13 Is the New 18

by Beth J. Harpaz

  There's even a website that automatically supplies “Yo mama” insults, or “snaps,” as they call them. I've seen Taz and his friends sitting at computers, trading these downloaded lines at rapid- fire speed while laughing uproariously.

  “Yo mama's so fat, she could sell shade! … Yo mama's so ugly, even a blind man wouldn't have sex with her! … Yo mama's so nasty, a skunk smelled her ass and passed out!”

  OK, so they're not the most sophisticated jokes you've ever heard, but you can see how they might sound pretty funny if two thirteen- year- old boys were shooting them back and forth every thirty seconds.

  In general, though, I do think mothers of boys have it easier than mothers of girls when it comes to making sense of friendships. And despite the phenomenon of sneakers that cost a hundred dollars and pants that show your boxers, I also think it's easier to be the mother of a boy when it comes to clothing.

  I don't envy all the moms out there who have to police their daughters’ necklines, bra straps, belly buttons, butt cracks, and skirt hem lengths. Things that my friends were embarrassed to be showing when they were thirteen, today most girls go out of their way to show.

  “They want to look lascivious,” one mother of a teenage girl said to me. Another merely said, “I feel sorry for the boys.”

  Arguing with girls over whether their clothing is too suggestive makes my fights over Jordans look easy. But at least most schools have a dress code, so parents can always tell girls that what they're wearing is not going to pass muster at school. My son, on the other hand, will never be called to the principal's office because he spent too much money on his footwear.

  While I am often shocked by the way thirteen- year-old girls dress, there have also been occasions when I have been moved to genuinely compliment a girl on what she's wearing. But my attempts to be nice never go over well. When a forty- something- year- old woman tells a thirteen- year- old girl, “Oh, I like your shoes!” or “Nice earrings!” she might as well be saying, “You are the most uncool person on earth. You look like you just walked out of a dressing room at Wal- Mart. You should strip on the spot, burn what you're wearing, and cover yourself with a sackcloth.”

  Of course, the girls that I've made the mistake of complimenting have all been too polite to run shrieking in the other direction. But even their subdued thank-yous were not enough to hide the looks of sheer horror on their faces. Clearly, there can be no greater insult to an adolescent female than to have a middle- aged woman like your style. I can only imagine how many perfectly fine pieces of jewelry, sweaters, jackets, and boots have been discarded by girls in Taz's circle, simply because I couldn't keep my mouth shut.

  As divine punishment for my insensitivity toward the clothing codes of teenage girls, the good Lord sent me word of my very own thirtieth high school reunion. Immediately upon being told of the date of this momentous event, I started obsessing about what to wear. How could I prove that I was no longer as uncool as I once had been? And what about my gray hair? My wrinkles?

  Well, after long deliberations (not to mention thoughts of changing my name and moving to Costa Rica), I finally decided on the perfect outfit. Then my friend Linda arrived from out of town to go to the party with me and announced right off the bat that my planned outfit— brown corduroy jeans that make me look really skinny and a really cute brown suede jacket— was totally wrong.

  “Corduroy?” she said incredulously. “You're wearing corduroy pants in June with a brown suede jacket? You'll die of heatstroke.”

  Glumly, I realized she was right. It was one of those hot, sticky days with about 110 percent humidity. If I wore what I was planning to wear, I would be drenched in sweat and passing out before I even got to the party. Linda was unhappy with her own choice of shoes for the event, so we set out to go shopping, and I figured maybe I'd buy something else to wear.

  We went to a few stores, and she bought better shoes. I bought a few things, too, but when I got home I realized that one of the tops I'd bought was too trendy, and I didn't want to look like I was trying to act too young, while the other one wasn't trendy enough, which was even worse.

  Suddenly, it hit me that getting ready for my high school reunion was making me feel like I actually was in high school again. I suppressed the urge to scream, “Oh my God, I HATE myself!”

  I tried to get a grip, went back to my closet, and somehow managed to find something suitable to wear. But it was plain and boring and not really all that stylish. Just like how I dressed when I was back in high school. At least my pants weren't too short (now that short pants are in).

  Then I looked in the mirror and realized that the problem really wasn't with my clothes, it was with my hair. I'd dyed the gray out of it, but it was a frizzy mess, as it had always been. (And as we all know, sometimes when people say, “You haven't changed a bit,” it's not a good thing.) But it was too late for a hair makeover; we had to be there in an hour.

  The other problem was with my face. Since when did I have all those pouches and lines in my skin? Why had I thought it was a good idea to be suntanned when I was seventeen?

  Then Linda slipped me the Magic Potion. No, it wasn't a drug or anything, it was wrinkle cream! Oil of Olay Total Effects.

  “Wow, this really works,” I said, a few minutes after applying it and convincing myself that I had fewer lines around my eyes than I had five minutes earlier. Problem was, I still had more lines around my eyes than I did when I graduated from high school.

  We arrived to find several of our former classmates standing outside the appointed gathering place, smoking nervously. They were afraid to go inside, and so were we. Someone else from the class had promised Linda she was going to be early— the first one there! But, of course, when we finally got the nerve to walk in, she was nowhere to be seen.

  Within a few minutes, however, more of our classmates had shown up, including another friend I'd stayed very close to over the years. She handed me a small bag when she saw me.

  “It's a present,” she whispered. “You'll love it.”

  Inside was another brand of wrinkle cream.

  Hours later, after hugging everyone and talking so much that I literally lost my voice, when I looked around at my old acquaintances, I decided that most of us looked better than we had when we were teenagers— I suppose because most of us had found flattering hairstyles (except maybe for me) and could dress the way we wanted instead of how the crowd or our mothers dictated.

  And truth be told, there were very few of these forty-something women who didn't still remind me of their young selves. The ones who were funny and clever still made me laugh; the ones who were serious and brilliant could still hold me in their thrall. I started thinking that maybe being a high school girl wasn't so bad after all— maybe we'd had a lot of fun amid all the social jostling and stress of the cliques.

  It was only later that I realized almost none of the Cool Girls had attended the reunion. Does that mean reunions are basically for dorks? Well, if I was there, then maybe so …

  I ended up corresponding with one of the Cool Girls by e- mail afterward. She confessed to me that being a Cool Girl in high school was very stressful in its own way, but she then pointed out that she actually hadn't been in the very Coolest Clique, she'd been in the Next-to-the-Coolest Clique.

  All of which only made me realize that not only was I incapable of figuring out girls nowadays, but I couldn't even figure out the girls from my own generation. Girls, it seems, are just a mystery to me.

  Which would explain why I was always puzzling over some behavior I'd observe among the girls in Taz's circle. I'd notice them doing something, but have no idea how to interpret it. It was like being a novice wildlife watcher and seeing some creature perform an apparently inexplicable act— like salmon trying to swim upstream, against the current— without having a clue as to why.

  For example, the girls Taz knows have a habit of walking up to him and other boys to give them hugs. I don't think I will ever get used to seeing
this, but it seems to happen every time I go to his school for a teacher conference or some other event. It's a wordless custom, from what I've observed, and there doesn't seem to be any other overt way in which they acknowledge knowing each other. No hi, no smile, no wave, no high- five— just the Hug.

  Witnessing this interaction always makes me feel like I am a tourist in a country where I do not know the customs and cannot speak the language. Yes, I'm living in the Land of Thirteen- Year- Olds, and I sure wish I'd done more research before I ended up here.

  And then there are the calls in the middle of the night. The phone rings a couple of times, just enough to wake you out of a sound sleep. But they hang up before you can actually pick up. These callers, Taz says, are always girls— usually girls at a slumber party daring each other to call boys.

  I've thought about using the ∗69 callback feature to contact a few of their parents, but I don't want to be the grown- up version of a tattletale. So I decided that unless someone else's kid's behavior was causing chronic problems for me, I would let it go. It all seems to be an elaborate dance designed to attract attention from the opposite sex, but if you're really cool, you don't acknowledge that you've noticed anything.

  Besides, for all the strutting I see on corners and subway platforms, for all the sexy screen names, profane MySpace messages, and flirtatious acts— like the wordless hugs and the calls in the middle of the night— it's not like anybody's wearing anybody else's ring, or going on a “date,” or even making out in public places.

  Clearly, these are mere preliminaries to more serious physical interactions and emotional entanglements, but as far as I can tell, for most thirteen- year- olds, it doesn't go much further than “grinding” parties, where they smash their (clothed) bodies against one another while loud pulsing music plays in the background. If a school-sponsored dance starts to go that way, the chaperones are instructed to physically break 'em up. The adults literally insert themselves in between the offending couples and warn them to find another way to enjoy the music. If a home party goes that way, you can only pray that the parent is on the premises and paying attention.

  My personal parenting experience in this regard has been rather limited, due, I suspect, to an uncharacteristic discretion on my son's part. Like most wild creatures, the adolescents I see seem to do a good job of keeping their dating and mating habits secret. Or, as the ten-year- old younger brother of a couple of teenagers I know put it, “My brothers would never talk about girls at home!”

  And in that respect, it may be the one way in which thirteen-year-olds do not act like eighteen-year-olds. Not yet, anyway.

  Here's another sign that I've spent too much time with boys to understand girls. All over the country, thirteen- year- old girls are growing their hair long, in order to some day cut it off and mail it away to charity.

  “Donate your ponytail!” the Locks of Love web site cheerily urges on a page decorated with little red hearts. There are photos of bald kids juxtaposed with pictures of them wearing wigs, and photos of the donors, literally holding their chopped- off ponytails in their hands. Some girls grow their hair for years before making the cut.

  Girls do this as a form of community service, the way other kids raise money for good causes or volunteer at a soup kitchen. But why does the very thought of it make me want to stick my finger down my throat and say “Eeeewww!” Why does it seem so Karen Carpenter to me, so Joan of Arc?

  I know, I know, these girls are doing such a good and kind thing, and giving of themselves in such a sweet, pure, and wholesome way. I would have thought that after all the years I've spent in the company of boys, with their burping contests, diarrhea jokes, whoopee cushions, and murderous video games, that I wouldn't be so creeped out by a disembodied chunk of hair.

  But maybe I'm just so immersed in the culture of boys who want to be bad that I can no longer appreciate the innocence of girls who want to do good by literally giving away a piece of their physical selves. To me, Locks of Love can only fall into the category of “Mysteries of Girls,” and I'd probably best leave it at that before my moral turpitude gets me in any more trouble than I'm already in.

  Another big difference between the Ways of Boys and the Ways of Girls is how they do in school. When I was a kid, there was a lot of hand- wringing over gender differences in school, but the gender everyone was worried about was girls. Girls needed more encouragement in science and math! Girls needed to be club president, not club secretary! Girls needed to be playing on teams, not cheerleading!

  But today the idea that girls need some extra advantage to succeed seems as old- fashioned as a manual typewriter. By almost every measure, girls today do better than boys— on standardized tests, in high school graduation rates, in acceptances to college. From early on, teachers say, girls work harder, and do better work.

  Yes, I've seen the little girls reading Harry Potter books in kindergarten. I've observed them sitting nicely in their seats with their hands folded when the boys are running around the room like maniacs throwing spit-balls. I can tell how much they love the many writing assignments in the early grades that now involve poems and journal entries. You see, I used to be one of those girls when I was little, reading big fat books with small print when I was seven, and writing tomes of prose by the time I was in fourth grade. And, yes, I did sit nicely while the boys ran around pitching paper clips up the substitute teacher's dress and stealing each other's hats. But somehow the boys never got in trouble for this.

  And that, I think, is what has changed. The behavior and academic orientation of girls is now considered the model for normalcy. And when wild little boys don't conform, they are perceived as troublemakers and mediocre students. When I was little, the boys got away with murder. Now they get yelled at and have to sit down and be quiet and do their work.

  A woman in my neighborhood named Louise Crawford writes a very funny column called “Smartmom” for the local weekly The Brooklyn Paper, and one of my favorite columns she ever wrote was about the nightly battles she has had with her son since first grade over writing assignments.

  Crawford recalled that he once refused to write about a memory in his writer's notebook.

  “I don't have any memories,” he said.

  “Of course you have memories,” she said.

  “Not any that I want to write about for homework,” he said.

  I laughed out loud. That was my boys to a T! Once, when one of Sport's teachers told me at a parent- teacher conference that he needed to write more about his feelings, I actually argued with her about it.

  “Why?” I said. “Why does he have to write about his feelings? The history of Western literature written by men has almost nothing to do with feelings. It's all plot, and violence! It's about war, and crimes, and action. It's not about feelings. Boys don't like to think about their feelings!”

  At this moment, Elon was giving me the Evil Eye, which made me realize that I had just destroyed any potentially decent relationship we might ever want to have with this particular teacher. I quickly shut up, and pretty much never said another word to her about what I perceived as female standards for how a child might express himself on paper.

  Sport always got low marks on his writing from her, but I would just tell him, “It doesn't matter. You write about whatever you want. Don't worry about whether other people like it. Dad and I will always love it.”

  The point is, though, that between the time I was a kid and the time my kids got to school, the education system had decided that it placed more value on behavior and achievements that came naturally to girls. I always wonder if part of why Taz never loved reading was because I kept forcing him to read all those insipid paperback series that they now foist upon elementary school students— pat little formulaic plots that ostensibly involved magic or mysteries.

  By the time Sport was that age, though, I smartened up. When he resisted reading the formula fiction about whodunits and time machines, I bought him a series of biographies for childre
n. He was just a nonfiction, nitty- gritty kind of a guy; he liked real stories about real people, so why not let him start early in a genre he could relate to. But it always cracked me up if someone asked him what he was reading, because he would inevitably say something like “I'm reading the biography of Albert Einstein,” or “I've just completed the life story of Harry Houdini. Did you know he was a pilot as well as a magician?”

  But that just shows that your first child is your guinea pig, and sometimes you can use your experience to do a better job with the next kid who comes along. I didn't know enough, when Taz was little, to tell him that if he didn't have any memories to write about for his journal entry assignments, he should just write about whatever the heck he wanted. And I didn't have the guts to say that if he couldn't get through another Junie B. Jones book, maybe he'd like a book about the Civil War better. I just assumed that the teachers were always right, and that school was not Taz's thing.

  Little did I know that by the time he was thirteen, experts and researchers would be concluding that his entire generation of boys was doing badly in school, and they'd be trying to figure out why. Now, I'm no expert on education, but maybe, as a first simple step, we could just stop asking them to write about their feelings, and let them write, I don't know, an account of last night's Yankees- Red Sox game instead.

  Sport once wrote a sixty- page account, in longhand, about waiting for the bus for an hour. It was so realistic, you really did feel like you were standing at that bus stop with him. And that wasn't necessarily a good thing. Inexplicably, the teacher told him he needed more detail in his work. Um, actually, I was thinking more plot might have helped. Is the content of what they're writing really so important that we have to micromanage it? Isn't it enough just to have them making grammatically correct sentences, practicing handwriting, perfecting their spelling, and creating a coherent narrative?

  It's no surprise, given the gender differences in scholastic achievements, that some of New York City's best high schools are dominated by girls. One of these schools looks for kids with the highest reading scores on standardized tests. Girls do better than boys on those tests, so the school admits more girls than boys.