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

by Jennifer OConnell

  From my fourteen-year-old perspective, my mom just didn’t know how to blend in or how to have fun—defined, of course, as “letting me get my navel pierced”—and I vowed I wouldn’t turn out anything like her.

  So in the fine tradition of stubborn suburban girls, I spent my adolescence rebelling. I enrolled in a college two thousand miles away from home, I made dating choices based on weighty criteria such as “coolness” and “hotness,” and I took off for a semester in Italy even though I couldn’t speak a word past ciao and grazie. I did everything I imagined my mother wouldn’t have wanted me to do in high school.

  And, of course, I turned out just like her.

  Somewhere in my early twenties, I stopped burning up my credit card at the mall and started scouring vintage boutiques and T.J. Maxx for bargains. I took out my navel ring because it interfered with my research projects in grad school (small metal rings embedded in your flesh plus giant spinning magnets in an MRI machine—turns out, not a good combination). Just last week, I found myself in the organic food section of the grocery store, frowning down at food labels as I sought out healthier choices. I’ve even caught myself using her trademark expressions: “Marry in haste, repent at leisure,” “When you rub elbows with the rich, all you get is holes in your sleeves,” and the ever-popular “If you’d spent as much time working as you did complaining, you’d be done already.”

  I’ve gone over to the dark side. And I love it.

  Because now that I’ve survived the churning chaos of adolescence, my mom no longer has to be the enforcer. Somewhere along the way, as I kicked and screamed and demanded my freedom, she let go and gave it to me, in increments so small I could barely see the safety net receding beneath me. Mom went from being the spoilsport who sabotaged my dates with Derek Whalen to being the benefactor who slipped me a few extra bucks when I failed to budget and ran out of cash in Rome. She parented me through those tumultuous years when I most needed the solid foundation of maternal bedrock, but now she is my best friend. And for someone who I once derided as hopelessly unhip, she sure knows how to have a good time.

  Mine is the only mom I know of who has seen every episode of Sex and the City and The Sopranos, and who has such great taste in clothes and shoes that I feel compelled to borrow them without asking. She’s always eager to try new food, new hairstyles, and new adventures. Just last month, she called me on her cell phone to inform me that she and my dad were on the road to Vegas—a spur-of-

  the-moment weekend of gambling and romance. In the space of a decade, she’s gone from my oppressor to my role model.

  So now we have all new problems.

  Mom’s no longer safeguarding my chastity; now it’s, “When are you going to stop collecting all those stray dogs and start having children?” She’s no longer fending off the Derek Whalens of the world; instead, she and my husband gang up and tease me about my (allegedly) high-maintenance ways. We’re still all over each other’s nerves, just in different ways. In the midst of the dishing and laughing and good-natured bickering, I sometimes stop and marvel: who is this woman, and what did she do with my mother?

  Judy Blume, as usual, has the answer to all my mother-daughter questions. She perfectly captures the dual nature of motherhood without over-the-top drama or fanfare. As an adult rereading her books, I’m astonished at the transformation I see in her maternal characters. Just as I can’t believe that my mother is the same person she was when I was in high school, I can’t believe that the mothers in Tiger Eyes, Forever…, and Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself are the same characters I read as a child. I know that these are the same books, but somehow they’re completely different.

  As the go-to young adult author for girls worldwide, Judy Blume was in the unusual position of writing for a teen audience while parenting teens of her own. When she wrote Forever…, she had to consider the issue of sex and romance from both the parents’ and the child’s perspective. It would have been easy for her to minimize the parental figures and sidestep all the inherent moral dilemmas, but she didn’t. The mothers in her books are fully drawn, actively involved in their daughters’ lives, and dealing with flaws and conflicts of their own.

  When I read Judy Blume in middle school, I skimmed right over the mothers’ dialogue. At that age, I viewed parents as an obstacle that kept the heroine from attaining her dreams. Davey’s mom in Tiger Eyes was (I thought) selfish, self-defeating, and a little frightening as she sank into a fog of depression after her husband was killed. Katherine’s mother in Forever…was embarrassingly clinical and kind of sneaky, trying to break up her daughter’s first passionate love affair. And Sally’s mom in Sally J. Freedman was just a freak—seriously, who doesn’t let her kid change in a bathhouse?

  But now that I’m nearing thirty, I’m struck by how real the mothers are in these books. They’re not saints, they’re not demons; they’re just human. You can feel them struggling to hold their lives together as they deal with problems with their husbands and children. I wanted to cry for Davey’s mom, Gwen, who is trapped between her paralyzing grief and her guilt about not being there for her children when they most need a parent. She’s neither mean nor selfish; she’s sacrificing her dignity for her children. To move in with her in-laws who constantly upbraid her for not being smart enough, rich enough, responsible enough—that’s maternal love. When I reread Tiger Eyes this year, Gwen sort of took over the book for me; in many ways, she’s the most fascinating character. She and Davey’s father got married too young and had a child too young, but despite financial hardship and familial disapproval, they kept their marriage strong and their family close-knit. After her husband’s murder, she found the strength to work through her sorrow, start dating again, and move back to the house she’d shared with her husband. She didn’t take the path of least resistance; she just did the best she could and made the decisions that she thought gave herself and her children the best shot at long-term happiness.

  Sally J.’s mother, Louise, is an equally complex character. On one level, she’s frightened and paranoid, always terrified that her children will catch exotic diseases or be snatched away from her. On another level, she’s courage personified—in an era when women were encouraged to stay close to home, she packed up two children and moved clear across the country, leaving her husband to work in New Jersey while she oversaw her son’s recovery from nephritis in Florida. As a child, I was swept away by Sally’s cinematic fantasies and indignant that her wet blanket of a mom always ruined her fun. But as an adult who’s watched one too many evening newcasts, I have to admit I now empathize with Louise. It’s a scary world out there, getting scarier every day (Sally’s parents didn’t even have to worry about the proliferation of Internet predators and promiscuous pop stars). It’s easy to condemn a mother for playing it safe and raising a daughter who can only indulge her adventurous spirit through fantasy, but when you consider that Louise nearly lost her only son to a disease that was poorly understood at the time, you can understand why she might not be keen on encouraging her children to take unnecessary risks. Though she says that “little girls don’t need to be adventurous,” she leads by example and shows her daughter that sometimes a woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do. She’s a paradoxical mix of strength and submission, pioneer and homemaker.

  Diana, Kath’s mother in Forever…, is an intriguing mix of Gwen’s stalwart independence and Louise’s homebody reticence. She married young but pursued a career as a librarian. She values her looks and tries to dress stylishly but refuses to spend her life “keeping herself up” for her husband. When her seventeen-year-old daughter falls in love with a nice boy from a nearby high school, she probably understands exactly what Kath is going through, but as an adult, she has the foresight to see the relationship for what it is: first love, destined to burn brightly, then flare out. Diana shows equal amounts of support and restraint as Kath tries to race down the path to adulthood; she doesn’t want to encourage Kath to become sexually active, but she won’t
forbid it, either. She is, first and foremost, a parent, not a friend, and focuses on what her daughter needs, not just what she wants. In a mother-daughter heart-to-

  heart, Diana confesses that she regrets marrying so young, which probably has a lot to do with why she discourages Kath from following her boyfriend to college. She wants Kath to have more opportunities than she did, and isn’t that what all mothers want for their daughters?

  At their core, Tiger Eyes, Forever…, and Sally J. Freedman are all books about teenage issues, but to an adult reader, the parents’ story lines seem to almost overshadow their daughters’. I’m bringing an entirely new set of experiences to these novels now, and my reward is a fresh set of story lines that I missed the first time around. I’m sure that in twenty or thirty years I’ll read these books again and completely identify with all of the grandparent characters. That’s the wonderful thing about Judy Blume—you can revisit her stories at any stage of life and find a character who strikes a deep chord of recognition. I’ve been there, I’m in the middle of this, someday that’ll be me. The same characters, yet somehow completely different. Just like my mother, who just called to tell me that if I’d spent as much time writing this essay as I have procrastinating about it…I’d be done by now.

  Beth Kendrick spent her high school years writing painfully bad poetry and pining after boys who preferred her beautiful best friend (which only inspired more bad poetry, creating a vicious cycle) before growing up, cheering up, and deciding to write romantic comedy instead. Her novels include Nearlyweds, Fashionably Late, Exes and Ohs, and My Favorite Mistake. She is also reliving the funnier moments of her adolescent angst in her series for teens, The 310, which she publishes under the name Beth Killian. You can visit her Web site at www.bethkendrick.com.

  The Wienie Girl’s Guide to

  Making Friends

  Berta Platas

  I was the wienie girl, way back when. I’ve changed a lot. People who know me today can’t believe that I was once a timid, geeky kid, but thirty years of living will do that to you. Okay, so it’s more like thirty-five.

  In elementary school I was so shy that I never raised my hand in class or talked to anyone new during recess. Ask questions about a math problem I didn’t understand? Forget about it. I was doomed to count on my fingers. Judy Blume changed that for me. Not the counting on my fingers part. I’m still a math moron. Judy Blume taught me how to make friends.

  Shy doesn’t always mean lonely. The friends I had until fifth grade were imposed on me by the nuns at my parochial school in Pittsburgh, where Catholic Social Services sent my family after we arrived in Miami from Cuba. I sat next to girls who were supposed to help me learn to speak English, and even with the language barrier, we got along well. I played Barbies with my sister and wild games of tag and hide-and-seek with the neighborhood kids, all the while picking up the language rapidly, as only little kids can.

  But disaster struck at the end of fifth grade, when I found out we’d be moving all the way to New York City. I thought I’d never have a friend again. I’d had enough change in my young life to know everything would be alien in New York. I said good-bye to the neighborhood I knew and loved. Our landlady had lent me her copy of Wuthering Heights, and in total drama queen mode, I bade wistful farewells to our blue-collar Irish/Polish neighborhood, envisioning the moors, whatever those were. I wafted up and down the steep hills of my neighborhood, thinking I’ll never see this rosebush again, and Mr. Szyklow’s dog will never follow me to school again.

  I even sighed over Randy, the guy in homeroom who had a crush on me and gave me my first Valentine ever. I read it so many times that I can still recite the little Hallmark poem inside, and the signature, “Your friend forever which is Randall.” Sigh.

  We arrived in Manhattan in the summer, which gave my sister and me a little time to get used to the area before school started, but we were miserably lonely. The days were hot and sunny, and we could hear the neighborhood kids playing stickball outside, but we weren’t allowed out while our parents worked. It wasn’t long before we were bored with each other, and this was in the bad old days of daytime television, before the Cartoon Network.

  The day our mom first took us to the public library was a thrill I’ll never forget. I’d never been to one before, and the building seemed huge. The smell of mildewed paper hardly registered as I walked, amazed, through room after room lined with books and filled with rows of double-sided, freestanding wooden bookcases. The sight was as thrilling as the first glimpse of sand and water on our yearly trips to the beach.

  We’d heard scary warnings about the city’s dangerous streets, but the children’s section was deep in the center of a building full of books. What bad guys would go there? My sister and I felt safe, hidden in the stacks. The public library opened new worlds, though I never talked to the other kids we encountered there, heeding the warning of the so-called dangerous people who were out to get children and newcomers.

  I’d drag home bags of books at a time, giddy with the sheer number available, the loneliness lost in stories about other places and other times. I loved most books, with the exception of any story set in the late twentieth century that featured a girl with friends. As I’d feared, I was friendless, and heroines like Nancy Drew drove me to despair. She had two best friends (although I always wondered if George had ulterior motives).

  There weren’t any self-help books on friend-making that I knew of, and when I asked my mother for tips, she said, “Just go up to people and introduce yourself.” Right.

  I thought about how I’d done it once before, but that was in kindergarten. Who remembered that far back?

  By now, school had started, but everyone at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs, my new parochial school, seemed to have known one another forever. I sat alone in class feeling as if everyone was looking at me, feeling like an intruder. Recess was held in the quiet residential street in front of the school, and when pedestrians walked past, I would stand near the groups of laughing girls, smiling and nodding as if I was one of them, and then hurrying away, afraid that they’d noticed what I’d done. I stood alone, the alien dork. The wienie girl.

  They’d jump rope and play games that I didn’t know, including deliciously complicated hand-clapping rhymes that I couldn’t possibly learn. It was like watching a show, and I was the only audience.

  At the end of the day, as we rushed out of the building, the girls would chatter about after-school activities: playing in Fort Tryon Park, going to Girl Scouts, music lessons and dance. My sister and I went straight home, under orders to stay inside until my mom got home. When we weren’t sick of each other’s company, we played elaborate games of make-believe with our Barbies.

  I’d left behind my tiny plastic cowboys and Indians and Tonka trucks in Pittsburgh, thinking I’d outgrown tomboy stuff. When I missed them, I wondered, what next? Thumb-sucking? I needed to move ahead. I needed a plan. I was clueless.

  I pictured myself kidnapped by aliens. Maybe one of them would be totally cute like Bobby Sherman. Maybe I read too much science fiction and watched too much TV.

  My mom saw us struggling and tried to get us to be more outgoing. One year she signed us up for baton twirling. We spent most of the time marching in formation. I learned then that I wasn’t cut out for a military career. Another year it was swimming lessons in what seemed like a huge municipal pool with peeling aqua-colored paint. My favorite part? The dead man’s float. I used it with glee at the swimming pools of motor courts up and down the eastern coast on our annual trips to Florida, freaking out the tourists.

  Mom’s efforts broadened my horizons, but the skill I longed for, the one that eluded me, was how to make friends.

  One cold, rainy autumn afternoon, I was at the library filling my bag with fantasy novels and threw Jane Eyre on top to reread because we were having English weather. I was also looking for a book I’d overheard a classmate recommend to her friend.

  It was Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by
Judy Blume, the book that all the girls on the playground were whispering about. The nuns said it wasn’t for the likes of us. I was looking forward to knowing what all the buzz was about—not that I’d have anyone to discuss it with. I was disappointed that it wasn’t on the shelves that day. There were lots of other Judy Blume books, though, and I grabbed one. Testing the Blume waters, so to speak.

  The chance I took paid off. Then Again, Maybe I Won’t changed my life. It wasn’t my first choice, since it was told from a boy’s point of view, and who wanted to know how boys think? I was very young.

  I was hooked from the first page. The hero, Tony Miglione, was moving, and boy, did I understand about moving. He felt many of the same emotions I had when we found out we were leaving Pittsburgh and moving to New York City—fear, excitement, resentment, and nostalgia for things that still surrounded me. Tony could have been my brother.

  I knew those awful fears he described, that you’d never see anyone you knew again, that you wouldn’t know where the best candy was or the place to buy a magazine or what TV channels to watch.

  Tony’s family had gotten rich and moved to a mansion, while we’d moved from a big house to a tiny apartment. Of course, we weren’t alone. Everyone in New York lived in tiny apartments. I wondered how people could stand to live in the city. I had to walk to school every day with my sister, and our parents hammered the “no eye contact” rule into us. Eyes on the sidewalk and you’ll do okay. Those bad guys were supposedly lurking everywhere. So I didn’t look up except to see if the streetlight had changed. This was before the 1978 pooper scooper law, and there were other, more immediately disturbing reasons for keeping your sight on the sidewalk.