8-11: The Ugly Years
If you're lucky, you escape it with a good sense of humor and a bitterness that you'll be able to suppress for the rest of your life and perhaps turn into a lucrative career the way Janeane Garofalo did. If you're unlucky, you never get over it, and it's possible that your name is mentioned in the news later in life along with words like "estranged" and "disgruntled."
Without a doubt, the ages of 8 to 11 are the physically ugliest of anyone's lives. It's worse than puberty; puberty offers at least a hopeful glimpse towards a more improved future. 8 to 11, however, are the pre-puberty years, where nothing is right at all.
It's a dance of biology, and nobody is dancing together. Allow me to hearken back to those days and recall everything that was wrong with me, physically:
— I was growing out my bangs, so that I no longer had that shaggy, greasy shield to cover the...
— Brand-new, super-shiny oily complexion I had developed, which was complemented nicely by...
— Brand new, super-shiny braces, accented colored rubber bands (and
occasionally pieces of spinach), which were not nearly as colorful as...
— My glasses.
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| Portrait of the author as a young woman. |
Ah yes, the glasses of an adolescent in the late '80s. If you've had them, you'll never forget them. There was no such thing as a cute, subtle, or charming pair of glasses for youngsters at that time. I remember mine. They were thick plastic. And they were blue and pink. Not one color, but two. To quote a friend of mine who also had to suffer the consequences of having bad vision at an early age, "How can any parents allow their child to look like that? To go out in public like that? These parents must not love their children."
Some people might argue that, of course, there is more to life during those years than the shame of being physically unattractive. Of course, those people don't remember childhood at all, do they? The cruel joke of that stage of life is that while you descend into your most unattractive and awkward, the emphasis on being attractive, cool, and popular begins its first wild ascent. You become conscious of popular culture, of those beautiful, perfect über-teens that you must become and emulate. Meanwhile, you look like somebody too ugly to be kidnapped. The girls in Sassy and Seventeen, meanwhile, mocked you with their matte skin and cute clothes from within their pages. The days of being either sassy or 17 seemed like they'd never come.
Of course, an entire era of one's life cannot be completely condemned. Without the Ugly Years, many of us would not be without a certain amount of self-deprecation. You might now be beautiful, rich, with a great job, and a wonderful family. But at one point during your childhood, you were horrible. It's okay to admit it, we all were there. It's one of those human experiences that everyone can commiserate over, no matter who you are or where you're from.
And those of us who managed to eschew that wondrously painful awkward age... well, you'll get what's coming to you, one of these days. These are the people who were the child beauty pageanters, the people who really had an awful-looking teenagerdom, the people with really, really bad personalities.
That's because they never had to deal with that time of life. They never dreaded their school pictures. They never had a popular boy look at one of said pictures and say out loud, so everyone could hear, "Claire's face is so shiny in this picture, I can see my reflection!"
Yes, they'll get theirs.
— Claire Zulkey (clairezulkey@hotmail.com)
