Well, the day has finally arrived. I am a teenager! I have survived through 13 long and oh-so-hard years....
This is what I wrote in my diary on my thirteenth birthday. I continued by discussing my plans to become a soap opera actress and offering a complaint about a bad grade in science class. And there was that guy that failed to notice me. What was the problem? My zits? (Yes.) My braces? (Yes.) Little did I imagine that I would be sitting here decades later, writing much the same thing:
Well, the day has finally arrived. I am middle aged!
I know that it's indelicate for a lady to admit her age, so let's just call me SPORTY. Everyone has been asking me if I feel differently now that I'm SPORTY, or if I'm depressed, or if it marks some big, cataclysmic shift in my life. Certainly, there was the SPORTY of my imagination. You guys remember -- we used to sit around, full of youthful ambition and smugness, and say, "I don't want to turn SPORTY and not have (fill in the blank: won a Pulitzer Prize, sailed around the world, figured out the way to achieve world peace...)." SPORTY was like a judgment day, a cosmic end-of-unit assessment. And, sadly, it turns out that I have not done any of those things. I have no Pulitzer, no sail boat, and I can't even broker peace in my own home.
But if I'm honest, SPORTY doesn't feel all that different than FLIRTY WHINE. I still have to get up and make the school lunches. I still need to badger (scream at) my kids about their homework every night. There is still a splotch of food ON MY CEILING that has no explanation. I frankly haven't had the time to contemplate what it means that my optometrist has warned me about "the changes that start to happen at your age."
Speaking of changes, I will cop to a big one. For the last 20 years, I have purchased my t-shirts in the juniors' department. They are SO MUCH CHEAPER than the grown-up kind. And it doesn't really bother me when Britnee, the salesgirl, comes over to tell me HOW TOTALLY CUTE a pair of denim-looking leggings would look on me -- BECAUSE I KNOW BETTER. Britnee, I wore leggings with STIRRUPS in ninth grade, and those old pictures don't lie. I looked like an eggplant (and actually, so do you!).
But the other day, I was in the dressing room in the juniors' department at Nordstrom, when I overheard a group of young women talking about tattoos.
Girl #1: (Squeal!)
Girl #2: Like, my mom is such a b**ch
Girl #3: OHMYGOD, what did she do?
Girl #2: She won't let me get a tat on my hip.
Girl #3: OHMYGOD, No way!
Girl #2: She said I shouldn't put Justin's name there in case we break up.
Girl #3: OHMYGOD, you'll never break up.
Girl #2: We are so in love.
Girl #1: (Squeal!)
So there I was in the adjacent stall, musing about why my legs always look so much worse in store dressing rooms than they do in my mirror at home, and I had to literally bite my tongue to keep from telling Girl #2 that she should absolutely, positively, NOT tattoo Justin's name on her body. It occurred to me that I am so like her mother, that I could BE her mother. And with that, I have no business trying on the same t-shirts as she does.
So, OK. Now that I am SPORTY, I will consider shopping in the adult section of the department store. I am also going to take my calcium supplements more faithfully. But really, turning SPORTY is all good. I am very, very lucky to have made it this far.
