Poo-berty
As I was having my daily 8:00am hot flash the other day, fanning myself with a credit card offer, feeling sorry for my sweaty, flushed self and wishing the one stupid ovary I have left would just throw in the towel and send me to chin-hair land already, I got to thinking that this actually isn't the most frustrating, terrible, and awkward phase of my life by any stretch. That honor has to go to puberty, the steaming pile of poo that life throws us when we are not in any way equipped to handle it emotionally or physically. Eddie Izzard nailed it in his bit about puberty in Dressed to Kill, likening it to the plague. It pretty much seems like the end of your life, which has an even more dramatic connotation when you're 13.
The drama carries on for years, doesn't it?
I was already a super dorky kid - glasses, braces, red hair - the dork trifecta. But as soon as I started having crushes on boys and caring what I looked like, my body gave me the big FUCK YOU and started doing truly heinous things to me. My hair had been pretty straight with a little wave through my childhood, but shiny and manageable. At 13, it turned into a frizzy, cottony hell fire of a rat's nest. Okay, honestly, it was an orange fro.
I don't know this kid, but I feel his pain.
This was long before the miraculous frizz-controlling products of modern times, this was the early 80's. If mousse and Aqua Net couldn't fix it, you were hosed. And there is not a ginger alive who is gonna rock a fro and pull it off. Not. One.
The hot flashes of late made me think of how sweaty and smelly and completely incapable of doing anything about it I was. I remember trying every kind of deodorant, slathering it on, which would just make me sweat more and create crusty, yellow armpits in every shirt I owned. I used to put folded paper towel under my arms inside my shirt to prevent visible sweat stains, but inevitably, the sweaty paper towel would fall out of my sleeve when I was walking past a boy I liked or the really pretty girls who seemed to skip puberty and always looked fresh and perfect. BITCHES.
I don't know this girl, but I feel her pain.
Ugh. Clothes never fit right because you had 6 feet of legs and arms and no torso. (I actually haven't outgrown that, unfortunately, but whatever.) My sweet dad used to come in my room in the middle of the night and try to massage the cramps out of my legs because I would wake up screaming. I grew almost 7 inches in one year, and I'm pretty sure it was all my legs. Still have stretch marks on the insides of my knees and on my hip bones from it. Sexy!
I do feel lucky, though, despite all of that nastiness. I never had acne. I've had fewer than 10 zits in my life. Guess the trade-off is I can never have a tan and scare people with my ghostliness, but I'll take it. I felt terrible for my brothers and my friends who had to fight that battle. It looked awful and painful, and had to be sooooo great for the self-esteem. Me and my glasses and fro and braces and sweaty pits had it pretty good, I guess.
As crap as girls have it with the boobs that suddenly appear but you don't notice until your nipples make an unfortunate appearance through the stupid "training bra" you're wearing at a school assembly (training for what, a boobathon?) and the period starting most likely when you're wearing your mom's white pants that you aren't supposed to be wearing, I have to think boys had it worse than us. Yeah, voices cracking and weird hair growth would be bad, but random boners and fluids erupting from your body? Uh huh, I'll take the fro and hit the tampon aisle, thanks!