to your first real party, but your mom finds out it's
unchaperoned and won't let you go. You are positive that your life would be
vastly improved if you could drive, or stay out later, or your parents
would quit treating you like a baby. However, you have not yet abandoned
hope for a cooler, wildly fun future, as your 16th birthday still
twinkles promisingly on the horizon.
By 13, you have developed a nuanced understanding of your
school's social hierarchy and your own place within it. You've also become keenly aware of brands — not only of your own jeans
and sneakers, but of everyone else's — and what they imply. Painful, unabating,
hyper-self-awareness consumes you, and you begin to agonize about your
appearance. Meanwhile, puberty arrives, in all of its horrible,
unpredictable glory, bearing extravagant gifts of pubic hair, body odor and
acne. Boys get little dirt moustaches and exuberantly ill-timed boners.
Girls get periods and boobs, although never the boobs they had wanted. The
only thing worse than going through puberty is not going through puberty,
like the tiny, late-blooming boy in your class whose biological clock seems
to have been set for daylight saving time.
One of the few things more demoralizing than the actual experience of
puberty is listening to the adults in your life explain it to you.
Unfortunately, between 12 and 15, most kids must endure
the Puberty Talk at home, at school and possibly in some sort of religious
youth group situation.
The Puberty Talk isn't the same as the "birds and bees" conversation that
people have in movies — it isn't primarily about where babies come from. (One would be hard pressed to find a 12-year-old these days lacking that
particular information.) The Puberty Talk usually begins something like
this:
You have probably noticed that there are some changes happening to your
body. Maybe you've grown taller or your feet have gotten larger. This is
perfectly normal for young people your age. Did you know that your body is
actually changing on the inside as well? You are transforming from a child
to an adult. Your brain is sending special messages to your body to grow and
develop, so that some day, you can have children of your own. This happens
to boys and to girls, but in different ways. It's called puberty.
Soon words like "menstruation," "sanitary napkin," "erection," and
"nocturnal emission" start getting thrown around, and the pubescent audience
cringes and rolls its eyes at the embarrassing, patronizing indignity of it
all. A stupid video is played, cheesy pamphlets are distributed, and after a
largely silent Q&A period, the Puberty Talk mercifully ends.
At my house, the Puberty Talk never ended. My mom was a childbirth educator
who taught Lamaze and breast-feeding classes. She also taught a class for
9-to-13-year-old girls called "From Girl to Woman: Growing Up/Growing Together" and
regularly used me as a guinea pig to test out various educational books and
movies. I specifically remember a video featuring the entire cast of "Annie,"
all grown up and discussing their pubescent foibles, and a book that
suggested its readers pretend to be fallopian tubes by extending their arms
straight out to the sides and spreading their fingers as if palming
basketballs.
Of all of the massively embarrassing moments I endured as a 12 to
15 year old, the worst was when, at the age of 14, my little
boyfriend and I opened the trunk of my mom's car and discovered amongst some
grocery bags a single stuffed boob. It was just rolling around in there — some kind of teaching tool, about the size of a football and not dissimilar in
shape. There was a weird elastic strap on the back of it. I prayed for
death. We stared at the boob in speechless horror for about 30 seconds.
Then my boyfriend turned to me and asked, "Where's the other one?"
It is likely that these four years are the most humiliating, uncomfortable,
unpleasant, and disappointing that you will ever weather. But don't abandon
hope. After all, you're just about to hit 16, the age when you'll
finally emerge from the shadow of puberty and pass into the golden,
legendary teenagerhood that you were promised. Or at least you can always
hope.
— Alissa Rowinsky Wright (alissa@flakmag.com)
