Being Twelve

I tell myself it’s a compliment when my child volunteers me for things. Like the time she signed me up to bring fruit salad to a seventh grade class party that was happening the next morning. She must see me as reliable. And it’s true that the last minute notice wasn’t a problem, since we live two blocks from a handful of grocery stores.

I rode to the store before dinner and returned home with a flat of strawberries bungeed to the back of my bike. I got back from a run the next morning just in time to deliver the strawberries to her classroom.

“You’re wearing that?” she asked. I was wearing the sweatpants she hated. By my standards they weren’t bad. I had thrown away the pair that were six sizes too big, because no amount of comfort justified pants that big. The sweatpants I had kept actually fit me.

None of this mattered to Carly. “Aren’t you going to change?” she asked.

“I just got back from a run,” I said. “This is what I’m wearing.”

I waited in the driveway while she ran back inside for a jacket. When she reappeared scowling, Blue came up behind her with a look of glee on his face. Once you hit your forties, you're usually comfortable enough with yourself to laugh quietly at your child’s embarrassment over your apparent shortcomings.

Still I offered to ride ahead. I saw the conflict cross her face, the desire to be rid of me at the same time she knew I had the cache of strawberries.

I ended up letting her go first, my daughter in a green corduroy jacket, rolled up bell bottom jeans with her cute little butt, a shocking pink helmet she’d bought with her own allowance to declare her femininity, and a bright green cruiser she’d gotten for her twelfth birthday. The contrast was notable; I plodded along behind in my sweatpants, a baggy sweatshirt, and my hair still damp with sweat under my baseball cap. But at my age all that sweat just made me feel good.

“You lock your bike, I’ll go ahead of you to your classroom,” I assured her when we got to her school.

But I couldn’t find her classroom, and had to stand in the quad and wait for her. She pointed, and I walked toward what I thought was the right room. I walked in on a group of eighth grade boys from her surf club, their longish hair side-parted like something straight out of The Endless Summer. Translation: cute boys. If my wandering in the quad had embarrassed her, imagine how she felt about my stumbling upon a bunch of cute older boys.

Once I rode home from the grocery store dangerously close to the time school let out, with a forty pound bag of dogfood, a twelve pack of beer, and two sixteen packs of toilet paper. I wobbled home with this mountain of supplies, making it to the house just two minutes before a boy she liked rode by. Had I been any later, he would have seen not one but two mega packs of toilet paper strapped to my rack, and the packaging which bragged: “Sixteen GIANT rolls! The same as FORTY regular rolls!”

That time Carly had been spared the humiliation.

Finally I found the right classroom and delivered the strawberries. As I rode away I thought about our conversation. “Nobody cares,” I’d told her when she scowled at my sweatpants. “Everybody cares,” she had said. And when you’re twelve, it’s true. Everyone cares.