Before I was a mom: My bad teenage poetry

A long time ago, my dear friend and fellow Jersey girl Jaime and I were talking about our bad teenage poems, and she asked me if I'd ever think of posting some on my blog.  At the time, the answer in my head was a resounding NO, but I seem to have lost some of my self consciousness because today I was going through my backup files and found this poem from college and just had to post it.  Why?  I have no idea.  But this is for you Jaime ;)

Ocean City

I like it when the boardwalk
isn’t mine. Pavilions full of locals sit
in the same place every night. Better to be
moving through crowds of mostly strangers
always seeing someone I know, always someone different.
Smells of sand and salt and buttered popcorn
and the faint hope that some perfect summer guy will
approach me with a pick-up line fresher than the popcorn.

Somehow,I tell myself, dragged by friends into the deafening arcade,
It’s still exotic. Iconsent to one game of air hockey
and slide past the “Please No Smoking” sign on
the cigarette machine to change my five dollar bill. I play distracted and the buzzards
who might have gone to high school with me
see me losing and start circling the table.
I yield it to them, and leaving my friends to their shooting games
I slip outside to watch the Shoobies in their
tank tops and black socks moving through the crowds.

Someone drives me home and I sit up for a while.
The smell of boardwalk sticks to my skin
and my hair and my high school sweatshirt and I feel dirty
and alone. The house is quiet but
the arcade rings in my ears. I try to calm myself with
fudge or taffy, and when that fails
I take an hour long cool shower
to wash away the grime and tears
before I sleep.

You can't go home again

When DH and I got engaged, we were 23 years old and lived in different states. He was starting his master's degree and I was in my first year of teaching at a fantastic public high school. I put in my resignation, finished the year, cried like a baby at the end of year faculty party, and moved halfway across the country.

My whole life, I have always done everything right. It was the first right thing I had ever done.

We were broke, really broke. We lived in a tiny apartment. I subbed as much as I could, getting long term positions in and out, always getting enough work when I needed it. I went to the library. I read The Tightwad Gazette cover to cover. I baked our own bread, made our own ketchup. I planned my wedding there. Life was simple if not easy.

We were supposed to be there for 3 years, to have a life there, but it didn't happen that way. I cried when I heard we were moving, then I packed up and started again somewhere else.

This week, my husband had to go back to that college town for work, so BG and I went with him. I wanted to show my daughter where we'd lived, what we'd done, what our lives had been like back then.

But I didn't remember.

I mean, I recognized our old apartment building, but I didn't know which apartment had been ours. DH would point things out to me, "Oh, remember? That's the other Walmart. That's the Applebees where the Korean grad students used to drink all night." I nodded vaguely. I remembered the story, but not the restaurant.

While he was in meetings on Wednesday, I drove her out by the schools where I taught, not sure what I intended to do there, just hoping that when I saw them I would feel something.

But I didn't.

Nothing in the whole town had any meaning for me. The schools were just schools, the parks were just parks. There was no one there who would remember my name.

DH took us to dinner that night at the pizza place next to campus, where we'd only eaten once because we had gotten a giftcard for opening a bank account. The food was delicious, and it really wasn't that expensive. BG giggled all through dinner and ate half of my pasta. We bought her too many clothes at the campus book store, and we all went out for ice cream.

On the way out of town Thursday morning, our beautiful baby girl asleep in the back of our car, I lean my head on DH's shoulder. Without taking his eyes off the road, he puts a hand on my knee.

"When did we grow up?"

He raises his eyebrows. "A long time ago."

Somehow, I think, I'd been too busy to notice that until now.

Before I was a Mom: the college years

Did you read my first Before I was a Mom post? Well I never promised it would be a frequent series.

V.
My college roommate (ahem, are you reading this?) and I used to like to sit outside to study. We said sunlight gave us energy. I don't remember which of us realized that that made us plants.

VI.
At the one and only party I ever threw in college, one of my loveable nerdy friends was walking around my apartment insisting to everyone that he couldn't be drunk because he knew that Paul Wolfowitz was the deputy secretary of defense and because he could still do calculus. I asked my drunk apartment mate if she could still do calculus.

"No way!" she said. "But I never could!"

VII.
I stopped by the post office on my way to class my Sophomore year and picked up a package my best friend had sent me. When I went to open it in class, someone asked me what it was.

I looked at it and realized for the first time, "Oh. Today's my birthday."

VIII.
My roommate talked to my future husband online several times. When she finally met him in person, she said that she was glad to realize he was normal. We all agreed that that was the opposite of the reaction people usually have.

IX.
At the end of my junior year, I was literally running down the street in a dress and heels because I was going to be late to my Phi Beta Kappa induction (okay, seriously, everyone gets that I'm a nerd, right?), and a guy with a guitar slung over his back stopped in the street looked at me and said, "you're lovely." I paused for a second, said thank you, and went back to running.

X.
One year, my friends and I decided to cook a Thanksgiving dinner. Only we didn't defrost the turkey long enough. And then an hour in, the power in our apartment went out. So we put the turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and biscuits in the car and drove across campus to finish cooking them in our friends' shared dorm kitchen. We spent the next several hours going up and down the stairs to their third floor suite. We had to borrow tableware from friends and steal a table from their floor lounge, but we had ourselves a lovely dinner. At midnight.

Before I was a mom

It has been brought to my attention that a good 29.5 years of my life occurred prior to the birth of my daughter. (I know. It came as a surprise to me too. Hasn’t she always been here?) So, I thought it might be fun to share with you some vignettes from that other, foggy part of my distant past so that you can get to know that part of me too. I don’t know how regular a series it will be, but whenever I think of them I’ll share. I’m beginning in roughly reverse chronological order, mostly because that’s all I can remember.

I.
I started a long term sub job when I was already 10 weeks pregnant. By the end of my 3rd week of teaching, one of the senior girls asked her teacher-mom if I was pregnant.

“Why would you say that?” asked the mom, genuinely confused because I certainly wasn’t showing.

“Because she’s wearing those elastic pants, and her boobs are huge.”

Oh. Well then.

II.
My last year teaching full time, I told my freshmen that my two biggest pet peeves are when people use “literally” and “ironically” incorrectly. For the rest of the year, every single thing I said to them was “literally ironic.” Well done, freshmen. Well done.

III.
I advised the Honor Society. My seniors were sitting around one day talking about torturing their calculus teacher.

“Guys,” I said, “that’s just not okay. You need to learn how to behave like adults. I mean, there are people I don’t like, but I act professional about it.”

“Wait,” they said, “there are people you don’t like??”


IV.
When my husband was writing his dissertation, I proofread it practically constantly. I read the dense engineering text probably 100 times. As such, in his acknowledgements, he thanked me for my careful proofreading.

Except, technically it said “I would like to thank to thank my wife for her endless hours of proofreading.” Oops.