Being Thirteen

Carly wrote this essay for her 8th grade Core class, and I thought it was better than any description I could come up with for this part of adolescence. I've reprinted it with her permission.


Being thirteen is very stressful, but can also be very fun. These days, being cool and popular is everything. Thirteen year olds have many things on their minds, like school, homework, music, sports, friends, girlfriends or boyfriends, peer pressure, responsibilities or chores, and family problems. Thirteen year olds often get headaches, stomach aches, and growth pains. Being thirteen is like switching a light on and off. Sometimes you feel great, and other times depressed and busy. It is also a really fun age because you get a lot more freedom. When you turn thirteen, you are finally considered a teenager.

For some thirteen year olds, being thirteen is all positive aspects. When you are thirteen, your parents consider you much older. They now decide to give you much more independence. For me, I get a lot of freedom. I am allowed to go many places with my friends, ride bikes, and be out in the real world. I am no longer always with my parents. It makes being thirteen pretty fun. My parents always have to know where I am, which makes me bring up technology. Cell phones, for an example, are very positive. They are positive for parents to keep in touch with their teens, and for their teens to keep in touch with them if they need help, or are in trouble. I also think that our school can be very positive toward teens with sport teams and clubs. For me, signing up for surf club, or basketball is very enjoyable for me to be with friends, but also learn and do new things. Our school has almost every sport team or club that I can think of. I think this is all very positive, because many teens’ parents can’t afford to sign them up for recreational sports. Everyone is welcome to join sports at my school.

Although it seems like being thirteen is great, for some thirteen year olds, it’s very difficult. There are many negatives about being thirteen. For me and some of my friends, we get headaches often. I also think that technology can be negative sometimes, because some teens think of their cell phones as talking to their friends. They will spend all their time text messaging their friends during school, at home, and even while adults are trying to talk to them. It can be very rude. The computer can also be negative. I think that most thirteen year olds think of the internet as myspace, or what they go on when they’re bored. Myspace and other things on the internet can turn out dangerous, because some teens post things on the internet that they shouldn’t. The internet can also be negative because you may get excluded out of many things. Girls can be so mean that you never know when they will backstab someone. I think of being a thirteen year old girl as much harder than being a thirteen year old boy, because girls can be so excluding, and just plain mean.

When I was younger, I never really thought about what it would be like to be thirteen. I always thought of thirteen year olds as “Big kids”. But being thirteen is much more complicated than that. The movies about puberty that we used to watch in school talked about how hard it is to be thirteen, but really, it’s not too hard. When I was younger, I thought that when I was thirteen I would get so much homework, but really, we don’t get too much homework. The one thing that I didn’t really think about when I was young is being popular. In elementary school, there were no popular groups, or nerd groups. Now, when you’re thirteen, there are many groups with different people. Although I didn’t think about it much, it’s for sure different than I imagined it to be.

Being thirteen seems very difficult right now, but I am hoping that in a couple years it will be easier. Being thirteen is like when a light bulb dies, you replace it with a new one, and everything is bright again.

Roller Queen

I have a thing about elaborate kid birthday parties. The birthday girl or boy opens a mound of presents, plastic wrap and paper flying, and the gift each child has carefully selected gets lost in the shuffle. Then there are the gift bags the invitees take home, in most cases a substitute for hand-written Thank You notes. The truth is that it’s possible to throw a birthday party without Toys R Us.

Eliot wanted to have his eleventh birthday party at the roller rink. For two hours we had the rink to ourselves, although for less money you can rent a table and hold your party during open skate time. With Eliot the quieter rink was the way to go. We had pizza and veggies and cupcakes, and I requested No Gifts, because as Carly said, “We are the Weird Family.”

But No Gifts birthday parties are great because kids bring drawings instead. Josh from Eliot’s baseball team drew a picture of the two of them playing baseball, and at the top wrote, “Happy Birthday, Eliot.” Eliot’s friend Cailin drew a card with a pink five-tiered Seussean birthday cake. Mitch and Mariah’s dad, a professional photographer, brought an 8 1/2 by 11 inch photograph of Eliot and Mitch in their Halloween costumes, flanked by their teaching assistants dressed as mimes and waving white-gloved hands. There is a whole story in that picture, in a classroom where many students have little or no language, and like mimes rely on hand signals and facial expressions to make their needs known.

Eliot’s friend Aaron came, and his mom put on her skates and pushed Aaron around the rink in his super high-tech wheelchair. Mitch’s sister Mariah skated around the rink so fast I couldn't keep up. Her mom is a hockey player who grew up with five brothers, and Mariah is growing up with two. When I asked if she played hockey with her mom she said, “Sometimes in the house.”

Blue and I laced up the double-wheel skates with the worn toe brakes and took a turn around the rink. Blue half-walked, half-skated, arms waving wildly. He wouldn’t let me hold his hand. Neither would Eliot, who made his way slowly around the rink clinging to the bars. Then, in the last fifteen minutes, Eliot held out his hand.

By then the other kids were doing the Limbo, and I made Eliot do it too. Together we skated toward the Limbo bar. The first time he fell on his knees, but the second time he squatted down and skated under the bar. The few adults watching from the sidelines of our blissfully small party broke into applause.

After the party Mariah came over to play. In platform heels with fur lining, she ran around the backyard with a laser gun, squatting behind bushes and rising up to spray Eliot with a litany of laser beams. Then they played hide-and-seek laser tag inside. Mariah hid and Eliot counted. For ten minutes he looked for her. Finally I went to help him. Under his ¾ height bunk bed, where he had gone first, a lumpy blanket sat in the corner.

“You need to look more carefully under your bed,” I said. He got under the bed and sat on the blanket.

“First you couldn’t find me,” Mariah said, lifting the blanket off her head, “and now you’re sitting on me!”

When it was time to take Mariah home I said, “Do you want to say anything to your guest?” thinking Eliot would say goodbye. But he walked over and gave her a kiss on the forehead.

They had been friends since Mariah was five. Now that she was nine she was soaring ahead, but I tried to keep the flame going. A couple of months later, I took them to the movies. When we dropped her off at her house afterward, I told Eliot to walk her to her door.

“He doesn’t have a clue,” I thought, but when I looked up he had taken her hand to cross the street. To him it was a safety precaution, but it didn’t matter. “Thank you for coming with me to the movies,” he said. “I enjoyed it. Did you?”

Turned out there was hope for him and the Roller Queen yet.