Maybe it's Alphawoman's 70s retrospective.
Maybe it's the conversation I've been having with a group of online friends about love and what it means in life.
Maybe it's that I spent so much of work today dealing with various aspects of the emotional fallout from adolesence.
Maybe it's just that my daughter and I drove in at the same time tonight.
I like to believe that she's nothing like I was at seventeen. One the surface, she's not. She's a terrific student, and these days she's busy constructing sets for her school's musical. She's not a party girl, or much of a social butterfly at all, but she has a few good friends whom she loves to spend time with. And she may be happiest of all curled up in her bed with her dog, her cat, and a good fantasy novel.
But for whatever reason, I felt a real lurch back into time tonight. I am seventeen and it's early evening, very dark and cold in western Massachusetts. I'm in boarding school, where seniors are left to their own devices at night. We pull on our boots and our coats and head out into the crunchy knee-high snow toward the student center -- a gloomy, dimly lit basement where we can sit around and smoke cigarettes and talk.
What did we talk about, all those evenings that winter? I can't remember at all. It was a different time, in which test scores and GPAs were matters of no interest. It was a different world, in which people experimented with but talked little about drugs and sex. I suppose we talked about The Future, but not much. And we talked about boys some -- but we were reluctant to reveal our vulnerabilities. As girls who lived far from parents and siblings, we shared almost everything, but we didn't like to acknowledge weakness. After a couple of hours, we'd go back to our dorm and take our books and folders down to the basement smoker, where we'd write our English papers and smoke more cigarettes and talk until the wee hours of the morning.
I don't think my daughter lives at all the way that I did. She spends much more time with her family than I did -- I almost never saw my family. She is much happier and healthier -- and she doesn't smoke!
But I know that she protects herself, too.
9 comments:
I can relate. Sometimes I really miss smoking. Your daughter sounds like a real sweetheart. Pamela
Sounds like you majored in smoking in boarding school. Hack, hack! Your daughter is lucky she hasn't started. I have found that's the easiest way to quit! Lisa :-]
You are a lucky Mom! My daughter got senioritis when she was 17. Her car was on autopilot to the beach, not school! It is fortunate that she did very well in the first three years of highschool or we would have been paying for her college tuition! I lived on coffee and cigarettes when I was in college. During that time it was cool to smoke. My daughter smoked when she was hanging out with kids who did. She stopped because her new college crowd do not. Seems like it is not cool to be a smoker in college anymore.
What an interesting confrontation between the current reality of your dd at 17 and the memory of yourself at 17!
My kids teach me so much. It looks like there will be many more years of learning.
I remember the most important thing was to get as far away from my parents as possible! Under their tyranny, it was impossible to experience LIFE! We were lucky in so many ways, an innocent yet exploding time in history. Smoking? HA! Who didn't? (way back then) Football players smoked!
Your senior year in high school sounds more like college! It's interesting how you have built your family in such a different format than your family of origin.
Just being at boarding school instead of at home would make your adolescence very different from your daughter's, it would seem.
I think my children are also much happier and healthier than I was at their age. Glad to hear all's well at your house--I'm behind on commenting on everyone's journal. Been busy some of the time, sick some of the time, and lazy some of the time!
Wow! I am way behind on your entries. I rely on those alerts too much and haven't been getting them for your journal. DH and I were discussing how different we were at 18 also, than our son is. I reminded DH that I met him when I was 18. Do you keep in touch with any of your friends from boarding school?
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