I used to think that I understood what it was like to be a middle schooler. After all, I’ve been to middle school myself; I know the routine. I know all about all those must have right now fashions that come and go so fast you barely have time to get to the mall and buy them before they’re “so last week.” And I know about the those revolving door types of friendship that manage to make the plot lines of Russian novels seem like Twilight in comparison. And that knowledge came in very handy when my daughter, Clementine, was a middle schooler. I was able to help her navigate some of the melodrama, and I was, I like to think, a good sounding board when things got really weird. All in all, I think I had a pretty decent handle on the whole thing. At least, that’s what I used to think, before, my son, Clyde, started middle school. Because that’s when I realized I really don’t have the slightest clue about middle school per se; I only understand the concept of girl middle school.
And boy middle school is a whole other thing.
Take the drama. (Please.) The other day when I asked Clyde how his day had gone at school he casually told me that the girl he liked was, apparently, no longer speaking to him. I immediately started to plan for full crisis mode: thought about what we had going on that night and whether or not we could cancel it, wondered if there was any ice cream in the house, and tried to remember if I had bought or just rented the complete Die Hard set. With all of these things going through my head I gently asked Clyde how he felt about the recent turn of events. He looked up from where he was slipping his after school snack (also known as an entire pizza) out of the freezer and shrugged his shoulders at me.
“Eh. I kind of like someone else now. Would you make this for me?”
And that was it. The extent of the breakdown. I was, to say the least, flabbergasted. Gobsmacked. Even a bit twitter-pated. Because this was something I had no experience with at all.
If this had been me in middle school I would have, without a doubt, convened a meeting of my closest friends and painstakingly, and in great detail, gone over every single conversation I had ever had with my crush, trying to pinpoint the exact moment when it had all gone wrong. Or rather, when I had gone all wrong. What I had done, what I had said, what I had worn that had caused this retraction of (previously unshakeable) affections. Even now, three decades later, I would probably still find myself wondering from time to time where it all went wrong. (I’m serious: I still puzzle over why, in seventh grade, Rodney Moffet chose to walk away from me after our first—and only—slow dance. Was it the dress? I swear, Laura Ashely was all the rage when I bought it. The song? Who doesn’t like Barbra Streisand’s “Evergreen?” Maybe it was my hair: I never could quite figure out how to feather it just like Farrah Fawcett…)
Obviously, though, Clyde was not affected the same way. At all. In fact, he was remarkably sanguine about the whole thing, acting as if this were just some normal, every day occurrence in the life of a middle schooler, and not the earth-shattering, confidence-destroying blow that it would have been for me at his age. In other words, he was acting just like…Rodney Moffet had after our fatefully ill-fated dance. Like the world hadn’t just ended even a little bit.
Huh. Come to think of it, Rodney didn’t seem to notice when I stopped speaking to him either.