On being sixteen

I was listening to Womans Hour on i player whilst ironing sheets last week during Mabel's afternoon nap. On the programme was an article about a newly published book containing celebrity letters to their sixteen year old selves. Some of them were wistful longings for a lost youth, some of them admonishing their navel gazing teenage selves and some of them were lighthearted, giving tips for where to place bets for future grand nationals and warning themselves off men/women,drugs,liaisons and heartache of the future. My recent days have been filled with baby vomit and mucus and I have consequently been feeling devoid of comedy inspiration for this blog and so made a mental note to pilfer the idea to get me going. But then I started to think about what I would write and I realised that it was a shocking idea not least because my Mother reads my blog and is still inclined towards feeling wounded by and despairing of said teenager even though I am very nearly in my 30s. This could only be exacerbated by a romp through the grottiest, basest and most embarrassing time in my life and I know myself well enough to know that my proclivity for self flagellation via nostalgia would get the better of me and it might be a dangerous essay.

However

A great deal was going on for me that year, 1996. My soundtrack swung wildly between the first issue of Rage Against The Machine, Alanis Morissette and Miss Saigon which was thrashed mercilessly to death and probably to my father's chagrin on his good pianos and guitars. The hair, the doc martins, the tie dye dresses and the cardigans were long and the make up, the humour and the mood were pubescently dark. I wanted to be an actress and I could quote Shakespeare's comic females ad nauseum. I really though one day I would be married to River Phoenix. I rode a very tired Piaggio Gilera 50cc motorbike which I fell off daily and which I frequently forgot to fill with petrol necessitating my Dad regularly hitching his trailer in the middle of the night to come and retrieve me from the hard shoulder of whatever road I had stalled on. Acne cruelly consumed my face like a flesh eating virus and I longed to be cool enough to hang out at Reading's Forbury gardens smoking hash with a group of older boys known quite seriously as 'The Posse'. I aspired to nothing greater than snogging one of these gangly youths at the local club Utopia while drinking baileys (assuming my make up and heels would get me in). Some of this actually happened, some if it never did. I was a bit of a misfit kid but I mercifully had a smattering of misfit friends with awkward hairstyles and an array of sexual tendencies, we all waxed about our liberation and prowess, we watched soft porn while babysitting, we were all non practising bisexuals and we all at some point thought we had actually become pregnant without actually being penetrated by a member of the opposite sex. These fabulous girls are almost all still a part of my life so there's not too much I can divulge about them without breaking a code of trust but we bunked off school together, drank archers and hooch and did sex alot. Well actually I just talked about doing it alot at sixteen but some of them, I think, actually did it. I waited until I was nearly eighteen and in a rare moment of good sense chose a really nice boy. We ate strange concoctions of kitchen herbs and home grown green things to get high and we spent far too much time wondering how to get thin. The sun shone more in those days and in my memory we were always outside and always prostrate in bikinis in the garden of whoever's parents were out. These are the comfortable memories.

There are some uncomfortable ones. Physically and verbally fighting with my mother out of sheer red mist hormonal rage is top of the list of shame. Thankfully I have never met anyone else who matches us in or could push me to conduct such high speed, high pitched, lethal machine gun dialogue or fisticuffs . And thankfully also she loved me enough to endure me beyond those years. I remember keenly crying at night while listening to the Cranberries in my room alone because some boy had broken my heart or some friend had broken my heart by snogging the boy I wanted to snog, or just crying because I didn't know how to express myself properly without becoming rageful and thumping someone- probably my mother. I once asked my house master at school to call social services and have me taken into care because I couldn't live with my family any more, they made me too cross. I was absolutely serious. I was so full of rage in 1996 I though I might implode. I remember the most undignified wailing outside boyfriends windows after unexplained dumpings and I think I emotionally shredded a couple of ill equipped teenage boys who'd only agreed to go out with me because they though my Dad was in Dire Straits (the band) and fled for the hills when they learnt the reality of my musical heritage. I was deeply insecure and I projected this onto everyone around me severing many heads in the wake of my emotional jet ski. I am not proud of any of this.

So what would I write to myself in a letter? Warnings? The things I did that were normal rites of passage are part of the Fabric of who I am now. You can only learn what not to do by pushing the boundaries some. I loved drinking archers and sweaty snogging, it had it's place. I still miss smoking fags. I could have done without smoking herbes de provence but who knew? I wouldn't warn any teenager off these things. The things I'm not proud of I would eradicate if I could but the 16 year old me didn't heed advice and so it would be pointless even to try. Being the rageful, emotional teenager I was did me a favour, I know the power and the reaches of my anger and have learned to keep it in check which is a handy skill to have acquired prior to parenting a daughter myself. Hopefully I left that part of me where it belongs - in my adolescence. If I told my teenage self that in 2010 she'd have a baby and be ironing sheets while listening to radio 4 she'd not have believed it. It would have seemed utterly paradoxical. I can hardly believe it now and I am merrily living it. The future, should always be an unwritten adventure for a teenager, in fact for anyone. That's the fun of it.

Dear Sixteen year old Amity

Say what you feel and be who you are because those who matter don't mind and those who mind don't matter.

All things must pass

Eat more Salad.

Love, your almost thirty year old self x