This story will make your embarrassing moments seem a lot less embarrassing! It’s so bad, I’ve never spoken of it.
I have a flair for the dramatic. I recall an experience of such exaggerated intensity with my first crush. I’ll call him Rick, Rick Drexel. This was old school stalking I’m referring to: no technology, no cell phone, or FB, or twitter, or my space. I’m talking about the kind of stalking that took time and effort and premeditation, something to tell your grandchildren about.
So, I’ll rip off the Band-Aid and let the healing begin. I was in the 7th grade and I was in love. “Love” love. Rick went to another school. He was cool. He was cute. He was athletic He was mean to me. What other reasons could there be for a 12yr old to fall in love? I think I called him 15 times a day, 10 of which, I simply hung up. I’m sure the lack of caller ID and *69 really fooled him and his parents. Other times we could talk for hours. If I skipped a day - which rarely happened - he would call me. As much as he “hated” my harassment, he grew accustomed to it and missed my eerie pronouncements of undying love.
He invited me to his basketball games and his school play, which I went to like a puppy dog, only to be heartbreakingly ignored. He would show up at my softball games, watch and then leave without saying hello. I was happy to get all the negative attention, cause lets face it, it wasn’t indifference. I was also too young to understand that invitations to his events and surprise visits said something on his part.
Then he invited me to a movie, my first date. In a million years I don’t think I could remember what we saw. Oh yeah, Space Camp. Okay so I remember. I also don’t remember if he held my hand and maybe felt me up (over the shirt). I know, that was a little slutty of me, I know, but love has no boundaries, except a training bra.
It actually gets worse. The story thus far may have coaxed out some painful memories of angst and torment. Memories, you’ve buried somewhere in the recesses of your mind, and cringe at when they emerge. My story will make you feel like you can unrepress and visit them with ease.
We made more plans and of course, my infatuation intensified. I went to his Bar Mitzvah and the other kids told me that he was dating a girl from his school. “What? Huh???” I found the nearest bathroom and cried, and bawled, and sniffled, and gurgled under the crushing pain. I walked out to find a boy I was friendly with and in a dramatic twist, I told him I was going to kill myself. Trust me, I didn’t really get what I was saying or the weight of that statement, It just sounded like some desperate statement Molly Ringwald would make in Pretty in Pink, or Sixteen candles or some other John Hughes film. I also never I imagined a bunch of 12 and 13 year olds would take me seriously. It just flew out of my mouth.
Before I knew it, the entire kids portion of the Bar Mitzvah was in the lobby of his country club trying to console me and make sure I didn’t do anything drastic. “Hide the butter knives!“ someone yelled in the frenzy of “child psychologists,” -in the literal sense. While the parents danced unwittingly inside, the children were saving me from myself. Ahh, this feels good, this attention, this love, this concern. But it’s not enough. When will Rick come over and profess that it was me all along.
He never did. Actually, he made it over to me, though I believe it was to ask what the hell I was doing and to find out why no one was inside during his candle lighting ceremony -which he worked really hard on writing. Even more mortifying, he was followed by a concerned parent, as word of my threat had made it to the upper echelon of invitees.
You probably want to crawl into a hole just reading this, so you can imagine the humiliation of living it. We all have those moments that we wish we could suck back, or wake up from and say, “phew, it was just a dream.” Well, that was one of mine. One of, because I have volumes of mistakes, faux pas, blunders, and errors in judgment that shaped the confident, brilliant, humble, and perfect in every way adult I have become.
I look back and think, if only I could have used the skills I mastered just a few short years later, I would have backed off, invoked insecurity and gained the upper hand. Those were feminine wiles I learned out of sheer necessity, clearly my ability to obsess would not get me far with the boys. They were simple tricks my father taught me in lieu of some seriously deserved psychiatric analysis. “Jenny, just remember boys like a challenge.” He was right. To this day, I’ve never met a boy that didn’t fill that bill.
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Jenny from the blog is not her real name...but that’s the only thing about her that’s not real. Jenny's been featured in multiple magazines and has columns at iVillage, CityMommy, and TravelingMom. What intrigued us most was her wildly popular blog, TheSuburbanJungle.com, where she confesses for a living.
At this uproarious and irreverent site, she provides an uncensored look at motherhood and marriage. She discusses everything from her son’s addiction to video games to shamelessly flirting with her daughter’s swim teacher – which she concludes, “must be gay,” due to his lack of response on his part.
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