Thirteen Candles--Definitely Unlucky

You know that feeling you get right before a huge storm?  When it feels as if you could plug an appliance directly into the air and it would roar to life?

I am getting that feeling now. My oldest daughter turns 13 tomorrow.

Her vocabulary is reducing to two words:  "whatever" and "ri--ight."  Both are delivered with as much sarcasm as she can muster, and she never verbalizes when an eye-roll will suffice. When she's addressing me, that is.  When she's addressing her friends, 5,000 texted words on a cell phone per hour cannot express all that she has to say. 

Sometimes she starts screaming and crying and slamming doors.  For no discernable reason. 

She wears essentially nothing, unless it's 20 below zero, and then she throws on a thin hoodie, unzipped, lest someone miss the fact that she has sprouted a chest.  At Christmastime, I hid all of her spaghetti-strap camisoles so she would quit wearing them under paper-thin, deep-vee neck tees.  She borrowed camis and deep vee-neck tees from her friends and traipsed through the Blue Ridge January snow as if vacationing in the Bahamas, complete with humongous sunglasses, flip-flops, and bright orange toenails.  Despite her embrace of near-nudism, even in the dead of winter, her laundry never ends.  She soils enough clothing to make the laundry crew of the St. Regis Hotel hand in their resignations en masse.

She lives on the occasional pop-tart until 7 p.m., when she devours the entire contents of the fridge and kitchen cabinets, then inhales two cans each of pineapple rings and tuna from the pantry.  Then she peers hopefully into the freezer, calculating how long it would take to render something edible in the microwave.  Given her propensity to eat a quart of ice cream at night all by herself, leaving none for her many siblings, I bought a gallon of ice cream in a plastic tub.  She ate it.  All.  You might think that late night binges of this magnitude would make her obese, and you would be wrong.  The child can consume literally thousands of calories and they disappear without a trace on her skeletal frame.  I am considering donating her body to science now, rather than waiting until she's dead.  Clearly, the laws of thermodynamics do not apply in her case.  If I eat so much as a spoonful of ice cream at 7 p.m., I can lie awake late at night and watch it bubble up as cellulite on my thigh.

The Case of the Disappearing Ice Cream requires no Sherlock Holmes in this house.  Many strange phenomena occur when a girl hits puberty.  This morning, for example, I found a pile of wire hangers in my bedroom floor.  Guess who had cleaned out her closet the previous afternoon?  Daughter Dearest has decided that wire hangers are beneath her.  So is all clothing that is not purchased, brand new, at a mall.  And ideally, it should have "AEROPOSTALE" or "HOLLISTER" plastered across the front.  Do not ask me why.  Presumably because Aeropostale and Hollister excel at the near-nudism which she has embraced--see-through tees, oh-so-strappy camis, up-to-there miniskirts, and overpriced et cetera.

True story:  I bought an Aeropostale shirt at the Goodwill which she would not wear because it did not have "Aeropostale" written on it anywhere.  (I didn't even tell her it came from the Goodwill.)  I suggested (tongue-in-cheek) that she turn out the label on the back of her neck so that her shirt could be properly identified.  She considered this for a long moment in all seriousness(!) and shook her head.  "You wouldn't be able to see it because of my hair," she said.  We are now entering the teen capitalist Twilight Zone.  It's enough to make a mom pick up an air gun and go aeropostale.

What is she thinking these days?  Is she thinking these days?  I jerk a headphone bud out of an ear and inquire, "how are you?"  She looks at me as if my relevance in the universe is a matter of debate and returns to the rhythmic chants of Justin Timberlake.  Her music.  What can you say about her music?  Her favorite pop song (this week) observes 1,862 times in three minutes that "it's hard to breathe without air."  Sheer geniuses, these American Idol outputs.  Yet nothing in all her most brazen Top 20 hip-hop is as sexually suggestive as the KISS and Prince that I listened to at her age, or as senseless as Oingo Boingo, and with satellite radio she could easily figure that out.  So I zip my lip where her music is concerned.  And she retreats into her own little world, a maddeningly repetitious one with a beat.

I hardly know this omnivorous, proudly buxom cyborg that my little girl has become.  If she walks toward me, with a beaming smile, she looks vaguely like my happy baby girl of yore, but she doesn't want a hug, she wants ten bucks.  Or twenty.  "She isn't going to come to you any more," my mother advises.  "You will have to go to her."  So I seek her out, hunting daughter as one would hunt a very skittish and overpainted antelope wearing headphones and texting.  She is in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the tub, shaving her legs with my razor.  As she cannot hold any gadgets or devices over water, this seems like as good an opportunity for meaningful interaction as I'm likely to get.  I ignore the razor theft with great effort and say, "Soooooooo.  How's it going?" 

She looks at me as if trying to figure out whether I've noticed my razor or the fact that she hasn't made her bed or picked up her towel or done the vacuuming.  She decides I'm neutral.

We stare at one another for a long moment.  She was my baby, this gangly creature who is using my razor.  I read "Green Eggs and Ham" to her.  We cuddled.

"Mom," she finally says, "you're really weirding me out."

And so I retreat, feeling sheepish, to hunt another day.  As I leave, I hear a ringtone jingle.  One can't breathe, I'm reminded, without air.  "Hello?"  she says.  "Oh, hi, Ash.  Yeah.  Nothin'.  What are you doing?  He DID?  No WAY!  He's so cute.  Did he ask you out?  No WAY!"

I ask my mother, "Mom, was I this certifiably insane when I was a teenager?"

She gives me a haunted, hollow-eyed, veteran-of-bloody-campaigns stare.  Her look suggests that Vincent Price couldn't have narrated the sheer horror of her memories; that my raving teenaged lunacy would fill a dozen Bedlams; that all the parenting expertise in the world was futile in the face of my gawdawful adolescence.

"Mom!"  I say, waving her gaze away.  "Stop.  You're really weirding me out."