12-Year-Old Female Hormones--"I Don't Think We're in Kansas Anymore!"

Preface: I know I'm prone to hyperbole. Just roll with it.

 I'll admit. We are beginners to this adolescence thing. We're just starting in fact. Our oldest child, a girl, turned 12 this April and I have to say I've really enjoyed it for the most part. There are a lot of GREAT things about having a 12 year old in the house. However, this post is not about those things. This post is about the ONE THING that has the ability to trump and destroy all of the great virtues of having a great, twelve-year-old girl in the house. I call it, "Twelve-year-old Hormonal Mayhem," (a.k.a. "TAKE COVER AND RUN!)"

Now don't get me wrong. I remember quite well how it felt to be a twelve-year-old girl. I remember feeling outrageously wronged by my parents, overly self-conscious and crying inexplicably--a lot. And I'm the first in line to give our daughter my greatest and grandest sympathy at having to pass through this fiery, physical gauntlet of adolescence to adulthood. The fact that ANY of us survive this is truly a modern miracle!

That being said, being on the other side of the coin, as a parent, is like realizing that I just took up residence in Tornado Alley! Sudden, dramatic shifts in temperature and wind velocity are as common as house flies. Seemingly quiet, blue prairie skies can instantly turn into crashing, raging thunderstorms. At least with the weather, there are SOME indicators of a change. Not here. An innocuous dinner conversation can suddenly turn into a violent hailstorm that rips heads off and leaves body parts dangling by only a few tendons. When the sudden storm leaves the table, those of us left there stare incredulously at each other surveying the carnage and the aftermath. As the dust clears, we blink and wonder, "WHAT IN THE WORLD INSPIRED SUCH AN OUTPOURING OF WRATH!?" And that's just one dinner conversation! The litany of tempests continues at a breakneck pace! A simple comment about the encroaching time to depart for the bus will be met with a blast of wind that knocks everyone to the ground. Any type of discussion about trying to understand the "weather" will usually result in a punishing hurricane of wind, waves and water. A LOT of water! I hate to say it, but the weather pattern we are now in, if measured by emotional intensity, could rival Hurricane Katrina.

The even crazier thing is that after each storm and the resulting ruin, the atmosphere quiets and the true girl returns. The warm and sunny disposition shines, the melodic singing and dancing returns and the easy laughter is back. One wonders how something so sweet and beautiful could have been the cause of so much devastation! Jekyll and Hyde hardly seems to even capture the scope of it. We are DEFINITELY out of Kansas, and perhaps even OZ for that matter.

 I KNOW it gets better; the weather pattern quiets after a few years and becomes a little more manageable. But manageable is the key, operative word in that sentence. Let's face it. We'll never go back. The long, stretching, summer days of sunshine are gone. We will be subject to all four seasons now, and not in any particular order. Being a woman myself, I know there are times when I am still taken over by weather patterns that I don't understand. I've personally never made it back to Kansas since I was 12 years old. I'm not sure I ever will. (At this point, aren't you so JEALOUS of the fortunate men who get to live in this house?!)

So in the meantime, we'll just have to hunker down, buy a bunch of umbrellas, down coats and steel-toed shoes (probably at flipping Costco!) and try to weather the storms as best we can.  It's that, or I'm going to be relegated to writing the second part to Laura Ingalls Wilder's "The Long Winter." Of course, the title of my book would have to be more like "The Very Long and Apocalyptically Cold and Devastating Winter." And for all our sakes, lets just pray it doesn't come to that.