Look out for the newest teenager

Happy birthday to granddaughter, Emma. She is 13. Can you imagine that — 13! How can it be that long ago that my daughter was pregnant with her first born. Emma has officially entered that minefield we call the teen years.

Do you remember when you were 13? I do. My world was falling apart. School was a refuge. The country seemed like it was also going to Hades in a hand basket. Race riots were occurring frightening close. As we sang, “give peace a chance” we studiously avoided the areas where white folks were not the majority. The Vietnam war was raging. The draft was still in effect. People debated whether or not to join the fight or move to Canada. I don’t remember what Canada thought about the influx of Americans.

When I was 13 it was just a year after the president, John Kennedy, was shot. That started a string of shootings. Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Lee Harvey Oswald, and any number of others less famous gave their lives. The country seemed as unstable as my home life.

But, despite the havoc, life went on. Some of it was good, some not so much. Eventually, life settled down into a routine and shootings of famous people evolved into mass shootings of innocents. So much for giving peace a chance.

I wonder what is happening today that Emma will remember of her thirteenth year. Will she remember all the  divisive politics? Will name-calling adults in both political parties stick in her memory?

Then again, perhaps she will instead concentrate on her first school play. She says drama class is her favorite. Some of her other teachers don’t meet her standards for being excellent teachers. There are one or two that are first-year instructors so she gives them the benefit of inexperience in her private grading system.

In the next five years or so she will be expected to know things that are not traditionally taught in schools. She should know how to cook a balanced meal, how to run the dishwasher and what to do when the dishes don’t come clean. She will be expected to know how to shop for major and minor appliances. She will be expected know how to save and spend her money. She will be expected to know how to deal with a variety of people with vastly different personalities and their own problems.

All this, while battling unfamiliar hormones, a changing body, siblings,  and the fact that for the next few years her parents have suddenly become the dumbest people on earth.

Thirteen years ago I was cradling her in my arms while walking her up and down the block. She had a touch of jaundice and the doctors had said to sit her in front of a bright window like she was a plant. I read books to her in a language she had yet to master.

We have made cookies, bread and huge messes. We have built forts out of blankets and kitchen chairs. I took her picture as her mom walked her up the sidewalk to her first day of kindergarten. I watched her grow from a tiny child into one that lived in a Spiderman costume one entire year, just like her little brothers, Jacob and Nicholas. I relished the tales of her going fishing with one of her eleventy million and seven grandfathers and taunting him when she caught more fish than he did. “How do you like being beat by a little girl” she laughingly told him.

She is not a child, but also not an adult. Much will change for her in the next few years before she is let loose on the world. I look forward to watching her grow and change. “Some of it magic and some of it tragic” will apply to her life as it does for the rest of us. My granddaughter is now a teenager.

Watch out world, here she comes.