I have a facebook chat with a couple of my closest girlfriends that's been going on sporadically for about six months now, in preparation. Thank heavens they both have better memories, and more remaining ties to the town, than me, and can catch me up on who married whom and where they are now and who that one guy is I seriously cannot remember even though there were only 46 kids in our graduating class. Did he really go to school with us?!
With the big weekend quickly approaching, I decided to dig out my yearbooks and freshen up my name-face recognition a bit (not that everyone will still look just the same, but I figure it can't hurt). In the process, I came across a stack of my old journals. Two of them in particular seem to cover the majority of high school. There was another very poorly written one that was from junior high. I skimmed it and shook my head at my own silliness, but had hopes that the high school ones would be better.
Oh, folks. Oh gosh. If I ever needed a window into what my girls are going through now and what they will be going through over the next 7 to 16 years (depending on the girl in question), I just got one. It was not pretty.
I consider myself to be a pretty even keel sort of gal. I've always been cheerful and relatively easy going. When I look back on high school and junior high, with the exception of a few specific bad incidents, I'd say I had a really great experience. I am confident I have uttered the words "I loved high school!" with a straight face.
You would not know that from these journals! They are incredibly angst ridden. I was "so depressed" and "so lonely" and yada yada yada. Spattered among the whining I have jotted down things like "not that I can really complain" or "I know my life is good" so hopefully if someone ever stumbled across them they'd see through the ridiculousness to the good parts. But I hardly wrote the good parts. Mostly I just wrote about whatever boy I was currently "so in love with it hurts" or other cheese-tastic awfulness that had me alternating between gagging and laughing today. I was forever in love with boys who didn't know I existed, or at least didn't care.
Looking back on it now it's so easy to laugh! Clearly none of those "loves" was meant to be and even more to point, they weren't necessary, since I found a wonderful guy and was no worse off for not having dated much in high school. But I can remember, and the writing makes it clear, how much it cut me to the core at the time. It makes me wonder how to teach my daughters how unnecessary those silly romances are because in the end there'll only be one that really matters... (I'm envisioning Kirstin Dunst's Amy in Little Women, "You don't need scores of suitors. You need only one... if he's the right one.") but I'm not sure that's something the developing adolescent girl's brain can really absorb.
I seriously wrote in almost every post about the boy I was "in love with" and how he never even looked at me, and how this friend or that was seeing someone and how unfair it all was. I would have thought I was more sensible than that. Maybe what I should really take away is that a girl who sounds that absurdly flighty can still turn into a fairly reasonable human being.
My older two girls each have journals that they use to write back and forth with me. It's sporadic; typically one will pull hers out when she feels slighted by us or by her sister or by someone at school. Ruth only got hers recently, and I was struck by the drama of her tone and the "I don't know what to do" vibe that's very "dear Amy" when in daily life she appears very chill. When I started reading my old journals, though, it was all there. That same overly-concerned-about-things-of-no-importance tone. It reminds me that they can't see past the silliness sometimes, to the really important stuff, because the silly things ARE really important to them. If nothing else, I hope my perusal of my own old writings today will help me remember that what I see as truly important and what they feel as truly important may not often align, and I need to come to them where they are if I'm going to help them and keep them coming to me for advice.
Also, I shouldn't be so hard on them for grammar and spelling issues, because my junior high journal was a joke in that regard.
2 comments:
I think all the silly romances prepare us for the real one. Plus, they've helped T. Swift make billions.
g.
This is good. It's cool that you are able to look back and help your girls.
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