Memory Lane

Over the past few weeks I have been having a trip down memory lane courtesy of Puberty Blues. I’m not sure what yours is like but my memory lane is scattered with the remnants of my dignity, littered with the debris of broken relationships, and haunted by the ghosts of “what if” that taunt me about all the less inspired choices I made (particularly in the area of boyfriends). But of course it’s also lined with my first love, with intense friendships, with phone conversations that lasted longer than the civil war (my friend’s father once ripped the phone out of the wall to stop one), with attempts to tape music off Countdown, with sneaky parties when parents were away, with summer holidays that lasted forever, and those times when I learnt to stay very quiet when my parents and all the uncles and aunts were having a few drinks and talking (it was amazing what you could learn). And then there are all the moments that were once painfully embarrassing but have thankfully become funny over time: like the time I put a sanitary pad on upside down only to have to rip it off again; or my first pash which felt like my whole face was being swallowed; or the time my boyfriend’s mother burst into his bedroom to find us both in our underwear “listening to music”; or the time I was felt up by the sales lady fitting me for my first bra. My memory lane is quite a crowded place that’s occasionally fun to visit – but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Watching Puberty Blues has caused a brain flood of  teenage memories – not all of it pretty. Funnily enough I lived by a beach when I went to high school so the locations are eerily familiar, as are the boys with the salty blonde hair and the girls with school uniforms up around their armpits. I’m finding the series both fascinating and difficult. The casual misogyny is well portrayed and so horribly real. The way the girls treat each other and pander to the boys is also hard to watch. I read somewhere that the writers raised the girls’ ages from 13 to 16 to make it more palatable to the public but I have to say it is still tough to take. And then there are the parents – drinking, fornicating, flirting with colleagues! What is the world coming to? Despite the fact that I am now a parent (and know what happens at those school fundraiser evenings) I refuse to believe that my parents got up to anything beyond a bodice ripper on the ABC and just the one glass of fruity lexia.

I know people who think the whole thing is too far fetched to be real but I can still remember reading the book all those years ago and feeling sure that the writers had been to my school. Bored one day, I discovered the book on my grandmother’s bookshelves and wondered what the hell she was doing with a book with “puberty” in the title, so I took it down and flicked it open. I was hooked on the first page and quietly curled up in an armchair and kept reading. I was only vaguely aware of a huddle of aunts and my mother in the doorway, looking at me and whispering. Apparently they’d bought the book and “hidden” it in Gram’s bookshelves while they decided if I was old enough to read it. I think I was about 14. Now that I was half way through it was a bit late so they nervously left me to it. The similarities to my life were uncanny – the cool girls, the surfie guys, the turf wars in the playground and on the bus, smoking in the toilets. We had moved from a totally different area of NSW before I started high school but it might as well have been another country. I was on the edges of it and felt like an alien. These girls spoke a language I didn’t understand – what the hell was being “fingered”? And the boys – well they just frightened me to death. I often wondered if my mother actually ever read the book and if she did, did she realise it was all true and on our doorstep? I think the fact that I wasn’t packed off to a nice convent means that she didn’t really think it was happening. Ignorance truly can be bliss.

Of course this is all resonating with me right now as I am on the brink of sending my first born off to high school next year. I don’t think I can do it. I’ve decided I desperately want her to be a nerd. It will be much safer – for both of us. It is such a shame I can remember those years so well. I’d be very grateful for some selective memory loss right about now – perhaps I’ll just have to induce some with some strategic valium abuse.

I am incredibly grateful that I am no longer at high school and that I’m not one of those people who think it was the best time of their life – their bar must be very low.

B

Wired

I think old Sir Cliff Richard would be very sad to discover that we are no longer wired for sound, but much more likely to be wired for sudden explosions of repressed rage. I know I have commented on public abuse before (the man who yelled at me in the dog park when his dog jumped all over No.2, the old lady who hissed at me on my bike) and you might start to think it’s something I’m doing since I’m the common denominator, but seriously people – what’s with the rush to abuse? Why do we leap straight to thinking that others are out to get us or deliberately flouting rules or cheating us in some way? Why can’t we all start at a slightly lower ebb. Whatever’s happened to “I say old man but would you mind awfully if I troubled you to take your foot off my toe?” These days you could accidentally step on someone’s toe on public transport and find yourself in a headlock, before you even register their toe under your foot, with a range of expletives ringing in the air.  You really notice this in cars. Someone makes the slightest mistake and suddenly horns are going and the errant driver is subjected to a torrent of abuse completely out of proportion to the apparent “crime”. It is starting to get to me.

This may explain why l just didn’t let it go the other day when a man in the park neglected the polite reminder entirely and skipped straight to rage. Let me set the scene – I was wandering slowly through the park with my children and my dog (on a lead) looking for a group of people I was there to meet and I wasn’t sure which section they’d be in. I had a pile of bags and was paying no attention to my dog at all. Several times I stopped and stared at groups of people in the distance trying to work out if they were the people I was there to meet. Suddenly this man loomed over me and shouted in my face that there were children playing in this damn park and it was disgusting that my dog had gone to the toilet and I hadn’t picked it up and would I bloody well go back and get it right now. He was almost frothing at the mouth. Now I could have just ignored it and gone all Zen, assuming that this poor man hadn’t been hugged enough in his life. But I didn’t. I started small and tried to explain to the man that I was very sorry but I hadn’t realised my dog had pooed, but was interrupted by another load of froth and bile as he yelled that I had seen it happen and I had deliberately ignored it. I was dumbfounded and rather than try to explain again I decided to ask him why he just assumed the worst and why he couldn’t simply have asked me nicely. I again tried to explain that I have a bag full of poo bags and that I always pick up the dog’s poo but was met with another load of abuse before he stalked off. I lost the plot and yelled after him that he was an idiot (or possibly an arsehole – my memory’s a little hazy on the details), grateful that Nos1&2 had taken off on their bikes moments before this scene transpired. I am heartily sick of being blamed for things I haven’t done.

So, in high dudgeon (best word ever), I stomped over to the closest picnic table, all riled up and nowhere near any kind of state even remotely related to Zen, and dumped all my bags violently on the table. I tied up the dog and stormed back to the area he had gestured wildly at and tried to locate the excrement in question in the biggest pile of leaves you’ve ever seen, all of which were various shades of shit brown. So, still not willing to leave it alone, I strode over to Mr Pig and “asked” him to show me where it was. He wasn’t much help but did have the decency to look vaguely shame-faced. I finally found it and hurled it into the bin feeling very hard done by.

So what’s going on here? Why can’t we be more gentle with each other? If he’d just politely let me know I would have thanked him profusely and picked it up immediately. If, after this approach, I had told him to sod off and mind his own business then he would have been completely within his rights to crank it up to the next level. Why did he start at the top? You’re not leaving yourself anywhere to go if you peak too early. Not to mention the stress on your body as the anger just churns around looking for a victim. Funnily enough, a little while later I noticed that his children had left their bikes all over the bike path, completely in the way of all the other kids on bikes and skateboards and various other wheeled thingies. Even when No.1 almost ploughed into one of them on her rip stick, he made no move to get his kids to put their bikes out of the way. I could easily have made a point of commenting on his lack of consideration for others, but I didn’t. I let it go. It wasn’t worth the distress it would have caused me so I just felt pleased that I wasn’t him and didn’t have to live inside his head. That would clearly be very tiring and he’s going the right way towards an early heart attack.

I am not sure what I’m grateful for in relation to this situation – possibly the fact that I chose not to one-up him. That will do.

B