I've Got a New Attitude

Kids these days, they seem to grow up faster and faster. When I was a girl, puberty and all the fun that went along with it was reserved for those awkward middle school years. I was unlucky enough to get my boobies in the fifth grade. They were no D cups, but they were certainly enough to fill out my training bra in a mortifying way. I don’t really remember the fun of armpit hair or worse, hair down there, but obviously I matured like everyone else. My period started (like it’s any of your business) in the seventh grade, and m moodiness hasn’t yet stopped. All in all, puberty was a journey that took several years, from about ten to fourteen, or so the textbooks at the time purported. We were in the fifth grade when we were separated by gender and shown films. The girls learned all about the curse; I still don’t know what the boys learned. But I am pretty sure the school district picked fifth grade because they knew it wasn’t really happening yet, so we would all be too embarrassed and disgusted to ask questions.

Now, thanks to improved nutrition, or more likely added hormones and antibiotics in our food supply, kids these days seem to start “the change” younger and younger. Girls today are beating the school district to the punch. They are carrying preemptive panty liners in their backpacks as early at the fourth grade. What used to start at ten now starts as early as eight. As much as I want my babies to stay babies, I know with each sprout of armpit hair that my daughters will grow up because that is what they are supposed to do. And while the breast buds and B.O. are slightly disconcerting, no puberty change seems to hurt quite like that hormone-driven nasty moodiness.

It comes out of nowhere and strikes like a viper, and you are hit before you can even run for cover. You are left floundering and twitching as the venomous bad mood seeps into your very core. Irrational misery loves company.

Take the other day, for instance. My daughter, E, woke up later than usual after what I assumed was a good night’s sleep. We had plans with friends that morning, and when I came downstairs to fix breakfast, she was lurking around the kitchen with a scowl on her face.

“What would you like for breakfast? Cereal? Waffles? Want some scrambled eggs with cheese?” I asked her.

“I’m kind of in the mood for muffins,” she said.

“We really don’t have time to bake muffins this morning, baby. We slept in a little late and need to get ready in about a half hour. That’s not enough time to bake something. Would you like toast instead? With Nutella?”

E glared at me. “I’m so sick of you,” she said.

I guess that meant toast with Nutella was out. As was my morning happiness. Now, generally when someone is nasty to me, I want to be nasty right back. So it took a lot of self control to let it slide. E did later apologize for her remark, and the morning proceeded with no further outbursts.

When we got home from our play date, I told the girls to get their homework done. My youngest daughter had the usual amount of math and spelling, but E was working on a big graphing project for math. She had already finished her poster and only had a reflection paragraph left to write, which she had been putting off for a few days because she didn’t want to do it.

E normally loves to write, except when she has to, in which case she generally whines and fusses and carries on and cries. I tried to point out to her that this was merely a paragraph, not a five page essay, and it was also about how she felt rather than what she learned. In essence, she had to write a “dear diary” entry. But she insisted she didn’t know how, because they didn’t cover it in class. She soon realized that I had no plans on helping her further with it and pouted on the couch with a pencil and a piece of notebook paper.

After she finished, I reviewed her paragraph. It started out fine—blah blah blah graphs blah blah pie chart blah blah blah bar graph blah blah. And then I got to the snake bite ending, written in ink rather than pencil like the rest. And here I quote: “I found this project frustrating because I had to redo my bar graph three times and my pie chart four times and no one taught me how to write a reflection paragraph.”

“Oh, E,” I called. “This last sentence here, do you think that’s a good idea? Think your teacher will like this part?”

“Probably not,” she said, drawing a circle with her toe.

“And in ink too?” I pointed out.

“And?” she said defensively.

“And now you can rewrite the whole thing, without that last line. I don’t think that is going to help your grade any.”

She stomped off to get a fresh piece of paper.

It might not seem like much to you, but from my normally sweet, loving daughter, that level of obvious contempt was like rubbing salt in my eyes. A double dose of her unbridled temper in one day is but a small taste of the bitterness to come. I only hope between now and the unleashing of her teenage puberty hell, I find a good supply of thick skin. Is that available on the Internet?