The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Teen Thoughts

Friday, May 22, 2009

Teen Thoughts

If I had to describe the worst fear of a teenager, it would not be death or failing in school, or coming down with a terrible illness. It would have to be embarrassment. I distinctly remember embarrassment as being the central emotion of my life for about seven or so years during the teenage period. And as I've already confessed, even when I was alone as a teen, I worried people might be watching me.

I think if you want to write YA, and a lot of folks who read this blog do, you have to really connect with those emotional memories to write authentically. I am keenly aware of my own boys' sense of embarrassment. The thing we forget is the acuteness of that embarrassment.

This past week, my car broke down and the dealer gave me a loaner car. Emma just loved it; it was a luxury car and she drove with me, stretched out in the back, happy as could be. I went to pick Christopher up at school, and he waved me on frenetically, then turned away as if he didn't know me. Because I try not to embarrass them (they don't believe this, and think I lunge at every opportunity to do just that) I drove home. That's when I saw the giant letters in the back: HOLMAN BROTHERS AUTO LOANER in neon tangerine. It took me a while to see that; he spotted that like an eagle would spot a weakened field mouse.

Last night was the spring concert at Philip's school. He used to play tuba. But mono and constant throat problems caused him to switch to percussion. Thinking he would play the drums at the concert like he did at rehearsal, off he went into the night. Of course, my husband and I went to the concert, along with a few of Philip's friends.

I am sitting in the audience when I get this frantic text: "Mom, can you say I'm sick? I can't do this." Now Philip is not one to shy away from the stage, but after several texts back and forth, I still didn't get what was going on. I could barely read them in the dim light, and I had to sneak reading them since they had already told us to turn off our cell phones. I couldn't imagine why he was hesitant to play.

After a few numbers, the band played again. This time, we saw Philip. Now he's a really big kid, I think the tallest in his grade, with long, straightened hair and his beloved piercings. He likes people like Kurt Cobain and the young Ozzy.

So there he stood in his shirt and tie, only he wasn't playing the drums. Apparently, a lot of boys played the drums, far more than ever played the tuba, and Philip has just begun percussion, so he was switched for the performance. He flicked his hair back and struck a note: Philip was playing "the bells" -- an instrument that sounded like something that would summon fairies. I watched his face redden to the point where I worried about aneuryism.

He was silent on the way home. I finally said to him, "So that was good, your concert."

"Mom, I am never doing that again. Ever. I am dropping out of band."

He means it. It wasn't a bad night. No one said anything to him. A girl told him how "cute" he looked up there. She told me and my husband. She clearly meant it. But to him, that one hour would define his future.

I thought of explaining persepective to him, at least trying, but then I remembered. As a teen, you don't have it, and more importantly, you don't believe in it.

7 comments:

Bish Denham said...: Oh the angst of being a teen. I'm so glad to be long past it. I was a loner and I was teased. But very little embarrassed me. In fact I often went out of my way to embarrass people around me by pulling some kind of harmless stunt. I loved taking an invisible animal into restaurants and feeding it under the table and telling it to behave itself.; Saturday, 23 May, 2009
Piloting The Ship Of Fools said...: That weakened field mouse simile just cracked me up!

I'm pretty impervious to embarrassment now, but I will never forget how keenly I felt it from years 12-18. I once burned the skin off the roof of my mouth rather than spit out a scalding mouthful of soup. I knew the mucous membrane would grow back, but the embarrassment of spitting out soup in public would have killed me. And the embarrassment-inducing potential of my parents was just surreal. My father would happily read The National Enquirer in the supermarket while my mother would loudly talk about Being a Republican. (shiver)

We had to rent a car here too, and it was an awful clinker. The first thing my foster daughter said when she saw it was "I am SO NOT RIDING TO SCHOOL IN THAT!" She did though, bless her: it was either that or take a dolmush, then climb the kilometer-long hill to school.; Saturday, 23 May, 2009
Mary Witzl said...: Anne, the above comment is MINE! The person I share my laptop with inconsiderately goes and leaves HIS name on it. Sigh...; Saturday, 23 May, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: Bish, you were the rare exception! But it sounds like you had some creative ways to make fun of the whole teen angst thing. It's funny now, but back then...

My kids think I am close to insane because I do yard work in my husband's old clothes (but does it occur to them that those strapping boys shouldn't let their 5'4" mom carry branches and lug leaf bags while they're watching music videos? Not a chance) You do become impervious to embarrassment.
I think it's because you get some kind of perspective.

The soup story is perfect -- it shows the exact flow of teenthink. And my husband is a Republican. A friend of mine asked me, very seriously, "Did you know Phil was a Republican before the wedding?"; Saturday, 23 May, 2009
Katie Anderson said...: Oh Anne! I just laughed out loud when I read that poor Philip lit up the stage with his bells! Oh lawsy! what a great story!!!; Monday, 25 May, 2009
Adrienne said...: Oh, poor thing. I think it's so funny that he tried to text you to get out of it.
My son is only eleven and he already thinks everything my husband and I do is embarrassing. We've got a long ride ahead of us...; Tuesday, 26 May, 2009
Stephanie J. Blake said...: Isn't it weird how a mother can be embarrassing just by standing silently to the side?; Tuesday, 26 May, 2009

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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