Growing Pains

Okay, no one loves junior high school, with one exception.  I'll call that exception, 'Anna'.  Anna came home from seventh grade one day and said (and I am not making this up), "Mom.  I just love junior high."  But she is the exception to the rule.

Before junior high, life made sense.  I wore clean clothes, my hair was always combed (seriously, in an old photo taken while camping at Yellowstone, my hair was braided neatly and I wore a headband that matched my shirt).  We lived in a pretty blue house with a swimming pool.  We were boy scouts and girl scouts.  We went on vacation every summer.  My father worked relatively close to home and my mother was a teacher.

I was a good girl and felt sure that my teachers, neighbors, aunts, uncles and grandparents loved me. I did well in school with minimal effort and I won foot races and spelling bees.  When I got into trouble it was for mild misbehavior (tattling, not sharing, answering back).  If something or someone upset me, I could easily find an adult to give me sympathy along with a warm hug and like a Band-aid on a skinned knee, I felt better.  Life was good.

Then I entered seventh grade and everything changed.  My parents were divorced and we'd moved to a smaller house in a different neighborhood.  It was a nice house and a nice neighborhood, but it was different.  Suddenly my clothes didn't fit without the benefit of safety pins.  I was too tall and too thin to wear anything off the rack.  Mom purchased an enormous box of Wate-On and I was expected to choke down six of the dry, chalky tablets every day.  I wore braces that always seemed to have food stuck in them and I began to get pimples.

Now school didn't work the way it was supposed to work.  I understood little of what the math teacher was saying (base 12? slide rules?).  I couldn't get my locker open and was always late to class.  For the first time in my life, I had teachers who seemed annoyed with me.  Friends I had had all through elementary school were different.  They had grown up over the summer, dressing in a way that was foreign to me.  I was still wearing tennis shoes and knee socks but they were wearing kitten heels and stockings.

I had lived a charmed life and without warning, I had fallen from grace.  The contrast was stunning.  I lost confidence in myself and spent most of my time playing catch up.  In those days I blamed it on my parents' divorce, but I now I know it wasn't the divorce.  It was adolescence and I wasn't alone.