Thursday, January 26, 2012
Monday, January 23, 2012
Reflections On LEHS Experience #1: I call this one "Sorry, Pete."
It is interesting to note that so little of my memory of high school has to do with academics. In fact, my only two real memories of the first day at LEHS had nothing to do with the school day at all. These two experiences weren’t even remotely akin to trying to locate my Biology class, or avoiding the upperclassmen who would try to direct you to the nonexistent fourth floor pool I had been so warned about by my siblings, but rather, I remember very clearly standing in front of the main door in my new pastel green skirt and white cowboy boots coming off of the morning bus, and the Drama Club meeting after the 2:30 bell. The former memory is merely me, completely unsure of what is to come on that fateful first day of high school, the latter is pretty much how the rest of my life panned out.
I had chosen carefully the outfit I was going to wear but I do remember that the weather was not necessarily cooperating with my choices. It was unseasonably cool that morning and my sister’s boots had become damp on the inside from walking across the campus grass. I was a good six to ten months younger than most of my classmates but unfortunately taller than most, with feet that could fit inside a twenty four year old’s cowboy boots.
My height had plagued me since I was in sixth grade, and here I was three years later, an inch and a half shy of the full 5’9” I would eventually reach and I was working hard to stay cool, blend in, look natural, with wet feet and ruined boots that would catch me all sorts of hell as soon as I got home. But I couldn’t think about that yet. I was focused on what did I look like? Standing here, did I look like this was normal? Did I belong? How about here?
To this day, I see pictures of myself from back then and can’t see anything but the head towering over the boys nearby, the white and pink knobby knees the only curves I possessed. Even now I can’t forgive that skinny little thing enough to even think that she may have been okay looking – her hair was pretty good, right? No, I was so wrapped up in that pubescent awkwardness that I still have a difficult time looking at that poor girl with any objectivity.
The drama meeting had been one of the hundred announcements coming over the crackly loudspeaker that morning, after our moment of meditation and reverent silence that was intended to allow room for school prayer if one was so inclined. In all four years I was there, I didn’t know anyone who really was.
Since the third or fourth grade, when I had first seen my older sisters come out from behind that black and gold curtain at an assembly at the big high school auditorium, I knew I wanted to be in the Lynn English High School Drama Club. The DC performances had been stuff of legend in Lynn during those years just previous and even the new director, and all of the changes that the old director’s hasty removal had implied, still couldn’t dampen my enthusiasm to be close to that magical place in my own right. My new friend Heather and I looked at one another across homeroom and silently agreed to go right to the theater after school got out.
I had only met Heather at the bus stop that morning. She was new to the neighborhood and I had seen her around once or twice over the summer. I was glad that she was in my homeroom and we could take the later bus together after the meeting. She was a nice girl, with a big smile and tiny teeth. We sat together in the huge theater, a two person homogeneous grouping clinging together for safety, a vestige from our junior high school days when the girls ran in deep packs. It was better not to be noticed individually just then, we were not quite ready to be unique just yet. Heather would leave LEHS at the end of the school year, and I would not see her again until at a party after graduation at a mutual friend’s who had bothered to keep in touch with her.
The meeting mentioned something about upcoming auditions and a production in early December and then quickly wrapped up. I don’t remember much about the content, but I do remember that mostly everyone hung around talking. We stayed, lingering for a minute, not sure if we should go yet or maybe we would miss another announcement. Two boys approached the two of us. I could see they were older boys. Senior boys, as a matter of fact. One had a backpack and one had a case I could only imagine held cassette tapes.
The cassette tape one seemed to take a lot of pride in the case and made a great show of displaying its contents. He could have had it handcuffed to his wrist and opened it with a key, it wouldn’t have really added much to the performance. He made a good deal about setting it down gently on the seat in front of us and making sure the seat didn’t tip back as they introduced themselves. The four of us chatted well enough, and I peered over at the cassette tapes and noticed something familiar.
“Hey, I have that one,” I nodded.
The older boy took a moment, his eyebrows went down. He smirked right at me. “That one?”
“Yup.”
He asked again, “That one?”
“Yes, that one.” I affirmed. His obvious disbelief annoyed me.
“Oh-kaay,” he dragged out the syllables and he smiled at his companion, like he knew something.
What? Why couldn’t I have that tape? “I’m not kidding. I have that one too.”
He looked down at my second choice, “Yeah,” he nodded. “Sure.” He was nodding but not agreeing. He was agreeing but not believing.
He didn’t believe me. Why wouldn’t he believe me?
I folded my arms, “I’m telling you the truth.”
“I’m sorry.” His superiority was maddening.
“For?”
“No one has ‘Nursery Cryme,’ you have to special order it,” he replied smugly. So smug. So smarmy. “It takes six weeks.”
This was completely infuriating. Why would I lie about something like that? I don’t even know him, why would this boy think I was lying?
“I know. My sister works at a record store.”
“Of course she does.” He and his friend laughed. He closed his precious tape case. “You know what, suck ups, let’s show you the auditorium.”
They escorted us around the entire theater and made jokes at our freshman expense. I don’t know why I let them, I was seething. Weren’t they talking to us to be friendly? That little exchange was decidely not friendly. I tried to make light of it, tried to be game about it, but honestly, by the end of that tour, before Heather and I in my ruined boots would breathlessly catch the late bus home, I firmly concluded in my head that this older boy, this senior boy with his stupid - well, not stupid because I had a lot of them at my house - with his cassette tapes was a complete and total asshole.
And I just realized that I will be married to that asshole fifteen years this June.
Friday, January 20, 2012
A Spy In The House of What Is It Exactly?
This week’s assignment was one that I found particularly appropriate. My son is 11 years old and my daughter is 9, and if the rate at which I am buying new pants and shoes is any indication, I think we are rapidly approaching puberty, which has made me reflect long and hard on my own experiences.
The readings from this week’s assignments brought me back to the Health and Biology classes that I had to take in junior and high school. I remember understanding very little of the material, but it may have been because I was giggling over the photos of boy’s development, and hotly embarrassed over the pictures of girl’s development in the text books. I learned about the physical changes of puberty much like a few of the children in the introduction of the chapter, in quiet late night conversations with my sleeping-over girlfriends, by researching in my older sisters’ trashy Jackie Collins novels or by half-listening during my classes at school. It all felt so clandestine, and mysterious, like I was some ne’erdowell spy looking for some kind of information that if someone actually had to tell me, they would then have to kill me. My parents, being of an older generation than most of my peers, were decidedly close-mouthed about the whole experience, at odds with the fact that my mother was a nurse.
I spent my summers at our home in Vermont with my parents. My brothers and sisters were upwards of eight years older than I was and so much of my time was spent in the company of my mom and dad. I remember having my first period in the August of my 11th year. My mother must have been doing the laundry and noticed some blood stains, and I remember laying in the top bunk of my bed and my mom coming in, waking me up and red-faced explaining the process of menstruation, about how my body was getting older and changing, but in her stilted explanations she failed to mention the changes in relation to *gasp* S-E-X. I was still half-asleep, but I nodded and tried not to look her in the eyes. I had already discovered the secret a few days earlier, and pretty much had figured out what was going on from my surreptitious and calculated fact-gathering.
At that time, I was not quite yet privy to all of the information about the periods in my household, but after a few months I would find out how the Blatchford girls historically had periods so painfully debilitating and irregular that I would soon be spending random days out of school in such physical agony near to the point of fainting. At the time I wondered, how could someone so skinny lose that much blood and not die? I often felt that I wanted to die from the pain, and my dad, in on the family secret I imagined only through necessity, would prescribe from his living room chair, “an aspirin, some gin and a M1 helmet.” From beyond the code of silence, over the coming years, our collective periods were dealt with through humor, but still, sex, or even the idea of what my brother may have gone through was not discussed in front of me.
Sex made me ridiculously curious. I was preternaturally annoying about knowledge in general as a child; I needed to know everything, all the time, right now. And adolescence had kindled a new fire in me, there was something that everyone was keeping from me and I needed to know what it was. Jackie Collins, for all her raunchy descriptions, did actually very little to inform me about the process of sex and how it related a boy to me. I needed, although unaware of the pun at the time, hard facts. I remember picking through some of my sister’s things and stumbling upon her birth control pills, something that she had clearly forgotten to take, which had caused a minor scandal in our household, and poring over the information packet folded inside the funny yellow hexagram. She caught me with them and I tried to explain that I knew she wasn’t using them so why couldn’t I just see what they’re… That was not a pleasant day.
Thankfully, school came to my rescue. I was able to piece together a somewhat cohesive picture between my own findings and what happened biologically as described by my science teacher. I am thankful for sex education, because I sure wasn’t getting it at home.
Which as I have come to believe has informed my relationship with my own son and daughter. As my husband and I had compared notes on the subjects of puberty, development and sex, we found that neither of us were ever told anything from our parents that we a.) didn’t actually figure out already b.) could relate ourselves to another human being. We had made a decision together that we would answer any of our kids’ questions with as little or as much detail as they asked for. We have been pretty honest with them about their private parts, how and where babies are made and what happens as you get older and how they will change. I was always surprised at how satisfied they would seem with just some small description and they would move on, either we could congratulate ourselves that we had successfully sated their curiosity with our deliberate matter-of-factedness, or my husband and I could admit that maybe they just had very short attention spans.
Still, despite all this preparation, I feel like I should be doing something right now to prepare them for the physical storm about to brew. My son is heading into middle school in the next year, and I feel like I still haven’t told him enough to prepare him for the sexual onslaught that junior high can bring. I have taught middle and high school for a while and I know how rife with misinformation and confusion and ridicule this time of life is. I know that soon, we will have to sit down and have, not just the short Q&A, but the real life “talk.” But then again, can’t I just do what my parents did? We have always had books about the human body lying around, maybe I will just leave the chapter on puberty open on the coffee table and hope that “someone” picks it up and does a little clandestine spy research of his own.
I know. I know. It was just a thought.
The readings from this week’s assignments brought me back to the Health and Biology classes that I had to take in junior and high school. I remember understanding very little of the material, but it may have been because I was giggling over the photos of boy’s development, and hotly embarrassed over the pictures of girl’s development in the text books. I learned about the physical changes of puberty much like a few of the children in the introduction of the chapter, in quiet late night conversations with my sleeping-over girlfriends, by researching in my older sisters’ trashy Jackie Collins novels or by half-listening during my classes at school. It all felt so clandestine, and mysterious, like I was some ne’erdowell spy looking for some kind of information that if someone actually had to tell me, they would then have to kill me. My parents, being of an older generation than most of my peers, were decidedly close-mouthed about the whole experience, at odds with the fact that my mother was a nurse.
I spent my summers at our home in Vermont with my parents. My brothers and sisters were upwards of eight years older than I was and so much of my time was spent in the company of my mom and dad. I remember having my first period in the August of my 11th year. My mother must have been doing the laundry and noticed some blood stains, and I remember laying in the top bunk of my bed and my mom coming in, waking me up and red-faced explaining the process of menstruation, about how my body was getting older and changing, but in her stilted explanations she failed to mention the changes in relation to *gasp* S-E-X. I was still half-asleep, but I nodded and tried not to look her in the eyes. I had already discovered the secret a few days earlier, and pretty much had figured out what was going on from my surreptitious and calculated fact-gathering.
At that time, I was not quite yet privy to all of the information about the periods in my household, but after a few months I would find out how the Blatchford girls historically had periods so painfully debilitating and irregular that I would soon be spending random days out of school in such physical agony near to the point of fainting. At the time I wondered, how could someone so skinny lose that much blood and not die? I often felt that I wanted to die from the pain, and my dad, in on the family secret I imagined only through necessity, would prescribe from his living room chair, “an aspirin, some gin and a M1 helmet.” From beyond the code of silence, over the coming years, our collective periods were dealt with through humor, but still, sex, or even the idea of what my brother may have gone through was not discussed in front of me.
Sex made me ridiculously curious. I was preternaturally annoying about knowledge in general as a child; I needed to know everything, all the time, right now. And adolescence had kindled a new fire in me, there was something that everyone was keeping from me and I needed to know what it was. Jackie Collins, for all her raunchy descriptions, did actually very little to inform me about the process of sex and how it related a boy to me. I needed, although unaware of the pun at the time, hard facts. I remember picking through some of my sister’s things and stumbling upon her birth control pills, something that she had clearly forgotten to take, which had caused a minor scandal in our household, and poring over the information packet folded inside the funny yellow hexagram. She caught me with them and I tried to explain that I knew she wasn’t using them so why couldn’t I just see what they’re… That was not a pleasant day.
Thankfully, school came to my rescue. I was able to piece together a somewhat cohesive picture between my own findings and what happened biologically as described by my science teacher. I am thankful for sex education, because I sure wasn’t getting it at home.
Which as I have come to believe has informed my relationship with my own son and daughter. As my husband and I had compared notes on the subjects of puberty, development and sex, we found that neither of us were ever told anything from our parents that we a.) didn’t actually figure out already b.) could relate ourselves to another human being. We had made a decision together that we would answer any of our kids’ questions with as little or as much detail as they asked for. We have been pretty honest with them about their private parts, how and where babies are made and what happens as you get older and how they will change. I was always surprised at how satisfied they would seem with just some small description and they would move on, either we could congratulate ourselves that we had successfully sated their curiosity with our deliberate matter-of-factedness, or my husband and I could admit that maybe they just had very short attention spans.
Still, despite all this preparation, I feel like I should be doing something right now to prepare them for the physical storm about to brew. My son is heading into middle school in the next year, and I feel like I still haven’t told him enough to prepare him for the sexual onslaught that junior high can bring. I have taught middle and high school for a while and I know how rife with misinformation and confusion and ridicule this time of life is. I know that soon, we will have to sit down and have, not just the short Q&A, but the real life “talk.” But then again, can’t I just do what my parents did? We have always had books about the human body lying around, maybe I will just leave the chapter on puberty open on the coffee table and hope that “someone” picks it up and does a little clandestine spy research of his own.
I know. I know. It was just a thought.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)