Musings

Have you ever wanted to go back in time and have a nice long chat with your adolescent self?  Probably.  Most of us have at one point or another.  Lately I've been wanting to go back and talk to the girl I was around age 14-15.

That was a very turbulent time in my life, even by most teenagers' standards.  I never had anything resembling a stable home life as a child.  My mother was severely mentally ill for almost my entire childhood and adolescence, and her illness continues to this day. (She just got out of the hospital for the umpteenth time yesterday, in fact). My father was married and divorced multiple times, and I got shuffled back and forth between both parents, and suffered through multiple divorces as a kid, not to mention witnessed a lot of stuff no kid should ever have to see.  Suffice to say I pretty much raised myself after the age of ten or so, and as such I developed a very thick skin from a very early age----something that's served me well as a writer, but not so well when it comes to emotions and personal relationships.

I was also a social misfit as a kid and had few friends my own age.  At school I was the "smart artist girl" and a social outcast, since I was into different clothes and music than anybody else was, not to mention a transplant to a small town from a large city who switched school districts four times in five years. (To give you an example of just how ass-backwards the town I spent my adolescence in was, I got made fun of by the 'cool kids' for liking U2.  In 1987, when U2 was the biggest band in the world). But I made up for my lack of social life in an odd way. My dad was involved in a lot of activities (historical reinactment) that he would drag me to on weekends, and as a result of that I got introduced to a lot of older people. And being the smart precocious kid that I was, I became friends with a lot of adults----college age and older---when I was still in junior high along with a few high school kids (none from my hometown).  Some of those people remain my friends to this day, and I'm still in touch with them. 

But I was still a kid, and as such I didn't necessarily understand a lot about adult relationships or how they worked.  What was odd was, some of these people kind of forgot that I was a kid at all (I was very mature for my age, physically and emotionally) and treated me like an adult, one of their peers.  Some of them even, shall we say, made passes at me.  Not physically, per se----but you know what I mean.  They wanted something from their relationship with me that I just wasn't prepared to give at the time.  And mature/precocious or no, I was still a kid, and a lot of that just flew straight over my head, so what they were looking for didn't even register in the first place.  Despite all the crap I'd been dragged through from an early age, in most ways I was still an innocent.

I remember when I was about 16 or so, at a family reunion I was bemoaning the fact that I'd never had a boyfriend, that I was the geek tomboy girl that nobody liked, that I was a social misfit who never had a date to the dance, yadayadayada.  One of my relatives sat me down and said, "Honey, you DID have a boyfriend.  A couple years ago. You know, the older boy who used to come visit you all the time and bought you presents."  (One of the people I'd met through my dad's group, several years older than I was, from another town, though we were still both teenagers.)  I remember just staring back at my relative incredulously.  "Oh, you mean So-and-So?  He wasn't my boyfriend.  He was just----well, So-and-So."  And I went right back to bemoaning what a wallflower I was, and my relative just shook her head and skulked off.

I want to go back to the 14-year-old girl I was when So-and-So was hanging around, being really nice and sweet and attentive to me at a time when nobody else was, and knock her upside the head.

Peace.