Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume (18 page)

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.

Beth Kendrick

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

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.

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.