A Certain Age

on growing pains

And the days go by, like a strand in the wind, in the web that is my own, I begin again…

Returning to our car in the sprawling mall parking lot last weekend, at a distance we heard a pack of adolescent girls screaming. Like mortal danger screaming. My husband snapped his head towards the sound, alarmed, and we saw them parading through the intersection and down the opposite block, tilting into the chorus of each other with full-throated shrieks and howls, not at all blood-spattered, broken, or under attack. “What the hell?” he paused with his hand on the car door, and then before starting the engine, “What is wrong with them?”

But I was not alarmed or even annoyed. I know why unscathed girls scream in the street; I remember it deep in my ribs. Their uniform of black leggings/big sweatshirts or big jeans/shrunken tanks is a little different than ours was, but their bewildering bodies are the same: those glass boxes smeared from the inside with handprints pressing to define the edges, that tightness in the chords always itching to be stretched. Their screams test the strength of the glass walls like the T-Rex poking the fence for weak spots, and they call each other closer, each one a test kit to herself and to the collective, an enclave body that shelters them through the hard growing.

I had a storybook 1980s childhood, and in hindsight I loved being a teenage girl, frothed daily into the screamy angst and all. You might never persuade me that 17 isn’t the dream, and my nostalgia makes me desperate to know how to best be with the adolescents I'm now surrounded by at school. Perhaps since I have become their parents’ age, the stakes of my time with them seem higher. For many years I got to play their bookish older cousin; I could pass for one of them on the first day, pop culture references usually landed, and with focus we could find shared understanding of any text. But they are 100% digital natives now, all but the rare “returning student” were born in a different millennium. That diction sounds melodramatic, which I sure am, but it sure is not. The difference between adapting to cyberspace and smart phones as an adult vs arriving at birth with them, creating yourself with them, is obviously colossal. I’m hoping not catastrophic.

Marc Maron was ranting with someone on WTF when he described phones in a way I had to play back and scribble on a Starbucks napkin — he called them “…trauma mills; they shatter the brain’s ability to contextualize properly. Rocket fuel.”

I want to be a nimble cartographer for my student’s still-mapping minds, but their main accessory pulls them beyond my fingertips. I can’t get half of them to repeat an idea I've just offered, never mind write an original response. I can’t get them to write by hand in a journal even on a nature walk; they’re sitting on glacial erratic rocks in the delicious dappled sun of our campus food forest jotting notes on a phone. I know all the reasons they've come to this, but I can’t find it in my heart to understand. Just having one all-purpose tool is radically foreign to my sense of how a human is grown. What single thing in the late 20^th century could compare to a smart phone? Every day required so many clunky wonderfully palpable things that fed us, wore us out, defined us. What would we be if we’d given up our effort, our patience, our juggling mastery?

I hate to admit how much I struggle for empathy. And to make matters worse, I don’t have my wits about me. The re-puberty that is menopause has me addled, awash in feeling unfit for any public appearance. Though I can easily glimpse my 17yo self on the horizon behind me all the time, I can’t run or climb or crawl to her because my body is disintegrating. I can’t confidently bend to grab an eraser when I drop it on the floor in class. And it’s all I can do not to be the one screaming, at them: I know it’s unimaginable, I remember, but I swear this will happen to you, too. In a blink. You'll only have what you have done and thought and held so I'm just about begging you, please be all here and think and practice and turn each piece over in your hands. Please scream in the street, if otherwise you'll curl inward and inward in silence…

I’ve built an echo chamber of teenagers around me just as I have with my peers -- I have found and/or been found by the few young women who are rooted in the full-blooming world, fully expressive, ever creating, connecting, and curious, enchanted with life even as it batters them and breaks their hearts. And because I see it’s somehow still possible, I can’t give up on the rest of them. I know what a unicorn is, and that I can’t remix that very special sauce, but what else am I going to do?

Fall was always my favorite season, until I reached the rough side of middle age; now I'm all about June. Baffled, in fact, by how anything ever felt better than the long long light, blinding green, bounty of berries. The rest of the year now is just waiting for summer, burning the summer fuel down to the fumes. I also live for June now, I’m afraid, to get away from students (in person at least), who I don't believe have emotional access to seasons whose bounties or scarcities don’t register on a screen, without cheeks in the wind or hands in the water or soil. I might be running into summer away from how ancient I am amidst them, racing past the old-enough-to-be-your-parents margin into some outlandish will-I-really-still-be-standing-here-when-I’m-as-old-as-your-grandparents space; or I might be just hiding from how sad it is that I’m already too far away to reach them.