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