Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [23]
She may have more trouble in the next few years than she anticipates. The social scene will get tougher, her emotions more turbulent, and the time may come when she thinks family night is dumb. She is just moving into the time when adolescent girls really struggle. But I think she is much more likely than most girls to hold on to her true self. She has a strong inner focus and self-confidence that I think will hold. I wished I could protect her, wrap a magic cloak around her that would keep her safe. I thought of the last line of a poem that a mother wrote about her child: “I hurl you into the universe and pray.”
My horticulturist friend says that the environment is the richest and most diverse at borders, where trees meet fields, desert meets mountains or rivers cross prairies. Adolescence is a border between adulthood and childhood, and as such it has a richness and diversity unmatched by any other life stage. It’s impossible to capture the complexity and intensity of adolescent girls. I think of one client at twelve, wanting to be a fashion model or a corporate attorney—whichever made more money. And another, an Amerasian girl who escaped Vietnam, shyly explaining that she wants to go to medical school. I think of Sara pouring forth songs from Guys and Dolls as I drive her to school. I think of the awkward movements and downcast eyes of a girl who works in her parents’ deli or the self-assured way that a neighbor girl walks back from the mound after pitching a no-hit inning.
Adolescents are travelers, far from home with no native land, neither children nor adults. They are jet-setters who fly from one country to another with amazing speed. Sometimes they are four years old, an hour later they are twenty-five. They don’t really fit anywhere. There’s a yearning for place, a search for solid ground.
Adolescence is a time of intense preoccupation with the self, which is growing and changing daily. Everything feels new. I remember the impulse to hit my mother when she woke me one morning for school. Even as I felt that rage, I was appalled by my weirdness. I remember going weak-kneed when certain boys walked by me in the halls. These moments took my breath away and left me wondering who I was becoming. I was as surprised by my reactions as I would have been by a stranger’s.
Sara, at twelve, needed to be reminded to brush her teeth, but she wanted to rent R-rated movies and get a job. She flew all over the map. One minute she was arguing with us about politics and the next she was begging for a stuffed animal. She wouldn’t be seen with us in public, but was upset if we missed her school programs. She no longer let us hug or kiss her. One night during this time of constant declarations of independence, Sara woke me in the night. She had a fever and wanted me to get a cold cloth and sit by her. I was pleased by this temporary reprieve from her ban on touching.
With adolescence, many kinds of development occur—physical, emotional, intellectual, academic, social and spiritual—and they don’t always occur in tandem. Tall, physically well-developed girls can have the emotions of children. Abstract thinkers can have the social skills of first-graders. These differences in developmental levels within the same girl confound adults. Should adults relate to the fifteen-year-old or the four-year-old part of the girl?
Generally, puberty is defined as a biological process while adolescence is defined as the social and personal experience of that process. But even puberty is influenced by culture. Girls are menstruating much earlier now than during the colonial era, and even earlier than in the 1950s. There are many theories about why puberty comes earlier—changes in nutrition (girls get bigger at a younger age because they are better nourished), hormones added to beef and chicken (growth hormones that are known to affect humans may trigger early puberty) and electricity (bodies are programmed to enter puberty after exposure to a certain amount of light, which comes much earlier in a woman