Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume (17 page)

In the attic, I resign myself to getting nothing accomplished. I call my dad, then my sister, read them lines until we're laughing so hard we can't speak. I tab entries to read to my mom when she gets home from work. I keep turning the pages, sometimes laughing so hard I'm crying; I can sense my private, imaginary world preparing to collide with the real one, moving toward the point where the books ended and my own story began.

I didn't know then how my stories would play out. I didn't know that I would kiss a boy when I was fourteen, say “I love you” when I was seventeen, say it and mean it when I was nineteen, get my heart broken when I was twenty, and twenty-seven, and twenty-nine. That it doesn't hurt once, but keeps hurting; that as you get older, the feelings don't fade. That to speak your feelings, even to argue, isn't always a bad thing; sometimes it's important, necessary. That one Wednesday as I was sitting down to a bowl of pasta, I would get the phone call from my parents that went like this: “Dad and I have been having some problems…”

I was twenty-eight. I had moved away from where I grew up, had jobs, students, serious boyfriends. Yet I instantly recognized this call. I had read it in a book long ago. I had written it a thousand times.

“I love you,” Mom said, and I felt devastated because I knew then how serious this was.

She passed the phone to Dad. In the pause, I picked up the bowl of spaghetti, crossed the kitchen, and threw it in the trash.

“We're still your parents,” Dad told me. He sounded uncomfortable, slightly rehearsed. “This doesn't change that.”

And I thought: Are you kidding me?

What do you think I am: Twelve?

In a way, I was; a decade and a half evaporated in the course of that five-minute call, and suddenly my primary role in the world was no longer
girlfriend
or
teacher
or
writer.
I was defined, most importantly, as
daughter
again. The years rewound, and I felt like I had as a child: speechless, faced with all the things I didn't know.

In
The Judy Blume Diary,
the photo at the beginning of March was always my favorite: empty swings hanging over pools of thawing mud. They're the good swings, the black rubber kind that fit snug against your hips. Now, as the attic starts to get dark, I put the diary back in the box where I found it. I go downstairs, pull on a coat, and cross the street.

Glenside Elementary looks small, like a toy school. The classroom windows are papered with cut-out snowflakes. It's a Saturday; the playground is empty. Most of the equipment is shiny, modern, bright yellows and blues. Only the old swing set is still there, like a relic from another time.

I get on a swing and start pumping. The metal chains are cold, squeaky on the upswing, made of loose rusted links. Since my parents separated four years ago, they have been honest about their marriage, telling my sister and me all they know now, trying to keep us from repeating their mistakes. “Say what's on your mind,” they tell us. “Always remember to communicate.” I wonder now how much I intuited when I was younger, if the necessity of raising your voice was something I sensed without being told. If, maybe, it was the presence of words unsaid that drove me to bang on a typewriter, scribble in journals, fill up my toy box with stories. Yes, for everything I didn't know as a child, there were some things I saw with a startling clarity, like the last entry I read:

I swing higher and watch the outline of my feet against the sky. Though all afternoon I'd been looking backward, feeling protective of the little girl I was, she was looking into the future, feeling protective of me. At thirteen, the exclamation points were far less frequent, the bright inks dulled to blacks and blues, but the spirit of my sign-off hadn't changed: It's
10:20,
I wrote.
Tomorrow will be a good day.

I let go of the swing and hop off, landing on a patch of crunchy winter grass. Buttoning my coat, I start back across the playground, past where the old tires once sat, past the stairs where we lined up after recess. I remember one day in fourth grade, after we'd formed our ragged lines, Mrs. James made an announcement. Someone, she said, had vandalized one of the stalls in the boys' bathroom:
JH + JK.

A gasp traveled through our ranks: intrigue, excitement, and quick deduction.

Joey Healey and Jeannie Kim!

“Until someone admits to doing it,” Mrs. James said, “we're staying right here.”

There was only a moment's suspense before Joey raised his hand.

“It was me,” he said, stepping forward as a murmur of admiration rippled through the crowd. “I wrote it,” Joey said, and you could see even the teachers' faces soften, torn between needing to reprimand him and maybe, just a little, admiring him, too. In the spectrum of elementary school, his was a serious offense, but he had exposed his guts, brought his true feelings to light, and this was, we all knew, an act of courage.

Kyra Davis

People have all sorts of ideas
about why
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
should be read by pubescent girls. Some feel that preteens will relate to Margaret's anticipation about getting her period. Personally I was never all that concerned about menstruating until I actually started to do it, at which point I began praying for menopause.

Then there's the issue of peer pressure. Obviously that's a concern for every child as well as for most adults, and undoubtedly Margaret's anxiety over wearing the right outfit and being liked by the right people hit close to home for a lot of readers; but not so much for me. See, I was fortunate enough to be blessed with an inflated sense of self-worth. Throughout my life I've managed to maintain my own unique sense of style, and I've always befriended the people I enjoy hanging out with rather than the people who might elevate my social status.

So when I finally started reading Judy Blume's renowned novel at the tender age of eleven, I didn't expect to identify with Margaret all that much. But that was before I got to the part where Margaret started to address the dynamics in her family. I remember being curled up in bed reading about the tension that existed between Margaret's parents, whom she loved, and her grandmother, whom she adored, and all of a sudden I
was
Margaret. I knew exactly what she was feeling. I understood the burden of trying to maintain positive relationships with beloved family members despite their unwillingness to have relationships with one another. Margaret's parents tried to dispel the tension that existed between Margaret's grandmother and themselves by moving to another state. My mother and stepfather tried to escape the animosity by refusing to spend too much time with my grandparents even though they literally lived right next door. I'm not sure which solution is worse.

When it comes to childrearing, there are two types of people. First, there are those who want their descendants to do better than they did. These parents don't want their children and grandchildren to experience the pain and/or disappointment that they experienced in their own lives and thus they try to create a different path for their children to follow. Then there are those who feel that they have lived life the way it is supposed to be lived. They want their children and grandchildren to do the same, and they do everything they can to encourage them to follow in their footsteps.

Margaret's parents belonged to the first category of people. Both of them were raised in religious homes, and they experienced firsthand how religion could be used as a divider. They saw it as a beacon of intolerance and judgmental behavior. It was incredibly important to them that Margaret not experience the pain that religion had caused them, so they did everything in their power to shelter her from it.

Margaret's grandparents (both maternal and paternal) felt that their lives had been greatly enriched by their religion. For them the idea of not raising a child with the beliefs that they held so dear was unthinkable. Margaret's maternal grandparents disowned their daughter for the offense of marrying a non-Christian. While I'm not a Christian, I certainly know many people of that faith who would say that was a very
un-Christian
thing to do. But once we meet Margaret's maternal grandparents, we realize that perhaps they were simply trying to exercise a form of tough love. They wanted to do whatever they could to convince their daughter to return to the faith even if they had to lose her in order to do it. After all, what's a few decades of bad feelings compared to an eternity in the pits of hell?

Margaret's parental grandmother took another route. She wasn't thrilled with the idea of her son marrying a non-Jewish girl, but she was unwilling to cut her child, or her grandchild, out of her life. However, she was also unwilling to give up on the idea of said grandchild embracing the Jewish religion and identity as her own.

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 really 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.