When A “Good” Girl Starts Secondary School
My eleven-year-old son, my first-born and the epicentre of my universe started secondary school last week and I can’t lie, but I’ve been in a STATE about it!
Will he get bullied for being autistic? Will he slip into a major depression? Or, will he fall in with the wrong crowd? Skive lessons to smoke fags at the back of the school field just to keep in with them? Will he spiral out of control and end up on drugs? Get a girl pregnant!? Get arrested and wind up in jail???
(Yes, that escalated pretty quickly. But I’m only 41. I’m too young to be a grandmother, and frankly, I just don’t have the time to hide shivs in homemade cakes and smuggle them into prison on a monthly basis. My schedule is already stressful enough (plus, I’m not much of a baker if the truth be told.)
The ‘Welcome Home’ cake that I baked for my husband. Case in point.
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ my Mum said as I sobbed down the phone to her just seconds after my son left for his first day of school. ‘You’re being dramatic. He is a good boy, he’ll be okay.’
But the woman has a short memory. She forgets that I too was a “good” girl…a straight A student, shy and desperate to please…a little girl pure of heart and soul.
I mean, look at that face…
Like butter wouldn’t melt.
At age 11, I still played with Barbies. I still believed in Santa and the Tooth Fairy, in unicorns and leprechauns. It was 1991, and back then my dreams revolved around wondering if Jimmy Saville would ever answer my letter and “fix it” for me to meet Kylie and Jason, or whether I’d finally get to be a contestant on Pat Sharp’s Fun House and throw myself into a pool of slime on telly.
But, all of this was not to last. This “good” girl was soon going to put my poor mum through years of hell…a hell which was unleashed the moment I set foot through the gates of my local comprehensive school.
First up….
THE HORMONES
In primary school, boys were generally considered to be smelly and annoying, but by the end of my first year in comp, I’d transformed into some sort of sex pest. The hormones were surging through my body and I had no control over what they did to me.
Peer pressure is a powerful thing and all of a sudden, everything felt like a big competition. It was no longer about who had the nicest handwriting, or who could do a perfect cartwheel or handstand, but more like who had the biggest boobs, who had started their period and who had bagged themselves a boyfriend!
By the second year, my friends were exclusively ‘boys, boys, boys’ and given that half of them were already boasting about their first snog ( a real ‘neck’ and not just a ‘peck’) , the pressure to attract a smelly boy and slip my tongue into his mouth became intense.
I prepared well, as every teenage girl should, and where my mum thought I was upstairs doing my homework, I was actually practising my snogging skills on the bathroom mirror. And when the lights went out at bedtime, I moved on to snogging posters of Jason Donovan and Chesney Hawkes on my bedroom walls.
When my older sister informed me that my favourite beaus were no longer “in” I switched over to assaulting Bon Jovi instead and after a few weeks of intense practice, I’d snogged a large hole into his face and was left with only my pink wallpaper to work with.
Practising at home was one thing, but I went to extra lengths at school to try and get a boyfriend. I ditched my bra from Tammy Girl (size 30AA) and upgraded to a padded one from Primark and, unbeknownst to my mum, I stole my dad’s razor and shaved my legs every other day. I doused myself in White Musk which I’d bought from The Body Shop with my dinner money and the moment my mum dropped me at the school gates, I would wait until she drove off before hoiking my skirt up a few extra inches.
That’s what all the girls did, so I played along. And do you know what? It worked.
My first snog finally happened in the Valentine’s disco at the local rugby club (of course, my mum thought I was at a girly sleepover, but shhhh!)
Harry Cox was the boy of the hour and given that he was a whole year older than me, pulling him really did put me on the map. A Million Love Songs had just starting playing when he pounced on me and by the end of the first verse, our tongues were slipping manically over each other like a pair of freshly-caught fish squirming in a bucket.
My friends, with their matching Rachel Green haircuts, stood behind us cheering us on as they sucked on their cartons of Um Bongo and chewed their Curly Wurlies, and I was in my element! I was actually snogging a boy! An OLDER boy!!
But half an hour later, we were still going strong. My friends had grown bored, I was turning blue and on the verge of lock jaw and my friend’s dad had arrived to pick us up and was tooting his horn in the carpark. I knew I had to put an end to it, but I had no idea how to stop the never-ending snog.
Tap him on the shoulder to warn him? A quick kick in the shins? Mumble something? What??
Rachel Green haircuts, bomber jackets and Curly Wurlies… the must-haves of every girl my age.
In the end, I took the bull by the horns and decided to pull away sharply, but unfortunately, in doing so, I gobbed all over Harry’s spotty chin…a thick dollop of Curly-Wurlied dribble.
Our romance was over before it even started, and by the end of the following week, he’d asked out three of my friends and my poor mum was left to pick up the pieces.
THE ANGRY PHASE
A few months later, long after I’d become a confident snogger who didn’t drench the chins of the multitudes, I developed a sudden and overwhelming anger towards life.
I had nothing to genuinely be angry about, but that didn’t matter.
Everyone around me was feigning misery , so naturally, I followed suit.
My girly tops and dresses made their way to charity shops and I committed to wearing as much black as possible. My Rachel Green haircut was grown out, permed and dyed black, and I bought myself the tallest pair of DM boots that I could find and painted the backs of them with Tippex.
From a distance, I suppose I would have looked pretty intimidating—a miserable black figure with skunks clinging on to her calves—but that was very much my intention
Totally out of the blue, I decided one day that I wanted to become a vegetarian ( “Why must animals suffer?! WHY??”) and my mum rolled with it. She filled the freezer full of Linda McCartney sausages and aside from an occasional bacon sandwich ( I needed it…for growth and energy), I stuck at it for almost a year. I was equally as committed when it came to my facial expressions and I made sure that under no circumstances would I ever smile. EVER!
I could not afford to break character. Even after I bought a black lipstick and my mum had to take me to one side to ask me if I was “worshipping the devil”, I still didn’t smile.
Hilarious though it was.
Satan’s Little Minion
THE ANGST
The day before my fourteenth birthday, Kurt Cobain killed himself and the world fell apart. I had no idea who Kurt Cobain was, but after doing a little research, I decided that I was going to be utterly devastated about it just like everyone else in my school. Teenage angst was a movement and I wanted to be a part of it.
My bedroom walls were soon plastered in pictures of Kurt’s beautiful face and every night, I would write a secret diary to tell him how much I missed him and how I loved him more than anything…even more than my springer spaniel, Lucy.
In a moment of madness, I even took a pair of scissors to my brand new jeans from New Look and sliced them up and poured bleach all over them so they would look like his jeans. I did the same with my hair—both the bleach and the haphazard wielding of scissors—and at one point, my mum was seriously concerned that I was going to do something stupid in order to be reunited with this man in heaven…a man who up until a few months ago I’d never even heard off.
Sorry for the stress Mum…seriously, I was a dick.
THE ANXIOUS STAGE
Thankfully, by the time I started my G.C.S.Es, I had grown into a more respectable young woman. My life was all about studying and I started drinking Nescafe by the gallon in order to keep awake long into the night with my textbooks. Kurt Cobain was totally forgotten and now, I was fully invested in Beethoven and I was determined to become a professional cellist. Spotty boys were out, inappropriate musical icons were out and all traces of devil worshipping were long gone.
I was now the “good” girl that my mum always believed me to be.
But good girls are perhaps the hardest work of all. Right, Mum? Remember the time I was so stressed out that I had to take FOUR days off school just because my fringe wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do?
Bet that black lipstick didn’t seem so bad after this, right?
Anything less than four inches was unacceptable back in my day.
THE 16th BIRTHDAY PARTY
And finally, my next door neighbour invited me to her 16th birthday party but I turned up late as I had a concert beforehand. ( Musician readers… let me just tell you that this concert was actually my concerto debut. It was in the local community hall that stank of cheesy feet and chips. The accompanist was about eighty years old, the piano was consistently a tone flat and my chosen repertoire was the Elgar concerto …but only the first page of it because I couldn’t play the rest!)
Anyway, I digress.
After playing my glorious top E, I took a bow for a small group of pensioners and hauled my arse back home so I could still make it to my neighbour’s party.
‘Be home by eleven,’ my mum said, her eyes glistening with pride after my listening to my short but impressive cello performance.
‘I will,’ I said, and I meant it.
But when I walked through the door of the party and I was handed a litre bottle of this stuff…..
Anyone who has sampled this poison in any quantity will know what comes next.
Within the hour, I’d barricaded myself in the downstairs loo and I was puking multi-coloured vomit with such violent force that I actually pulled the toilet seat clean off its hinges!
I returned home way past my curfew, stumbled through the door and saturated my mum’s door mat in vomit instantly. I then passed out on the sofa with my eyes fixed wide open. Naturally, my mum and my sister thought I was dead, and it was only after they threw a bucket of water over me that I sprung to life and took down the sofa with another shower of unpleasantness. (Sorry Mum, I know how much you loved that paisley sofa)
It’s only now at the age of forty one that I’ve become the “nice” girl that my Mum thought I was all along. I’m a respectable classical musician, wife and mother of two and my days of debauchery are long over.
But knowing what I know about life as a secondary school student, I’m pretty sure that the next six years of parenting a teenager are going to be horrendous.
If you’ve got an 11 year old too, brace yourself! Have the mop and bucket at the ready, an exorcist’s number saved in your phone and whatever you do, don’t walk in on your kid in the bathroom.
Top tips from one “good” girl to another. xx