Seventh grade. Seventh grade. Seventh goddamn grade.
I say it over and over and over again, like some kind of multi syllabic mantra, like if I say it enough times it will become more real or maybe disappear or both. I say it because B is in it and this makes me equal parts queasy and proud and scared.
This school year has already brought the great ice breaker of adolescence conventially known as the Bar Mitzvah (and the Bat Mitzvah, to be fair). Sock-clad dance floor dancing is the closest most girls have gotten to most boys and mazel tov! It works. Every kid grows up just a little bit more after one of those awesome bashes.
Today, however, on (ironically?) the Rosh Hashanah school holiday, B was invited to another kind of party, though if she knew I called it that, she would roll her eyes with such dramatic effect, you might think she was having a seizure. It was "just a bunch of kids hanging out" for fuck's sake -- I'm adding the fuck's sake part because it was quite obvious she was thinking it; she is my daughter afterall. Anyhoo...
Naturally, I called the mom my sister to see if I should call the mom of the Boy who was hosting the par.. whatever, the thing.
Email her, she said. Play it cool.
I did. I felt like such a nerd, such a newbie.
She didn't email me back.
I decided to let B go anyway, because I was driving she and her friend to this Boy's house and I figured I would scope it out, and also because I knew almost all the other kids going and their moms and had consulted with one. But in the car ride there, I started to worry that I might be making the Number One mistake of parenting a barely just twelve year old girl or any girl really or any kid and oh my god I have no business being a parent and I should just turn this car right around and go force her to play with American Girl dolls or Polly Pockets or some such shit and, "mom?" she said.
"Uhhuh," I panted.
"Olivia thinks its awesome that you like that LMFAO song."
"I do," giggled Olivia.
Seventh grade, seventh grade, I kept saying, chanting it, barely breathing...
When I was in seventh grade I was a new girl in a new school. A new, very tiny school: there were less than 50 kids in my entire class. Within a month, I was finding random gifts in my locker: a watch, a twenty dollar bill, a brass locket. Within two months, I learned all the bad words I had yet to learn while riding the 40 minute bus ride home. Within three months, I was "going out" with a boy whose name was so preppy you would not believe it if I used it as the name for a preppy boy in a novel I may or may not be writing. Within six months, we broke up. We broke up after having never held hands or going anywhere together ever, but we talked on the phone and that counted for something. By the end of the year, I had my eye on a Cute Boy from a rival school.
The driveway was loaded with the detritus of New England childhood -- a basketball hoop, some old boogie boards and a stash of bikes and lacrosse sticks. And kids. There were some on scooters, one on a skateboard, a few tossing a football. B and her BFF jumped out -- thanks mom! thank you! -- and there they were.
There they were. Seventh graders, all gangly, all kinds of shapes and sizes, all unnervingly eyeing each other, adjusting baseball hats, pulling t-shirts into place. Doing what they do, what, in fact, they need to do.
"I'll text you mom," she said. "Thanks mom."
In the months that followed 9/11, I developed this intense anxiety about overhead planes. Nearly asleep, maybe even soundly, if I heard one, I would compulsively leap from bed and check the window: was it crashing? Was it crashing on us? Sitting on the couch, cooking dinner, driving the car: I checked every time. I've peered out more windows more times than most creepy old dudes do. It ended when I met a flight attendant who told me that "by the time you hear the sound of the engine, the plane is miles past you, miles and miles beyond. You wouldn't hear the plane that hit you."
It was the science and the utter lack of cosmic control -- together! -- that cured me.
I keep thinking about that now: is this what parenting is also gonna be like for me from now on? Leaping to the window, screeching on the brakes to double check -- check her, myself, her friends? Will I spend the next few years wondering if I should hold tighter to the arm of the couch, or lurch from my seat to hold her back? Do I worry about the sound of the engine or the lack of it's sound?
She texts me tonight from her BF's house where she is having a very "spontaneous" sleepover that I'm sure they'd been planning all day but where I need to go to drop off some clothes. She gives me her list and signs of with this message:
"Thanks Mommy. Can you bring my blue blankie?"
For now, I'm just listening to that and to her and the mantra, of course.
Seventh grade, seventh grade, fuckinga seventh grade.
