When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
1 Corinthians 13:11
I am now officially the mother of a teenager. Bess turned 13 last week.
This has been coming for a while. It seems that 12 is the new 13. Bess has been acting teenager-y for the past year or so. She is nearly my height and wears shoes two sizes bigger than mine. She is strong and fit, one of the fastest girls in the eighth grade. (She could take me in a fight, I'm sure.) She went through a long tomboy phase, but lately she has been wearing mascara and doing things with her hair. She's so beautiful she takes my breath away. The day of her birthday she brought home a straight-A report card and paperwork to join the National Honor Society. She practices the flute, does her homework, and writes thank-you notes without being asked. For the third year in a row, she asked her friends to bring donations for a charity instead of gifts to her birthday party, all her own idea.
I feel nervous even talking about how awesome she is, because I don't want to tempt fate. It helps that she has a great group of friends, all good students and athletes who are well liked by other kids. I believe that a teen's friends are the biggest influence on how well he or she will come through the years between childhood and adulthood. If only it were possible to choose our children's friends, we'd have this teen thing licked. I consider myself lucky. Knock on wood.
But she is, after all, a teenager. And a teenager's job is the same as a two-year-old's: to explore her independence. So Bess sasses me and complains about having her picturetaken and slams doors and rolls her eyes and refuses to kiss us in public. It comes with the territory. We insist that she speak to us and her sisters with respect, but secretly we laugh at her occasional pissiness. She has to do it. If we don't let her rebel in little ways, she will be forced to rebel in big ways. We drop her off at a friend's house and let her get away without a kiss. We let her hide away in her room and play moody music and text her friends while doing her homework. And when she suddenly decides she needs me to sit right next to her for two hours and watch the DVD from Netflix that she previously complained was "lame," I go along with it, without comment. I'll take whatever closeness I can get before she flies the nest. (And that flight is so close! She'll be applying to college in four years.)
May will be 12 in a couple of months. Last month she spent a weekend cleaning her room. She boxed up her toys, her Chinese books, the napkins and toothpicks she had sneaked out of restaurants in China, old coloring books and crayons, Easter candy from 2006 -- all the stuff she's been hoarding since she arrived here. I will keep some of it for her memory box, and the rest will go to Goodwill. Her room is a teenager's room now, full of jewelry and perfume and clothes, with just a few token stuffed animals and collectible dolls. She still plays imaginative games with Ella when she thinks no one is looking, but she is growing closer and closer to Bess's developmental level. She is trying out her wings. Bess boxed up all her toys when she was 11. I did it when I was 12. So it goes.
When you first become a parent and people tell you, "They're not little for long"? They aren't kidding.
I'll stop now before I start singing, "Sunrise, Sunset."
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