Lightning Flash Writing

I recently re-read Forever… by Judy Blume to watch the Netflix show and compare and contrast them on my blog. It made me remember how often I read that book when I was a pre-teen, hoping that if I studied the pages hard enough, I’d learn the secret manual for being a teenager.

Now my son is a middle schooler and I’m… somehow the parent in this scenario? The “responsible adult”? The one who’s supposed to know how this all works? I don’t feel old enough. And yet, here we are.

Middle school gets such a bad reputation: awkward phases, mean kids, braces, cafeteria politics. But for me, those years were golden. I loved them more than elementary school, more than high school, more than any other stretch of my formal education.

Maybe it was because everything felt new and possible. Maybe because my world was small enough to feel safe but big enough to be exciting. I was just starting to try on versions of myself, figuring out who I might want to be. And there was so much potential! I had the idea that I could become anyone I wanted to be as an adult! Or not even wait until I was an adult, because in middle school, I was so obsessed with Saturday Night Live that I was determined to run away to New York City as soon as I turned 16. I’d audition for the show and get on. After all, I acted out my favorite sketches for my friends every Monday morning. I was a shoo-in!

(Clearly, that didn’t happen. I don’t think that was even my dream by the time I was 16. I’ve wanted a million different things in my life—and a glimpse at my resume will show you that I went for a lot of them. You only live once!)

Right now, I’m deep in that time period again, and not just because of my son. I’m compiling notes for my March Sadness essay. I’m writing about a song that was on the charts in ‘97-‘98, which means I’ve been rewinding my mental tape deck to those exact years. Suddenly I’m back in my seventh-grade bedroom, hunched over my boom box in the closet, trying to soak up every note the radio played. I escaped into books and music a lot then… (and still do. I always have.)

It feels strange to be so vividly in touch with those memories while also paying bills, scheduling appointments, and keeping the fridge stocked. Stranger still to be the parent of a kid who’s at that exact age, except he is nothing like me in middle school. Not in personality, not in hobbies, not even in the way he thinks about the world. We share DNA, but our middle school experiences will be galaxies apart.

So I’m juggling all of it at once:

• The middle schooler I was, with my mix tapes and melodramas.
• The adult I am now, balancing all the invisible labor of life.
• The parent watching a brand-new middle schooler chart his own path.

It’s a lot of selves to carry around. But that’s what we do, isn’t it? We contain multitudes.

Re-reading Forever… now has helped in many ways, though the characters are in high school. Still, I can see how much I didn’t understand at the time, and also how much I was trying to prepare myself for—friendships, heartbreak, independence. Now I’m watching my son step into that same stage, wondering which roles he’ll choose, which scenes he’ll rewrite entirely.

As hard as it can feel to keep my mouth shut when it comes to sharing the “wisdom” I learned back then (and since)… maybe my job isn’t to hand him a manual like I was looking for all those years ago. Maybe it’s just to be here, cheering from the sidelines, ready to listen when he wants to talk and step back when he doesn’t.

And maybe, if I’m lucky, he’ll look back on these years with the same fondness I do.

My kid has some great books on his middle school required reading list, so I want to share a series I recently read and loved: the Winston Breen series by Eric Berlin.

Have you read this series? Do you like fiction books with engaging puzzles included? Recommend me some similar titles if you know any! (Already got a rec for The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, so that’s on my TBR and could go on yours, too!)

This writing prompt is all about memories, or perhaps how you wish things would have gone.

Write about the first day of middle school for you or a character. What do they feel? How does the day go? How do they feel when the final bell rings that day?