It will get better. It always gets better.

I was in Stratford a couple weeks ago, visiting my mama, my puppy and ignoring an entire town of people who shunned me once I left for university, when I came across [probably because I was digging around in the back room of our basement for it] a box of a bunch of stuff from my elementary years.

I found old Valentine Cards, letters written from my teachers to my mother telling her what an unruly flirt I was and how I disrupted classes because I was letting boys kiss me, and about 10 trillion “books” I’d written about Crustaceans and Christmas Trees and how lucky I was that my parents were still together.

Funny how oblivious a pre-teen, boy-crazy little girl can be.

I think I always felt like I had important things to tell people. Whether or not anyone else felt it was important. And whether or not it was true. Like boys, for example.

Despite the number of young men I recently found out were getting hand jobs in grade 8, I, on the other hand, was far too “square” to even be kissing boys. So I did what any other inexperienced girl in my position would do to safe face in front of her friends; I lied.

For a brief period in my early youth, I was dating a boy in the year below me who I probably thought was “the one”. We’d hold hands at recess, I’d wear his sweater when he walked me home from school [which, if I remember correctly was once], his friends would dare us to kiss and I’d say no; all the usual practices of a little, blonde prude. Then one day, smack dab in the middle of our mixed-grade romance, I got suspended for punching a boy in the face.

[No problem getting all up in someone of the opposite sex’s grill, but kiss? Let’s be serious here.]

I got send home for 2 days, my dad rented me some movies, a got me a big bag of Nibs and when I finally returned to school with my newfangled bad-ass chick reputation, I had discovered that my so-called boyfriend had found another girlfriend in someone who actually accepted the kissing dare. A girl who, from what I heard, went as far as to even initiate some to all of the lip action.

Whore.

Another time - same grade, same suck-fest of a reputation - a boy my age told me he’d be my boyfriend if I agreed to [and signed a piece of paper stating that I solemnly swear to and blah, blah, blah] give him one hand-job a week for the duration of our relationship.

The saddest part is, at that point - being completely un-kissed and all - I think I actually considered how bad that could possibly be for my popularity.

I think that was about the time I started searching for books on lesbianism at the Stratford Public Library. My mother even borrowed one called “So Your Daughter’s A Lesbian”… I think. Either that or she pulled it off the shelf and showed it to me. Either way, her point and her concerns were quite clear.

I mean, what was wrong with me? I’d let the little boys in kindergarten kiss me on the cheek during class time but I couldn’t actually kiss a boy with my eyes closed when no one was around.

I deserved to be picked on. I deserved to be mocked. I deserved that everyone found out that my first kiss lead me to scream out my best friend (at the time)’s name (she was a girl) in sheer terror that I wasn’t kissing properly. And that the “serious boyfriend” I lied about having for the remainder of my grade 8 year was a boy I was in a wedding party with one time and who was actually related to me distantly and through marriage.

What can I say? If I hadn’t of had a completely mundane pre-teenhood, I never would have gone out, grabbed the bull by the horns [I do mean bull; not boy] and actually made a real, existing life for myself. Although living in your head is something I think all girls learn to do from an early age and never really let go of (especially in terms of relationships), being able to survive a date that tells you that you have a Type C Personality Disorder or tells you that you’re not allowed to have mayo on your sandwich because it’ll make you fat really does inspire the desire to live in the real.

And I’m lucky I started writing early on in life, so that by the time an incident came along that was so atrocious [like being forced to wear tight, white track pants INTO McDonald’s on Valentine’s Day] that it absolutely had to be written about that instant, I would have the knowledge, love and desire to write it down.

Just as I did with BATS.

Nothing but pure passion there.

SLEEP TIGHT LITTLE ONES.
xoxo pinkcrush. oxox