Thoughts On Eleven

I went to lunch with my mom today, and as I was devouring my chicken fingers in a most unladylike manner, I noticed I had an audience. She was an 11 year old girl, with sun-freckled cheeks and brand new school sneakers on her feet. She was a cute kid, but despite the ribbon she tied in her ponytail, probably not the kind that would ever make it on to the cheerleading squad or the kind that would have a boy say yes when her best friend asked him out for her. When you're 11, these things are important to you. She sat with her mother in their booth, and stared at me for what was almost the entirety of both my meal and hers. Now, having once been an 11 year old girl, I can imagine that she was thinking very wonderful or either very horrible things about me. Girls of that age almost always think in extremes, and the shift from one to the next is dizzying to even the most well-adapted thought-acrobat. As she wasn't whispering to her mother while shifting her eyes back and forth from me, I'll assume that she wasn't horrified at my outfit.

I remember being 11. I remember being in Claire's, picking out that one blessed pair of earrings my mother was graciously allowing me to buy for picture day, and watching the older girls walk past me and into the stores with the half-nude mannequins and the employees with half-smiles and wondering at all the marvelous things that they must do. I remember thinking that their lives were magically more exciting than mine--that they spent their days shopping for new outfits and their evenings with their boyfriends in all the expensive restaurants. I imagined that they were always approached by the cutest, most popular boys, and that everyone wanted them to be their friend, and that they were always the nicest girls, even though they were beautiful and popular and probably rich. I never in my wildest imagination would have thought that these girls were worrying about their Spanish test, shopping off a failed job interview, getting out of their abusive home, paying their maxed out credit card bill, just getting off a terrible shift at work, or late with their rent payment. I wanted so desperately to talk to these older girls, to have them answer my questions about boys and clothes and periods and kissing, but I never would have wanted the real answers. I never would have wanted to hear that life continues to be difficult ten years after 11.

If this little girl, twirling her ketchup cup under the spout as I had done thirty seconds earlier, had spoken to me, and we'd talked about her life ten years later, she would be quite disappointed with time. Never would she imagine that 21 is not really that old, or that I am still as insecure and doubting as she is. She would never guess that my age has often failed to answer my questions, but has instead given me better questions. If she were to ask, I could not bring myself to tell her that although I'm grown up enough not to need my best friend to ask out a boy for me, the rejection that ensues is still just as horrifying and painful. I could never tell her that those fights she has with her mother about her outfit and curfew will only grow into more hurtful arguments about bigger issues. I couldn't tell her that her best friend won't be her best friend in even 6 months, or that she will probably never stop doubting her reflection in the mirror or whether or not people like her.

But because I couldn't have offered her happy answers, I would have liked to tell her that she is a beautiful girl, and that I liked her shirt, and I bet her boyfriend gave her that necklace. She would have appreciated that, because when you're an 11 year old girl, all you really want is for someone to notice you, think that you are pretty, and want to be your friend. And I think that in a way, time disappoints us all.