This essay is for every parent who has raised a teenage daughter.
Judy Blume's novel, "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margret," written in 1970, is now old enough to captivate a second generation of adolescent girls... and remind their mothers to be patient and understanding... and find God if they haven't already.
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Are You There, God? It’s Me,
Margaret’s Mom
Shana McLean Moore
Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret’s
mom. I barely recognize my daughter these days. Please help me, God. One minute
she wants to snuggle me and the next she spits “Mom” like it’s a swear word.
It’s scary, God! Please make sure my Margaret doesn’t make the same mistakes I
did as a teenager. If you could take away even a few of my worries, I’d probably
stop aging like a two-term president. Thank you, God.
We’ve
all been Margaret, Judy Blume’s main character in the most memorable novel of
our youth, Are You There God? It’s Me,
Margaret, a book now old enough to reach a second generation of adolescent
girls. In fact, we couldn’t possibly be in the role of raising a daughter of
our own if we hadn’t faced the same issues ourselves. The trouble is, from our
new vantage point, it’s twice as scary to raise a Margaret as it was to be one.
And that says an awful lot.
So
who could blame us for being mesmerized by Margaret? After all, her message
about adolescence being “pretty rotten—between pimples and worrying about how
you smell” was a great improvement from the grown-ups’ “church and state” explanation.
I almost expected my mom to grab a pointer and a pull-down wall chart as she
described the journey of an ovum traveling down the fallopian tube, through the
uterus, and out the vagina. It sounded like something Weird Al Yankovic could
have sung to “Over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house we
go.”
The
part of Mom’s lesson that baffled me, though, was the fact that blood was suddenly
deemed to be fine and normal, not something that should send me screaming to her
and Dad for Band Aids and some TLC, as it always had before.
Yet
despite all the disturbing details, I longed, just like Margaret, to have
physical proof that I was a pad-carrying member of young womanhood. And while I
was creating my secret wish list, I agreed with Margaret that it would be nice
to not only have a bra, but something other than Charmin two-ply to stuff into
it. Then maybe, just maybe, I’d be like every other sweater-filling girl in my
class who made the boys blush when it was her turn at “Spin the Bottle.”
Fast
forward nearly thirty years and I now understand that puberty is so much more
than a tissue issue, where we gain some up north and shed a few down south. It
has far more to do with the intangible things that hop aboard our psyche at the
very same time. Welcome to middle school, where your grades really count, where
you find out who your real friends are, where the same boys who pulled your
hair in kindergarten are now asking you to the dance. It’s got to be enough to
make our Margarets feel like they’re being speed-cooked in a convection oven,
with all those powerful waves coming at them from every which way.
I understood this the first time I
walked the halls of my daughter’s middle school, pan searing in
When will I know if we’ve laid enough groundwork for her to make the right choices for herself when it really matters? I’m not talking about the length of her skirts but rather the lengths my Margaret will go to in order to date her version of the novel’s Moose Freed, the naughty older boy at school. To be one of the popular kids on campus.
Please,
God, don’t let my Margaret be too hard on herself for her perceived
inadequacies. May she see the models and glamour girls of the world as
airbrushed versions of her own self, who wake up with bed head, pimples, and
bad breath, just like the rest of us. Remind her, too, that the characters she
admires in books, movies and even in the house next door have their own inner
battles to overcome, even though they appear to be the picture of style,
beauty, and excitement from the vantage point of our couch, or the kitchen
window.
I
hope my Margaret’s first love will be kind to her, God, I just can’t bear the thought of looking into the eyes of a broken heart personified. For that reason and so many others, please
make her remember what I said about never blowing off her friends, even when
she’s under the influence of puppy-love potion.
While
we’re at it, please don’t let her have sex too young, God. And if she does, please let it be because she is madly in love with
someone who loves her like I do, right down to
a cellular level. Make sure that the gossiping masses don’t find out about it
either, leaving her branded with a scarlet “S” on her reputation.
And
God? Please, oh please, don’t let her get pregnant with a Margaret of her own
until she has not only sown her wild oats, but watered and nurtured them enough
that she has a sturdy harvest of memories to sustain her through the selfless
early days of motherhood… in her thirties.
Thank
you, God.
