Middle-Aged in Middle-School
Surely it will be better this time.
My son started middle school last week and I’m shitting my ever-loving pants.
As my friend Erin said, “We all went to middle school. We know too much.”
It’s true. Who are we fooling?
You can’t unsee that stuff. You can unhear it. You are on an accelerated path to hell, like one of those weird Disney rides with the creepy, bug-eyed, finger-pointing, mouth-breathing animatronics who always look like they’re about to mansplain the difference between funnel cake and fried dough, but then launch into a cheery song about how much alligators love gumbo.
But how much do I say?
Should he know how dreadful those hallowed halls can be?
Or just…find out?
DO WE TELL HIM??? (And yes, we. You must all help parent this child now because it’s too much for me!)
I don’t want to scare him. Especially because he seems to kind of like it.
These Are Not My People
Is it weird that I get the creepy crawlies when I pick him up from school? Even this new crop of parents seem cold and large and formal like secret service agents in bootcut yoga pants and Crocs. Most of them don’t even get out of their cars!
And there’s no bell. Kids just start seeping through the doors at dismissal like pus from a fresh, irritated blister. There are so many of them! Middle school is huge and so…bricky. And those kids are so damn tall! And they all have phones! Is someone going to fight me on the blacktop? Am I going to get my ass kicked here???
You Are What You Carry Your Lunch In
Buying school supplies was a whole new level of terror. I swear I ordered black headphones, but blue ones showed up! THE PANIC! Did he ask for blue? Or black? Was I setting my son up for certain failure by procuring him the wrong kind of pencils or worse— buying him pencils??? Yes, they were on the school supply list (32 of them to be precise) but did middle schoolers actually heed that sort of advice? Did only DORKS and DWEEBS actually show up to school with pencils READY TO LEARN and WRITE SHIT DOWN? Oh god, these pencils are going straight in the trash!
It’s harder on the parents than the kids
This is a time of reflection for parents. Forced reflection. Like horror movie torture villain holding your eyelids open with toothpicks and making you rewatch your worst 7th grade memories horror.
Even though no one (not even a therapist) is forcing me to do this, I feel it’s important to enter my Middle School Mom Era with a clean slate and solid mental health foundation. (HA!) To do so, I’m practicing a modified version of aversion therapy and revisiting some of my rock bottom middle school moments.
Dickhead McDickerson making fun of my zit in 6th grade. (He’s still an asshole as evidenced by the crap he posts on Facebook.) It was on the side of my nose— like the entire side of my nose— and that little dickface yelled, “Wow! Look at the size of that zit on Mazzanoble’s nose!” Yeah, it was big. Enormous. MEGA-ZIT. Possibly the biggest zit to ever walk the halls of West Middle School. It was like carrying a second face on the side of my face and that second face also had an enormous zit. Really glad Dickhead McDickerson felt it was necessary to call attention to it. God forbid the passengers in row 32 on American Airlines flight 3854 en route to Sioux Falls flying overhead did not notice my giant zit from their 32,000 feet cruising altitude! What an asshole.
The biggest girl bully in 6th grade forcing me to give her the fold-out Duran Duran poster from my Bop magazine. The shakedown occurred in Shop class. Why I had a copy of Bop magazine in Shop class I do not know, but it couldn’t have been unexpected or inappropriate because no one told me to put down the boy band book and pick up my hand saw. Also we had a Shop class. Do they still do that? Kids and vape pens and nail guns? Is that bad?
My alleged friends taunting me at Chuck E. Cheese because I wouldn’t take a drag off the contraband Virginia Slims cigarette someone ripped off their mom. Little did they know, I’d be smoking all the cigarettes a few years later! Who’s laughing now, bitches?? (And YES this is a story for another day.)
Taking a bite of a Butterfingers candy bar in front of my crush and having the damn thing CRUMBLE like a termite-infested floor joist all over my chin and shirt1.
Getting busted by my mom when I tried to swipe two cans of beer from the basement fridge and stuff them into my LeSport Sac purse before a school dance. Oh I got in trouble, but for some inexplicable reason my mom still let me go to the dance.
Swigging the backwash of 14 other 7th graders from the can of beer a classmate with a less perceptive mom successfully swipped from her house before the aforementioned dance I was somehow allowed to go to even though I was busted earlier that night for attempted beer theft.
Watching the Girl Bully puke her guts out on the gym steps because she drank more than backwash.
Getting my first perm right before 6th grade started and later that day riding in someone’s2 convertible which made my hair balloon up and out like a F6 tornado. LIFE OVER! Goodbye, cruel world! I’m still pissed that my parents didn’t up and move us to a new town to start our lives over.
Fun fact: this was the first and only time I was ever violent towards my favorite teddy bear, Pooh. (I threw him on the ground.)
Math. F*ck that shit.
Memorizing the eye chart in the nurse’s office to avoid anyone finding out I was blind as a star-nose mole. Pretty sure not being able to see four feet in front of me was why I was almost failing social studies and literally never made contact between a bat and a softball.
All of the girls constantly asking each other if they were “mad at them.”
GIRL: Are you mad at me?
OTHER GIRL: No.
GIRL: Oh good! I thought I did something.
OTHER GIRL: Nope.
GIRL: You’re a great friend! Bye!
Repeat conversation next three years.
Kicking off 8th grade English with an oral book report on Lucky, by Jackie Collins. I was the only kid who read a book over the summer who was willing to get up in front of the class and talk about it.
Walking into the wrong classroom on the first day of 7th grade and taking a seat. It was 8th grade biology. I was supposed to be in 7th grade Spanish. I realized my mistake quickly because I am VERY SHARP and also because I WAS IN A LAB and NO ONE WAS SPEAKING SPANISH. I had to walk out while the teacher was talking and then walk into my Spanish class and explain why I was tarde— in Spanish! ¡Qué corte!
Playing with an Ouija board and accidentally leaving a ghost in my friend Theresa’s parent’s bedroom because it refused to say goodbye and Cindy and I got tired of asking. (Sorry, Theresa. I hope it was a friendly ghost.)
Blowing up a cake in Home Ec because not only did I mess up the math (obviously), I added baking soda instead of baking powder. Because of me, my whole group had to stay afterschool and clean out the oven. Oopsie!
Winning a badminton championship and acquiring my first and only trophy. Wait. Is that really a low-light, Shelly? No, that is most definitely a flex. Just had to share.
Well, that was fun. Guess who won’t be able to sleep tonight.
Generational Trauma?
It’s only been a week, but my son is already picking up his own special middle school moments to harbor deep in his psyche and obsess upon years from now when he’s under a weighted blanked and talking to a hologram of his therapist.
Here’s a few:
His Amazon Basics pencils
His mom buying him black headphones instead of blue
His mom offering to help run the Dungeons & Dragons club
His parents cutting off his $8 a day Starbucks Pink Drink habit after only one week of walking home from school
His cheap, stupid, embarrassing, definitely-not-an-Apple-watch accidentally butt-dialing his mom and having to explain to his class why his mom’s shrill, panicked voice was coming out of his backpack.
Off to a great start!
XO,
Shelly
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This actually may have happened in high school making it even more horrific, but also funnier.
I have no idea whose car this was, but I clearly remember being in it. I was 12. Would I have had friends old enough to drive convertibles? First my mom lets me go to a dance I was trying to get shitfaced at and then she sends me and my new perm off to ride around town with a stranger and his convertible? (I wasn’t alone. Pretty sure my friend Cindy was there too. And maybe my brother and they were probably my two worst influences so I’m sure everything was just fine. Everything but my giant broccoli-headed perm.)
Book club, anyone?
I think we were the same person in middle school. McDickersons never learn, do they?
Well, I think we all need a minute here to both stop laughing and deal with our emotions after having middle school traumas come flooding back. My family moved to another state the summer before I started middle school, so I knew no one. Then I broke both my arms that year (not at the same time) so I was the chubby, highly breakable new kid. Amazing that I can't remember who I talked to yesterday but I can conjure up those feelings in a split second.
When will you be getting another perm?
Butterfinger does have severe infrastructure problems. There should be a warning on the label.
Are you mad at me?