Thirteen

Turning thirteen!  Such a big year in the lives of our children and one we look toward with both excitement and dread.  From all that I was told when my daughter was little, I was sure that when she turned thirteen she would turn into a monster.  I learned that the best way to confront a future problem is by confronting it before it happens.  One of my favorite sayings is, "An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure."  So long before she turned thirteen, it was a subject that I brought up now and then in our nighttime conversations.

Every night I would read a chapter or two from a book we both wanted to read before she went to bed. Long after she could have read them by herself, we continued this tradition.  We enjoyed this time together so much that we sometimes stayed up way too late, just to read another chapter.  But along with the reading, came discussions about what was happening in life that related to the book.  As we were reading young adult novels, the topic of growing up was one that often came up.  So I prepared her and told her that when she turned thirteen, she might turn into this monster who no longer wanted to talk or spend time with her boring mother.  She promised me often that it would never happen, and I am relieved to say, that it actually never did.

With my son being younger, he was the one I would read to first at night.  Then I would say goodnight to him and go to my daughter's room where she and I would read and talk.  There was only a wall between the two bedrooms, so he would often stay up listening to us talk.  So by the time she turned thirteen, he already knew that I thought she was going to turn into a monster.

Well on her thirteenth birthday, she went to school first.  As my son, who was almost eight at the time, was leaving, he expressed his concern that his sister might turn into a monster that very day.  And that is when a plan started to formulate in my brain.  When my daughter came home from school that afternoon, I told her what her brother was worried about.  So she went to her bedroom, changed her clothes into more "teenage" looking clothes, put up her hair haphazardly, and put some bubble gum in her mouth.  When my son walked through the door she walked up to him, chewing her bubble gum loudly, and pushed him and said something like, "What do you-u-u want?"  He looked at her in surprise and concern.  She continued to act her part of being a nasty teenager who no longer cared about her mother or her brother.  He was horrified!  As she walked away he approached me, "Mommy, it really happened!" he announced in a terrified quiver.  So I said to him, "There's one thing that might help.  Why don't you go up to her and give her a kiss.  Maybe that will break the spell."  He found her and kissed her.  She responded by reaching down and hugging him.  With that he turned to me, wiped his brow, and said, "Whew, it worked!"

I caught the whole episode on my camcorder, but when we moved later that same year, the camcorder disappeared and that tape was in it.  But I don't need a tape to see it over and over again in my mind, it is forever burned into my memory.