Teen there, done that

It’s easy to forget what it felt like to be a teenager. The memories of those years get overwritten and erased by so much that comes after. The busy, purposeful 20s. The time-to-settle-down 30s.

So by the time our own children become teenagers, we’ve forgotten the sharp uncertainties and jabbing anxieties. The wild longings and sudden joys of those seesawing years between childhood and adulthood.
Perhaps this is why, decades later, I find myself treating my 13-year-old as I would treat an uncooperative adult. “Aaliya, don’t you see how lucky you are. You have so much to be grateful for,” I snap at least five times a day.
Or, “Why don’t you tell us clearly what you want?”

Or even, “Please think before you open your mouth.”

Forgetting, of course, that Aaliya has just embarked upon years of little logic and much confusion. That sometimes she can’t help herself.

Then, something unexpected happens and for the briefest moment I step back in time and re-experience that rawness and the over-the-topness of the teenage years. As many of my generation must have done this December.
It started the day after Christmas when my husband called out, “Did you hear? George Michael is dead.”

I felt discombobulated. It seemed impossible that that George Michael – whose floppy bangs, melting eyes and crazy lifestyle had loomed over our girlhood  — should be gone. We figured among his first fans. We borrowed blurry Top of the Pops videos from Teenage Library, just to watch Careless Whispers again and again. We read the tabloids closely to keep up with his seedy exploits. And tunelessly (or tunefully, if you were more gifted that me) sang Wake Me Up Before You Go Go in the shower. 

Of course, this came hand in hand with a sharp dissatisfaction about our own provincial existence – so devoid of neon colours and snowball fights and British glamour. Because George Michael and his ilk reminded us that there was a wide world out there, where supermodel-types were doing all the things we should be doing instead of memorising the coal-producing states of India.

When we were in college, a rumour swept Mumbai that George Michael had died at the peak of his fame. A distressed acquaintance tried to fling herself out of her college window. When the rumour was scotched a couple of days later, she treated her entire class to snazzy Yankee Doodle ice creams.

This time there will be no raspberry ripples for us. Not just because George Michael’s really gone, but because we’re no longer teenagers. 

I was still thinking about those scratchy Top of the Pops and schoolgirl yearnings when Carrie Fisher passed away a couple of days later. For a second time that week I was overcome with 3D memories. I never knew Carrie Fisher, of course, but I was once intimately acquainted with Princess Leia, her dysfunctional family and her doomed love affair. With her smile and spunk.

She was what many of us wished we could be. And the news about Carrie Fisher transported me back to the days when a Star Wars film meant anticipation, weeks of planning and then months of discussion. 

Suddenly, I felt reconnected with my 16-year-old self. And through her with my 13-year-old daughter. 

So I’m trying my hardest to cut out the standard lectures. Instead, I’m trying to give Aaliya the reassurance she needs. The promise that it all does work out. That she too will have her own bright lights, confetti and music-video moments one day. But that for the time being she needs to buckle down and learn the Parts of a Flowering Plant.