Mortifying Moments in the Making of Me

I think we can all agree that adolescence is not easy.  Speaking for myself at least, I have never felt, in all my adulthood, the kind of inadequacy that plagued my youth.  I grew up in the 80s, when the more leather and metal material woven into your clothing, the better; yours, I mean, not mine, I was a dorky kid who always wore through her shoes too quickly and had to wait all year for another pair, as they just got worse and worse.  Well, my mom had a little sister, has, I mean has, a little sister…anyway, this particular Aunt of mine, was the epitome of everything that rocked my little adolescent heart in the 80s.  She had spiky hair; leather jackets with metal studs; fingerless leather gloves; all sorts of cool hats, like berets and stuff; and jeans with rips all over, not just in the obviously-not-on-purpose-knees!  I have hazy edged memories of her pulling up in her stick-shift Mustang 5.0, climbing out and bounding into the house, carrying a huge glass bottle of 7-UP, metal clanking as she walked.  I’m telling you, this bitch was cool, if I didn’t know any better, I’d swear that my tormented little adolescent mind invented my own foil as a sick way to remind itself of everything it wanted to be.

The interesting thing about language, is that children aren’t taught most of what they learn.  Most of the time, kids take whatever they hear, hold it up to the backdrop of what’s going on for some context and surmise the rest.  And most of time it works…except when it doesn’t.  The problem is that the language acquisition device, chugging away in our youthful brains, does not consider the source.  Apparently, it’s not its job to consider the source, that job goes to some too-underdeveloped part of the brain, and consequently, unfortunately, balls get dropped.  I don’t remember how old I was when this exact scenario played out for me, but whatever age it was, it was pique-level impressionable era!

Hangin’ with some friends in my neighborhood, of course, at a boy’s house, whom I liked, I heard a word used in context with having a party.  My little language acquiring set-up immediately told the rest of my brain “STOP, everybody shut-up and pay attention!!  This is it, we need this language to be cool!!  You there, part of the brain that should be considering the source, abandon your post and take notes for me instead!!”  Later on, hindsight being 20/20, that part of my brain realized that we probably never should have trusted the boy who tried to snort the powder that comes out of fire extinguishers to know what he was talking about.

A few nights later, armed with this cool new word that clearly can only denote ‘party,’ I was sitting around the kitchen table at home, loitering there with my Aunt (probably not realizing that she was there on a Friday night, instead of anywhere else) and my mom, as the latter was making dinner.  I don’t recall if I waited for an appropriate moment in the conversation or whether I was even addressed to begin with, but either way, I said what I was there to say, I said the cool thing that I was sure would elevate me in the eyes of my kick-ass aunt.  I said “I’m gonna be so busy this weekend!  I’m going to an orgy at my friend’s house on Saturday night!”  I swear, it totally plays out in extreme slow-motion when I think about it now, “OR - - - G - - - Y…”  My aunt stopped in her tracks, looked at me and said “a what?”  Of course, I said “ya know, an orgy!  Duh!  You don’t know what an orgy is?”  It was exactly then that I realized I had made a terribly mistake, because my aunt could suddenly not stop laughing.  Wait, no, I’m wrong, she stopped long enough to ask me what I thought it was.  After I answered that it was obviously a party, THEN she could not stop laughing.  I cried about 35 shades of embarrassment.  And the crazy thing is that I don’t even know what my mom did through any of this, I have no recollection of that part.

Of course, I’ve learned to laugh at myself since then, so, I see now that it actually is funny.  However, I have three daughters for whom I keep a keen lookout for opportunities to usher across literary bridges such as this in a much more diplomatic and far less scarring way.  I don’t remember trying so hard to be something I didn’t fully understand for a very long time after this.  I am a tried and true ‘think twice before acting’ kind of person, perhaps that aspect of my personality has its roots in this very moment.  I wonder if my Aunt remembers this, not that I plan to ask.  Still, I wonder if she does.  We’re both, obviously with time, very different people than we were then, and I wonder what she would think of the whole scenario now.  Maybe some day I’ll have a chance to ask.