Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume

by Jennifer OConnell

  So basically everything Margaret’s parents and grandparents did for her was out of love, which is ironic since what that love manifested was a lot of anger and bitterness. Funny how love does that sometimes. God knows that was the case in my family. My grandparents were not happy with my mother’s choice in husbands. My stepfather was my mom’s second husband and her third serious relationship (my father being the second serious relationship, although she was never married to him). I think it’s fair to say that my mother’s first two choices in life partners left a lot to be desired. She married for the first time when she was nineteen, and the man she chose was brilliant and totally insane. I mean we’re talking about a guy who collected buckets full of tadpoles from a pond in a cemetery with the intent of selling them to a pet store. That in and of itself would have been weird, but what was worse was that he never actually got around to selling them, so for a while there my mother was living in an apartment that was literally overrun with bullfrogs.

  My father didn’t share my mother’s first husband’s passion for exotic pets; he was interested in more mundane things like music, women, and drugs. In fact, the only thing that the two men had in common was a high I.Q. and an aversion to moderation.

  So it shouldn’t be surprising that my grandparents had a hard time taking my mother’s word for it when she said that Richard (my stepfather) was the right guy for her, especially when he was so very different from anyone else in our family. It’s not just that he wasn’t Jewish; his whole approach to life was dramatically different from what any of us were used to. And while he and my mother have some things in common, on a whole they are very different people. In contrast, my grandmother and grandfather were two peas in a pod. It’s not uncommon to hear a friend talk about someone they know who has a “perfect marriage,” but it’s almost unheard of to hear someone refer to their own marriage as perfect. But my grandparents did exactly that; furthermore, they actually believed it was true. As far as they were concerned, they had discovered the secret formula for marital bliss. What they couldn’t understand was why my mother rejected their formula. She wanted to brew up her own concoction, and that just didn’t make sense to them.

  Let me be clear here—my grandparents didn’t think everyone had to be exactly like them in order to be okay. Before Richard entered the picture, my grandparents used to pay for my mother to take me on elaborate yearly vacations. We went to Bali, Tahiti, Kenya, the Caribbean, and other wonderful exotic places all because my grandparents felt it was important that my mother and I be familiar with and appreciative of other people’s cultures, philosophies, and lifestyles. But poor Richard wasn’t different in the right way. It would have been okay if he had been Chinese. My grandparents loved the Chinese. How many times did I hear my grandmother grumble, “How anyone could think that the Chinese are inferior to the rest of us is beyond me!” But poor Richard was Irish, and while that didn’t hurt him, it didn’t gain him any bonus points, either.

  They also would have been easier on him if he had been an intellectual. If he had been a Jewish Eurasian intellectual, my grandparents would have thrown a party, but a Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, or secular Christian intellectual of any ethnicity would have been fine. An intellectual son-in-law would have been an appropriate addition to a family who named their dog Socrates. But my stepfather wasn’t an intellectual, at least not according to the Jewish definition of the word. Worse yet, he went to church; only on Christmas Eve, but even that was a little more than what my grandparents were comfortable with.

  It would have helped if Richard had been a self-made man; that would have been even better than being an intellectual. My grandparents had started off with nothing, but they came from an immigrant family, and like so many immigrants, they worked their asses off until they had a significant amount of something. But my stepfather wasn’t a self-made man. He came from a middle-class family and took a middle-class job as an elementary school teacher. We liked teachers in my family, but it wasn’t enough to compensate for the whole Christmas Eve thing.

  Furthermore, my mother and Richard had clearly built their relationship on different principles and ideals than those that my grandparents used while building their own. Richard and my mother weren’t a team who always presented a united front. Rather they were partners who clearly cared for each other but also frequently disagreed and compromised in order to make the business work. So when my grandparents got to know my stepfather and saw the way my mother and he interacted, they assumed that my mother was settling. They didn’t think Richard was a bad person, they just didn’t think he was the right person for their daughter. It doesn’t really matter if this was true or not; what’s important is that this was their perception of the situation. The very idea of my mother settling for anything less than what they shared with each other was unthinkable, especially when you consider the fact that I was in the picture. I was ten when my mother married Richard, and my grandparents definitely didn’t see him as a positive influence.

  The really sad part, the part that I didn’t allow myself to see until I became an adult, was that Richard really wanted them to like him. In my mother’s family the thinking had always been if someone likes us, great; if not, then the hell with ’em. Richard doesn’t think like that. He’s one of those aim-to-please guys, and he wanted to be welcomed into the fold. I think he had entertained fantasies of us being a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory kind of family minus the extreme poverty and passion for caloric desserts. Sadly, his yearning to be loved pushed my grandparents further away. They saw it as a form of neediness, and my mother’s family doesn’t do needy.

  All of this would have made things difficult even if we lived miles away from each other. But the distance between my mother’s and grandparents’ house could be covered by foot in a matter of seconds. Perhaps this is the reason why Richard and my mother briefly considered the idea of moving to Australia. But due to financial and other pragmatic reasons, they decided that moving to a different house, let alone a different continent, wasn’t a logical option.

  I’ll never forget the day when Richard and my mother told me that we wouldn’t be spending all the holidays with my grandparents anymore. We’re talking about approximately fourteen days a year. I couldn’t get over the fact that we lived next door to these people—these people who had practically raised me—and yet we couldn’t even spend fourteen days a year with them. I can recall standing on the step of our sunken living room trying to make sense of a situation that seemed patently absurd while my mother and Richard stood on the slightly elevated floor of the adjacent dining room trying to explain it all to me. My grandfather had built that floor. He had built the entire house for my mother and me. Now we were going to tell him that there were certain days when he wasn’t going to be allowed to step inside the doorway that he had made?

  Of course, in retrospect I understand. My grandparents were angry with Richard and my mother for not taking their well-meaning advice, and who wants to spend every holiday surrounded by anger? Once upon a time, holidays had been about family togetherness. Now they had turned into this bizarre tightrope act in which I had to decide what part of the holiday I could spend with my grandparents and what part with my mother and her new husband. The holidays that we did spend together were almost worse than the ones we spent apart. Seriously, how was I supposed to react when my grandmother came over for Christmas and presented my Catholic stepfather with an article from the newspaper’s editorial section arguing against the divinity of Christ? What could I say when the present my grandparents reluctantly shoved under the Christmas tree was a board game titled Chutzpah?

  I didn’t have an answer and neither did Margaret. Judy Blume was incredibly daring when she decided not to provide her readers with a neat little ending or clear-cut conclusions to conflicts that realistically were never going to go away. However, what she did give her readership was a protagonist who was stronger than the angst within her family. Margaret recognized the problems, but she never rea
lly wallowed in them, and perhaps more importantly, she learned the art of compartmentalization.

  Like Margaret, I never doubted that my mother and grandparents loved me. I heard it in their voices every time they said my name. I felt it in every hug. The mistakes they made couldn’t overshadow the love they gave. As a child, that’s what gets you through the messiness of a dysfunctional family, and lets face it, all our families are at least a little dysfunctional. It’s really just a matter of degree.

  Like Margaret’s grandmother, my grandparents eventually came to accept my stepfather (albeit begrudgingly). I think their feelings about my mother’s marriage were similar to my feelings about my hair. I’m never going to be completely happy with it, but I’d still rather work with it than shave it off.

  So throughout the bulk of my teenage years, my grandparents managed to treat my stepfather with the same kind of civility and courtesy that Margaret’s paternal grandmother showed her daughter-in-law. And like Margaret’s grandmother, my grandparents frequently reminded me of my Jewish ancestry, although unlike Margaret, I’m actually glad they did since my Jewish identity has always been important to me. By the time I graduated high school, it became clear to everyone that they needn’t have worried about my being unduly influenced by either my stepfather or my grandparents’ resentment of him. Like Margaret, I was always my own person and I made up my own mind about things.

  So by the time I had reached my early twenties, I figured I had this whole family thing figured out. When I got married, I made it my mission in life to win the approval of my in-laws. Since I had spent years watching my stepfather fail at this task, I figured I knew exactly what not to do. I would not reveal the things about myself that could potentially piss them off. The trick was to be evasive. For example, when my father-in-law pronounced that Bill Clinton was the reincarnation of Satan, I refrained from telling him that I still had a Clinton/Gore bumper sticker glued to my car. My in-laws were Christians, but fortunately for me, my husband’s previous girlfriend was a Muslim, so by comparison my Jewish faith seemed comfortingly familiar to them. When I eventually got around to giving birth to a son, I congratulated myself on being able to offer him such a cohesive family dynamic.

  But that was before the divorce. I tried to make my marriage work, but nothing I did made a difference. It didn’t matter if my husband and I discussed our problems or swept them under the rug; either way, things were bad, and they were rapidly getting worse. So when my child turned two, I filed. When I signed those papers, I thought about what I was about to lose: not my relationship with my husband—that had ended years before I finally decided to make its death official; nor was my divorce going to adversely affect my finances—my husband had already spent everything we had, so there was nothing for me to risk. No, the only thing I would lose by signing those papers was the bond I had built between me and my in-laws. The cohesive family that I wanted to give my son would be gone forever. At first I assumed that my now-ex-husband would be the one to actively facilitate the continuation of the relationship that had existed between his family and our son during our marriage. But my ex had too many personal demons to fight. His parental visits became sporadic and short. If it was that hard for him to maintain his own relationship with his son, I certainly couldn’t expect him to maintain the relationship between his son and his grandparents. Clearly that burden would fall to me.

  The problem with burdens is that they’re…well…burdensome. No one wants to hang out with the woman who “broke (their) son’s heart,” and no one wants to hang with people who think you’re guilty of such a thing. Still, when my former sister-in-law called and offered me and my son plane tickets to fly across the country to visit their side of the family, I accepted. I reasoned that it was the best thing for my child.

  Margaret’s parents once made the same offer. They welcomed Margaret’s mother’s parents into their home more than a decade after they had disowned their daughter. In the book, that visit turned out to be a disaster. And now I’ve lived the disaster firsthand. My mother-in-law got a migraine the moment I stepped off the plane, and it didn’t go away until they dropped me off at the departures terminal a week later. The name of my ex-husband and the word “divorce” were studiously (and predictably) avoided. What I hadn’t been prepared for was the way that many of my offhanded remarks would be misinterpreted. Early on in the trip, my mother-in-law asked how things had been going for me, and I made the awful mistake of telling her that they were great. The looks of bitter disapproval on everyone’s faces quickly put me in check. So from that moment on, when someone asked how I was, I said “okay.” “Fine” was too generic, “bad” was a pathetic plea for sympathy, and “good” was the perceived equivalent of saying that I was celebrating the end of my marriage. I was careful to refrain from using the term “social life” in reference to myself. Instead, I had a “supportive network of friends.” This semantical tap dance was incredibly exhausting, and despite the fact that it was their sensitivities that made it necessary, it was clear that they, too, found it wearing. I don’t think anyone was upset when it was time for me to say adios.

  On the way back to California, I missed my connector flight. I remember clinging to my son’s little hand while the Southwest agent broke the bad news. I literally broke down in tears. “I just want to go home!” I sobbed. “Please, can’t you help me make this vacation end?” The people at Southwest were very helpful, and when I eventually got on a plane headed homeward (in a very roundabout fashion), I, for the first time in my life, coughed up the five bucks necessary to get the flight attendant to spike my tomato juice with vodka (of course, my son accidentally knocked it onto my lap before I had a chance to drink it).

  I vowed that I would not take that trip again. But would that be fair to my son? I think about how Margaret’s parents handled the family strife. They never flat out told Margaret that they were leaving New York in order to get away from her father’s mother, but they were so obvious about it they might as well have. Margaret’s maternal grandparents never said that their love was conditional, but they made it clear that it was. I think of the perverse pleasure Margaret’s father felt (and only halfheartedly tried to conceal) when his wife’s parents behaved in the awful manner that he had predicted. Each individual family member loved Margaret, but they put their own petty grievances before that love. I’m not going to do that to my son. So no more crying fits at the airport. Whatever tensions may at times exist between me and my ex-husband’s family, they are not as important as the fact that we are all good people who love my son and want the best for him. Everyone on my ex’s side of the family (including my ex) will have an important place in my son’s life for as long as they want it, and if they want to fly out to see him, I will happily put them up. I won’t allow the painful memories of my divorce to undermine my ability to get along with people who I continue to care about. I am determined to show my son that children like Margaret aren’t the only ones who are capable of behaving in a mature fashion; occasionally grown-ups can manage it, too.

  Twenty years after graduating from junior high school, Kyra Davis is still waiting to become a grown-up. Her novels include Sex, Murder and a Double Latte, Passion, Betrayal and Killer Highlights, and So Much for My Happy Ending. Her novels have received good marks from such publications as Publisher’s Weekly and Cosmopolitan. Nonetheless, Kyra has yet to work up the courage to submit her work to her eighth-grade English teacher. You can learn more about Kyra at www.kyradavis.com.

  The Mother of All Balancing Acts

  Beth Kendrick

  Picture a journal covered in faux fur (leopard print!) and Ren and Stimpy decals circa 1994…

  Dear Diary—

  My mom = total bitch! All my friends are allowed to date. All of them! And today, Derek Whalen asked me and Emily to go to the movies on Saturday. Of course I said yes—hello, he’s a SENIOR!!! But then I made the mistake about actually telling the truth about something for once, and Mom says I can’t go. She s
ays no dating until I’m sixteen! Bitch! Well, I don’t care, I’m going anyway. I’ll just tell her I’m going with Katie and Amanda and she’ll never know the difference. But someday, when you’re old and re-reading this, I want you to remember what it’s like to be fourteen. Because Mom does NOT. When I have a daughter, I’ll let her date whoever she wants, whenever she wants.

  I was fourteen, I was furious, and, as it turns out, I was lying.

  Now that I’m “old,” I do remember what it’s like to be an adolescent—the highs, the lows, the constant, cringing embarrassment brought on by everyone around me—but I have to say that no fourteen-year-old daughter of mine will ever be allowed to date some frosh-preying senior. Mind you, I don’t actually have a daughter, but if I did, sixteen seems a little young to be dating. Maybe college. Maybe grad school. Or, I know: how about never? Convents have come a long way—I bet some of them even have DSL and high-definition TVs these days.

  And Mom, the woman I so callously dismissed as a cold, unfeeling, well, b-word, knew exactly what she was doing. Despite my attempts to deceive her, she busted me on my attempted date—there might as well have been a SWAT team swarming the movie theater—and grounded me for the rest of my natural life. Which was just as well: Derek Whalen turned out to be a scuzzy serial cheater with a rather dismaying tendency to shoplift. And he much preferred my friend Emily anyway—she had breasts.

  My mom was never exactly like my friends’ mothers, much to my chagrin. She didn’t let me stay out ’til 2 A.M. or wear midriff-bearing tops or drink wine coolers at home because “at least you know we’re safe and not out driving drunk or getting date raped.” (I tried that argument many times; it cut no ice.) She didn’t let me stop taking AP math classes or start taking the occasional “mental health day” from school just because that’s what the cool kids were doing. As a former Shakespeare professor who didn’t believe in wearing lots of makeup, eating junk food, or spending all our disposable income on designer clothes, she was the bane of my teenage existence.